Governments effectively stealing your property - and it's Australia

You think you own the dream property you scrimped to buy? That if it has to be taken for some public purpose, at least you will get fair compensation. Only Marxist, communist states take property without compensation. And that doesn’t happen in Australia . Not in our democracy.

Well it does. Beware – governments can effectively steal your property, and give you nothing in return. Not only can they do this, they are doing it now along the New South Wales coast.

Another reason why the people must be empowered to make our politicians accountable more than only once in every three or four years. They have to be made accountable on every day, of every week, and of every month. As they are in some other countries.

All this is happening in the twenty first century in New South Wales as local councils rezone land as E2 and E3 zones under Local Environmental Plans (LEP’s)authorised by the NSW Parliament under previous Labor governments. The Coalition government has not been in a hurry to reverse this.

The agenda is not to protect pristine undeveloped land. It’s to sterilize existing agricultural or developed land, eventually to remove all human activity,including farming and tourism.

And who is to pay? It’s the landowners – they’re to lose the use of their property, and there will be no compensation on just terms.

And as vast tracts of privately owned land are frozen, governments have decided to cram even more people into high rise developments in our overcrowded cities. Urban consolidation led by big developers is being encouraged.

It’s an alliance we have seen in the United States – politicians, often claiming to be on the left, enriching themselves and working with wealthy forces against farmers and small business people, forcing them into overcrowded cities.

In New South Wales, some farmers have found that if they leave a field fallow, they have to spend thousands of dollars to seek bureaucratic approval just to use their land again.

Property values have been slashed, banks refuse to lend and nobody will buy. You can’t clear regrowth to minimize bushfire risks.

Take one example. Bernard and Rikki Grinberg’s Ballina Beach Village is a small business and small businesses are the biggest source of employment in the country. But the politicians have targeted small business like these, limiting their plans to employ young people, and threatening their viability.

As Rikki Grinberg explains here, the Ballina Beach Village was inexplicably rezoned E2 and although there is an existing use exemption, “every time they want to change anything, whether it is to use crockery at their kiosk, hire a singer to play in their piano bar, renovate the interior of an old shed to turn it into a yoga studio, even trim a branch off a termite-infested tree that might fall on a tent, they have to submit a development application and prove to Ballina Shire Council they are not “intensifying” the use of their land.” ( Miranda Devine in The Daily Telegraph 28 July 2012) They have spent enormous sums on lawyers and town planners just to keep their business.

It's wrong. It's undemocratic. It’s un-Australian. And it's happening now. We must stop it. All of us - or we will suffer too.