Camera Traps – November 2024

Warren may have attributed his political drive to the concerns and impacts of Native Title upon Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents in Cape York, but that particular wave of contention rose upon a powerful underlying swell of more insidious danger.

In pursuit of wilderness and undisturbed natural beauty, metropolitan elites yearning for what was lost amassing power and profligacy within their own electorates, inevitably gazed outwards, discovering those very attributes that make places like Leichhardt, so inimitably Leichhardt.  Whilst Australia should be encouraged and supported in defence of nature, the metropolitan drivers of social reform do so from degraded environments in which dreams of escape offer the best hope of re-uniting with nature.  From such patronising heights, any aspect of nature worth defending begins beyond the periphery of the urban sprawl and this self-aggrandising acquisitiveness undoubtedly drove Warren towards his representative resolve with even greater determination.

Only nine-years earlier, the 1987 federal election handed parliamentary leadership to Labor, having successfully campaigned on the promise of terminating tropical logging by nominating the wet tropical rainforests of north-east Queensland for World Heritage-listing.  On 9^th December 1988, this act of political and administrative manoeuvring commandeered a significant chunk of Leichhardt unto federal authority, within the meaning of the World Heritage Convention, but the extent to which Leichhardt self-determination was compromised was not revealed until the draft Wet Tropics Plan was released for public comment in October 1995.  In response, the Alliance for Sustainable Tourism held a public workshop in Cairns, during which Warren Entsch’s candidacy for Leichhardt was announced for the ensuing federal election on 2^nd March 1996.

Around the time that Australia’s National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development and Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment were formally ratified, the High Court made its Native Title determinations with respect to Mabo and then Wik.  The Wet Tropics Ministerial Council also allocated $23-million to address the most critically important threats to World Heritage values and to ensure the ecological sustainability of ecotourism in the Daintree, allowing twenty-percent of Daintree Rainforest community property to be acquired and then re-developed with tourism facilities to double the carrying capacity of state-supplied infrastructure. Meanwhile, Leichhardt assets were being plundered beyond World Heritage boundaries, via intergovernmental policy and the tens-of-millions-of-taxpayer-dollars invested into re-directing Daintree-Cape Tribulation tourism to areas south of Leichhardt.

On 10^th October 1997, Federal Member for Leichhardt, Warren Entsch MP., wrote to his Federal counterparts on Ministerial Council, to advise that,

I am strongly of the view that if there is so much funding available that the Wet Tropics Management Authority is unable to identify enough environmentally critically sensitive areas in need of management and is looking at spending these funds duplicating and competing with private enterprise, then I would suggest that we may well be too generous with the allocation of these funds and clearly an urgent review would be appropriate.  To me this whole situation smacks of some underhanded bureaucratic attempt to destroy the viability of legitimate small businesses north of the Daintree and in doing so, achieve some long-term agenda of eventually excluding the majority of landholders from north of the Daintree.

On the 7^th May 2000, Queensland’s Electricity Regulator excised an area of Leichhardt between the Daintree River and Cape Tribulation from the electricity authority’s distribution area and the environment most deserving of the cleanest form of electricity, got the dirtiest and most expensive.  In his valedictory speech, Warren expressed this one regret:

After 25 years of working to give my community north of the Daintree River an option for mains-equivalent renewable power, the project is at a crossroads.  Despite the money for the project being set aside prior to the 2022 election; despite having all the necessary approvals, permits and licences to proceed and also having secured excellent, credible, experienced investors for the project, including Kuku Yalanji traditional owners, brought on as a major partner for the construction and even better still, to be the operator, wholesaler and retailer of the renewable micro-grid, funding has now been withheld.

Anyone believing that the Daintree Rainforest is being ‘protected’ by running engine-generators on a per-property basis, should be excised from the grid within their own residential environments; to experience all the imposed impacts of polluting emissions, effronteries and economic hardships.

In 2005, Queensland’s Wild Rivers legislation was enacted, to purportedly secure remote rivers in near natural condition (four in Leichhardt) with all, or almost all of their natural values intact.  Nine-years-later, Wild Rivers declarations over Stewart Basin and the Archer and Lockhart Rivers in Leichhardt were ruled invalid by the Federal Court, with Justice Andrew Greenwood describing the declarations as so unreasonable as to constitute an invalid exercise of ministerial power.

Through a seemingly insatiable avarice and across the full history of the past 37-years since the Wet Tropics World Heritage nomination, a swarm of environmental crusaders from southern population centres have relentlessly campaigned to save the natural values of Leichhardt property, forever.  Of course, the underlying implication of all this passionate and well-intentioned intervention from outside agencies, is that the people and communities that reside within the environmental treasure-at-risk are neither worthy of such occupancy, nor capable of understanding and appreciating the true value of the environmental treasure, as it was so recently recognised and understood by those in possession of the higher order of privileged oversight, from whence such unaffected and unambiguous objectivity is derived.

In fact, the only agency that can understand and appreciate the full value of Leichhardt treasure, is the agency of human inhabitants who are there every day and every night and across every season.  Their understanding appreciates proportionately with the depth and duration of their inhabitancy and every experience is memorised within the environment, to accrue with the collective memories of their full inhabitancy, along with the memories of their forebears and successors.  The bond between an environment and its human inhabitants forges the highest understanding, appreciation and expertise in caring for the environmental repository of a people’s most valuable treasure, their collective memory.  Any attempt to break the custodial bond of an environment and its human inhabitants, is as repugnant as it is legislatively contra-indicated:

The legal definition of environment includes eco-systems and their constituent parts including people and communities.

Warren stood up against this covetous onslaught with bold defiance and for 26-years represented the constituents of Leichhardt, wrangling with 150 counterparts within the Legislative Assembly, 85% of which represent the constituents of metropolitan electorates and also 67-Senators, plus all their professional staff within the complex labyrinth of regulatory and policy compliance, without yielding one skerrick of support for his representative responsibility – the people and communities of Leichhardt, united.

As a Leichhardt constituent throughout the duration of Warren’s marathon parliamentary history, on behalf of the Daintree Rainforest Foundation’s Board of Directors, I offer my deepest appreciation for an outstanding representative service.

Neil Hewett – Chairperson