The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  NEVERTHELESS, SOME LANDHOLDER ADVOCATES were pleased with the direction things were heading. ‘The take away message for developers and landowners alike,’ wrote Paul Vergotis, an environment lawyer specialising in appeals against the New South Wales Land and Environment Court, ‘is that the Bill proposes a regulatory system that is ostensibly flexible, permissive, and market-based. The suggested changes will reduce red tape and unnecessary regulation, and make land clearing easier.’ Others weren’t satisfied. The NSW Farmers Association pulled out of consultations for a time in mid-2016 – despite their disparagement of the conservation groups for doing the same. Their problems were ambiguity about the rate and scale of allowable clearing, and obscurity on the subject of vegetation mapping. Members were concerned that the government, having tempted them with full reforms, might end up making concessions to the other side. ‘We believe many farmers will not engage or participate in a system that is over regulated, complicated and riddled with restrictions,’ said Mitchell Clapham, soon to become the association’s president. The organisation passed a unanimous motion withholding support for the new law unless the government agreed to pay them for all the cost associated with upholding environmental restrictions. They said they were being asked to act as park rangers, but without pay.

  In August 2016, an OEH report on land-clearing rates was released, taking into account the impact of the self-assessment codes that had been introduced in 2014. The previous report had assessed rates as stabilising or even diminishing; now, updated data showed an increase, and almost two-thirds of that was ‘unexplained’, possibly illegal, like the Turnbulls’. It was possible, the report said, that the government data was underestimating clearing by sixfold. Now that landholders could decide for themselves what might be ‘protected’ or not, a disastrous trend was forming.

  Koala habitat and wetlands, said Kate Smolski, chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales, were not guaranteed protection in the new laws. The Gwydir Wetlands, approximately 60 kilometres west of Moree, already had only 20 per cent of the ecological community that had existed fifteen years earlier. And there was no accounting for indirect environmental damage, such as silting of waterways once riverine trees were logged or billabongs filled in.

  Only the previous month, a report in the international journal Science revealed the devastating likelihood that human activity had destroyed biodiversity to the point where ecosystems might stop functioning properly across 58 per cent of the planet. Elemental processes such as nutrient cycling, pollination and growth were in jeopardy. The significance of biodiversity health could not have been more clear.

  In New South Wales, the Independent Biodiversity Legislation Review Panel was divided, with ecologist Hugh Possingham increasingly worried that the draft legislation was encouraging the most damaging forms of clearing: broadscale and of threatened species. The draft had been reshaped since his participation in the report two years earlier. His concerns were being overridden. In November 2016, he resigned from the panel.

  That month, the amendments and repeals were, after years of discussion, passed in the parliament. The debate was closed; the new laws were official. They would come into effect within a year.

  The legislation came in two parts. There was the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016, which concerned protections for native ecology and supported conservation, mandating penalties for offences. Then there was the Local Land Services Amendment Act 2016, which oversaw land management such as agriculture, handled permissions for clearing and assessed exemptions. Chris Nadolny, asked by The Sydney Morning Herald for comment, tried to be equitable. The Biodiversity Act, he said, had liabilities: it didn’t include issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, and had, troublingly, lost the imperative to ‘improve or maintain’ the environment. But it was mostly well intentioned and did include some conservation science. However, the Land Services Act was concerning. This is where theories of environmental stewardship were actually practised, and he couldn’t see any conservation science in any of the codes, only potential for dangerous practices. It could, Nadolny said, ‘threaten the most significant remnants of native vegetation in overdeveloped landscapes’.

  The Liberal minister for the environment, Mark Speakman, assured the media that farmers would now have incentives to ‘do the right thing by the environment’. This included the money for private conservation. And there were safeguards against massive clearing. ‘What happened in Queensland simply cannot happen here,’ he said. Across the border, the rates of clearing had tripled to 300,000 hectares under the Campbell Newman government.

