Excerpt from speech by Lang Hancock at the 3rd International Environment Conference, Environment 76, October 11-13, 1976, pp. 156-57, read by G. McComas, Sales Director, 3DB Melbourne.
If you stop mining you stop civilisation.
One extremely disturbing development is the alliance between the Labor movement and the environmental movement. Dr Barry Commoner, the ecologist, suggests that what was needed was a reorientation of the nation’s economy, in the following words: “We face a big debate on how we’re going to devote resources for the common good rather than for profit. There’s a whole question of inventing a new form of socialism.”
Socialist Delusions
I will soon tell you what the “new form of socialism” that Barry Commoner wants is all about. It consists of preserving the illusion of ownership, but with the control entirely in the hands of the State and the State, in turn, will be under the control of a self-seeking power-hungry “Hitler-like” clique, totally removed from any form of democracy or parliamentary rule.
Let’s examine how to destroy property rights, which is the other of the so-called environmentalists — the massive land withdrawal from exploration — and see how they created the ideological climate for it. In the first place, observe how consistently all these socialists have been trying to get land use legislation passed at the State and Federal levels.
Now the real purpose of land-use regulation is to place at the discretion of bureaucrats the use and disposal of your property, which will no longer be yours by right but by permission. So, what land-use legislation actually achieves is something more effective than expropriation; it leaves you with the burdens of ownership (ie property taxes, assessments, maintenance, insurance, etc.) and takes away the advantages of ownership, that is, the use and disposal of your property whenever somebody in government needs it more than you do (in their opinion). It’s the kind of thing that makes the Mafia look amateurish by comparison.
Public Picnics
In the second place, observe how adroitly those socialists have been playing a romantic con game to destroy the meaning of the word “property” by relentlessly advancing the concept of public property!
Now if Federal land is shoved into the limbo of public property via land-use legislation, what right do you have as a member of the public to use it? None whatever — except that you might be allowed to have a picnic there on special occasions. If you’re broke, would the knowledge that you own a share of this mythical public property be of any help to you? Nowhere. What can you grow on it? Nothing. How much of it can you call your own? None of it. If you want to either sell your “share” or buy someone else’s share, where is the market? No such market exists.
Human Blights
What’s the environmentalists’ answer to all this? “It’s human rights that we care about. Human rights take precedence over property rights.” Mind you, this is the only instance in which the so-called environmentalists all of a sudden show any concern for human rights. But their argument doesn’t wash because human rights cannot exist without property rights.
It is impossible, for example, to have the right to freedom of the press without your right to own paper, a printing press, and ink. There can be no freedom of speech without the right to own meeting halls, microphones, radio stations, T.V. stations and picket signs. And there can be no freedom of religion either without the right to own churches and religious books.
In actual fact, the so-called environmentalists do not give a damn either about the environment or about any improvement in the human condition. Let me quote The Environmentalist Handbook, edited by Garret De Bell, — which the leaders of the environmentalist movement have put in their bibles.
De Bell Tolls
In the preface of his book, the editor, Mr. Garret De Bell, B.S. in Biology, Stanford University 1966, states and I quote: “Our intention is not to praise the country’s industrial progress, but to put a stop to it.”
Immediately after, Mr. De Bell tells us what he means by the country’s industrial progress which he wants to stop.
At the top of his long list, of course, are “those ugly power plants”. Then comes the rest; cars, air-conditioners, clothes dryers and washers, canned foods, single-family houses, tranquilisers, hairsprays, deoderants, monosodium glutamate, calcium cyclamate, etc.
Incidentally, these are the industries that make the kind of consumer products that virtually everybody in Australia can buy, but that only the elite can afford or is allowed to purchase in special stores in Moscow, Peking, Havana, and other Marxist capitals.
