WELL before hunger-striking protester, Peter Spencer, lost his long running battle for compensation in the Federal Court last Friday, farmers wasted an opportunity to get the nation talking seriously and acting genuinely on property rights.
Spencer gave a loud voice to some of the deep-seated problems caused by land clearing, starting legal action in 2007 and embarking on a 52-day hunger strike atop a wind monitoring tower in late 2009, arguing native vegetation restrictions prevented him from developing his property near Cooma and publicising his claims for compensation for lost property rights.
For a while, largely because the media and political attention Spencer had attracted was too great to ignore, farmers and their leaders took the call to arms. Property rights were on the agenda.
A former senior representative of NSW Farmers explains Spencer rallied support around a concept of freehold based on an "absolute right that needed to be fully compensated if impaired".
For other farmers, he says the "sense of injustice as much as the precedent" drew their support and that of the association.
The big state lobby group helped pull together a rally at Parliament House in Canberra attended by thousands of farmers from throughout NSW and kicked in a reported $200,000 for the day.
Big bucks were thrown at the case too - with a rumoured figure nudging $1.5 million said to have been spent by the Australian Farmers Fighting Fund (administered through the National Farmers Federation) to support Spencer.
For various reasons that support was withdrawn last year.
Over time, leaders failed to effectively build a wider property rights debate, let alone secure any meaningful outcomes. Perhaps it was because a clear definition of the term "property rights" was never articulated.
Spencer's case was multi-faceted, and complex. But at its heart was the economic impact of the Native Vegetation Act, particularly for future development in previously marginal areas, along with claims land clearing laws are the only reason Australia meets its carbon abatement commitments.
NFF president at the time, David Crombie, accused state and federal governments of the "perfect scam" and backed Spencer's allegations that clearing bans were part of a plan to help Australia meet its Kyoto Protocol obligations.
He described it as a "backdoor tactic" for the federal government to assume tenure over private property.
Why wasn't the entire nation enraged by this?
This surely should have been the catalyst for a Royal Commission.
In his final submission to the Federal Court, Spencer reminds farmers why they should have kept up the fight:
"Thus unequally among all Australians, we farmers are forced to bear the costs, by holding our most significant capital goods - our production goods - in a kind of compulsory supposed pre-1788 botanical museum.
"The Native Vegetation Act stands for the unequal, capricious, discriminatory, disproportionate, unjustified oppression of a minority; and as since ancient times, we come to the Court for justice."
Knowing Peter and the team of people behind him, I dare say that fight for justice isn't finished yet.
Lucy Knight is a former press gallery journalist. She climbed the tower and interviewed Peter Spencer during his 52 day hunger strike and later that year was awarded for her coverage of the protest and property rights debate.