  But opposition spokesperson Penny Sharpe said the new law in New South Wales would increase land clearing, as well as erosion, salinity and carbon emissions, and harm wildlife. She promised a Labor government would ‘overhaul’ the laws if elected in 2019. Mehreen Faruqi, the Greens environment spokeswoman in the state parliament, also condemned the new law. It was, she said, ‘the biggest act of environmental vandalism we have ever seen in New South Wales’.

  Alaine Anderson, Turnbull’s neighbour, just wondered if things had to be so complicated. Was it too much to ask that a patch of green was left on every property? ‘If we all did a little bit,’ she said plaintively, ‘even on a four-acre place you can bring the little birds.’

  LONG BAY CORRECTIONAL COMPLEX, opened in 1909, is home to the Kevin Waller Unit for elderly male inmates. The buildings are brick, with watchtowers and barbed-wire fences; Christmas decorations are put on the severe exterior every December. There are great Norfolk pines for the inmates to gaze upon in their outside time.

  It wasn’t a comfortable place for an old farmer. Inmates were generally two to a cell. In January 2017, one man in his seventies smashed his cellmate to death with a sandwich-maker. The younger of the elderly customarily helped others with bedwetting or mobility problems. The bunks didn’t have railings. There wasn’t room for mobility aids in the cells.

  Days went by. Days went by.

  In November 2016, the month the native vegetation laws were passed, Ian Turnbull had a stroke and was taken to the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick. Four months later, he had another. Again, he was taken to hospital. He was diagnosed with heart disease, then possible sepsis. He was put gently on palliative care. His family was there at his bedside.

  On 27 March 2017, Ian Turnbull died of kidney failure and heart issues, at the age of eighty-two.

  There was a post-mortem – external only. He was spared the intimate examination made of Glen Turner’s remains. The coroner’s report optimistically extolled the dignity of recognising the life lived before a death. ‘Unfortunately,’ wrote magistrate Derek Lee, the deputy state coroner, ‘in this case, very little is known about Mr Turnbull’s personal life.’

  Reporters following the murder had solemnly presented the Turnbulls as squattocracy stalwarts of the district for 200 years, but that wasn’t true. Ian’s contributions to the Croppa Creek community were affectionately remembered by residents, but his name doesn’t appear in the district papers. Locals in Moree had recently been heard describing him as a ‘crank’, still dismayed at the attention he’d brought the town; locals in Croppa Creek said nothing to anyone, but some continued to murmur that Glen Turner had harassed the family, that he’d trespassed, that he’d pushed the old man to the brink.

  Roger felt differently. ‘He’s always been a mudguard,’ he would tell a reporter. ‘Shiny on top, shitty underneath.’

  Ian Turnbull was buried in Moree Cemetery. He had been in custody since July 2014, but had served less than twelve months of the 35-year sentence for Turner’s murder. The Turnbull family had, in fact, been preparing to appeal the penalty in May.

  Alison McKenzie said she’d been spared the anguish of seeing Turnbull protest his sentence. ‘We will never have closure, it’s just something we are learning to live with,’ she told journalist Breanna Chillingworth from The Northern Daily Leader, who had covered the case from the start. But, she added with
relief, ‘he died a convicted murderer’.

  For Robert Strange, the fact that Turnbull had served only months of his sentence for the killing was upsetting. ‘It didn’t sit well with me,’ Robert Strange told SBS’s Insight program. ‘It still doesn’t.’

  A death notice was placed in the paper at the time of Turnbull’s death. Ian Robert Turnbull, Late of ‘Yambin’, Moree, it read. Passed away on 27th March 2017 aged 82 years. Beloved husband of Robeena. Dearly loved father and father-in-law of Doug and Anne, Roger and Annette, Grant and Jacci, Sam and Justine. Much-loved grandfather and great-grandfather of their children. Ian’s funeral was held on 6th April 2017. ‘Will Always Be Loved and Remembered’.

