The hunger strike is a time-honored political tactic; its exponents have ranged from the suffragettes to the IRA to the 1989 protesters in Tienanmen Square. But few have been quite as odd as Peter Spencer, the southern New South Wales farmer who claims, somewhat improbably, not to have eaten since November 23 in a protest against land-clearing regulations.
As causes go, the right to chop down native trees is not a particularly inspiring one, and it would be tempting to dismiss Spencer as a nutter being cynically used by the Right in its twin campaigns against greenhouse science and the Rudd government. That conclusion would only be fortified by the views of his brother, Graham, as quoted in today’s Herald Sun, that Spencer’s “problems were only loosely related to land-clearing laws”, that his “land was of ‘marginal’ farming use and that his background was in public relations, not farming”.
Nonetheless, good causes often have unworthy representatives, and there is an important issue behind Spencer’s protest. My friend Chris Berg has a go at teasing it out in yesterday’s Age:
Spencer may not have been physically deprived of his land, but what’s the point if he’s not allowed to farm it? And if Spencer is not compensated for this regulatory taking, how is it much different from legalised theft?
I agree with Berg about the importance of property rights; a society that doesn’t respect property rights is well on the way to denying all rights. But this is only the beginning of the argument, not the end.
Respect for property rights does not require recognition of just any sort of property (most obviously, we don’t allow people to own other human beings), or allowing people to do anything at all with their property (owning a gun doesn’t give you the right to shoot people). Nor do we always think compensation is in order when these rules change: if animal cruelty laws are tightened, I’m not entitled to a refund on the purchase price for my dog now that I’m no longer allowed to mistreat it.
The question of just when we should pay compensation is a deep one, and it’s going to be hard to draw sharp lines. Berg’s example of heritage restrictions is near one end of the spectrum; compensation for slave owners is somewhere down the other end. Where we put Spencer’s case will depend on what we think about land clearing.
If you think clearing native vegetation is the natural and generally beneficial thing to do with land, and that regulating it is exceptional and only due to changed circumstances, then full compensation would be the way to go. On the other hand, if you think that land clearing has generally been an ecological disaster that is still doing great harm to our continent, then you’ll think that people such as Spencer should consider themselves lucky to have gotten away with it for this long.
Reasonable people may well differ on this, although I confess that I lean more to the second view. The problem is that talk about property rights on its own won’t really help to decide between them.
This is a bit of a simplification of this issue as I understand it.
Apparently the land was purchased 10 or so years ago and was something like 60% arable. The owner went OS for much of that 10 years to pursue other opportunities. During that time, the 60% previously cleared land became less than that as native vege re-claimed some of the cleared land. My understanding is that he wants to clear that land back to the way it was.
2 questions I find in this. Does a land owner have the right to use his land in any way he wants and does limiting that amount to violation of some rights. Or, should he be penalised for inappripriate land practises in the 10 years he was away?
Two answers?
Native regrowth is hardly ‘significant forest’ and doesn’t deserve protection
second, and maybe contradictory 🙂
Use it or lose it.
Yeah, tend to agree on both. One thing I’m worried about in all of this is how to police it without it becoming a diabolical bureaucratic nightmare. Not to suggest that it isn’t already.
Once you have accepted that some rights should be treated as property and some things treated as the subject of property rights, and you have done that I think, a nice analysis can proceed to delineate the kinds of rights (in old-fashioned Austinian terms the obverse of the duties laid on the state and the rest of us) that need to be discerned and covered and to elucidate the moral basis for compensating for any diminution of those rights or impact on the content of them.
Underlying the first part of this is the important notion that property rights are bundles of rights however absolute the ownership may be conceived to be. That often becomes important because of the potential for splitting up the bundle with leases, easements, restrictive covenants and the like.
Underlying the second part is surely a fundamental premise for any conservative, and even Labor MPs, that it is wrong for government to disappoint legitimate expectations that it has raised by its words or actions or allowed to grow or exist by its inaction. “Legitimate” helps to exclude the results of bribery for example and it maybe that inaction should be qualified, e.g. by “deliberate”.
It does look as though Peter Spencer could have the beginnings of a case that he had been disappointed of his legitimate expectation in relation to his control over his trees.
As to the general Heritage restriction question it shouldn’t arise in any acute form now because, by contrast with the early days of the first clod-hopping attempts to do something to protect the Heritage some 50 and more years ago no one could buy property these days without having Heritage matters in mind. And one of the things one would have in mind is that you might benefit from a classification, especially if it applied to your whole street. For commercial developers it would be rare for crying over a hard case to deserve much sympathy. On the other hand, government authorities and Heritage restrictions ought to be not only much more predictable (and particularly predictable about the range of possibilities they may entertain) but more sensible and more sensitive to the way the issues of justice might be handled. We are properly shocked when some crummy house in an old industrial suburb attracts the sort of planning/Heritage attention which costs its owner a lot of money.
Still, there is, on the other hand, the long vexed question of wipe outs versus windfalls. If restrictions on owner’s rights should be compensated what about a tax on the windfall from a rezoning or lifting of height limits, parking place requirements etc. Again, it may be simpler to say that, in the contemporary world the professional developer takes the good and the bad as the result of his well informed judgments and just accepts that. Also it is likely that the developer has “earned” his windfalls by his contributions to the planning process, even if by hiring highly partisan experts and advocates to assist the planners’ deliberations. It is the case of the private individual property owner which is harder. The Vic government’s proposed $95,000 a hectare infrastructure charge to be imposed on the next sale of land just included in its Urban Growth Zone (while it has removed a previously proposed tax of that kind on land re-zoned earlier) has a number of problems which suggest some intellectual deficiency in the Minister of Planning’s office, starting with the simple fact that the farmer who wants to sell out immediately so he can start up as a farmer in a new rural area won’t be able to sell his land for anything like $95,000 a hectare for many years to come! The problem should not be difficult to solve but it does point to the need for attention to the detail rather than just some broad statements of general principle.
Another thing Charles. Your reference to “greenhouse science” suggests that you need to read David Evans’s two lucid .pdf papers “missingsignature” and “noevidence” which you will find on his http://www.sciencespeak.com website. If you can say he is wrong (apart from following other links and wondering if he isn’t a bit of a cranky self-taught Austrian on some economic matters, with other Austrian overtones as well….) I hope you will tell your Crikey readers. On Evans’s theme it is of interest that a paper by Lindzen and Choi in the August Geophysical Letters (or some such) relates direct evidence against the positive water vapour feedback which is necessary for the IPCC’s case.