  20

  No one argued that we should accept this poor, old continent for what it was. It was ours to improve, to manage. We were to take what was and use our knowledge to make gain for our nation and humanity.

  —David Smith, Australian agricultural scientist, circa 1960s

  ‘Dear Premier and Minister for the Environment, I am writing to you today to voice my concerns about the land-clearing laws proposed to come into force.’

  It was August 2017, and the new legislation was due to take effect within a week. Alison McKenzie had written an open letter to the state government to share her feelings on the subject.

  McKenzie, Fran Pearce and two of Turner’s former colleagues, now ex-OEH, had asked to preview the draft legislation and meet with Local Land Services staff to discuss its implications. They were grateful for the opportunity. ‘However,’ she wrote, ‘the meeting did not dispel our concerns.’ It was apparent that Turnbull’s clearing would soon be considered legal. She mentioned liabilities and contradictions in the proposed scheme. She mentioned Turner’s experience of farmers’ intransigence with regulations. ‘It appears the new regulations have been written to satisfy farmers/property developers like the Turnbulls,’ she wrote frankly, and asked the government to delay the laws until they’d been reviewed again by environment experts. ‘The regulations are clearly not based on the principles of conservation biology.’

  She had never wanted her husband’s death to be politicised, she wrote. ‘Ian Turnbull was overheard to say that he was willing to be a “martyr for the cause” and murdered Glen in an act to force the hand of government to change the laws to suit large property developers such as himself.’ She’d hoped, hearing of the law changes, that they would increase conservation efforts, not lead to more destruction. But, ‘[i]t seems that he was successful. Glen lost his life upholding the laws of our state to preserve habitat for future generations. With the diminishing of those laws, the value of his life is further diminished.’

  Environment minister Gabrielle Upton responded to McKenzie’s letter. ‘Glen Turner was a highly valued and experienced environment officer who was murdered just doing his job. Our state lost a good man,’ she reassured his widow and supporters. ‘I can assure them that the new codes and laws in no way diminish Glen’s work or life.’ But, she added, ‘[t]here will be no delay to the codes’ introduction.’

  ‘You can’t help thinking,’ muses Phil Spark, ‘about theories of extinction debt [the number of species in an area likely to become extinct] and island biogeography [biodiversity in isolated natural communities], looking at remnants becoming unviable and population decline. And one of the stupid things with this legislation is there’s no consideration for the landscape issue with their clearing. This continuing use code, if you’ve cleared it once before, or your grandfather has, then you’re allowed to clear it again!’ Farming need not cede any prerogatives. Regrowth and recuperation would not be encouraged, and land bared back to 1950 could be denuded once more. Except for the most critically endangered communities, environmental impacts were not relevant. ‘So there’s no overriding planning on how we’re going to improve the viability of all species. Science just doesn’t come into it.’

  An emerging theme, as criticism of the new legislation grew, was the suppression of research and expertise. Politics and economics, some said, had nobbled evidence-based policy. ‘Science is just forgotten,’ Spark says. ‘It’s just relegated. I think that’s partly because most of the people involved in science are now gagged in their occupation; they don’t seem able to speak out like they should be or could be.’

  Alison McKenzie, too, had word from those in the field. ‘From what we have heard,’ she said in her letter, ‘the expert knowledge of staff was not included, nor were environmental scientists and conservation groups, or their submissions, which also appear to have been ignored.’

  The OEH was due to administer the legislation, but when those in the organisation discussed its workings, there was a stifled whine of frustration. Occasional news articles emerged with hints of a department beset by funding issues, high turnover and vexed staff negotiating demanding obligations. The office was pained, with apparent fractures between its divisions, including tension between the science division and other groups of the organisation, which had soured into secrecy and lack of trust. Since Turner’s murder, staff had been tried by trauma; by tests of their resolve, as some went out into the field to face potential conflict; and by murmurs of political pressure, which only grew with the revelations of suppressed investigations at Wee Waa.

  Investigative resources were insufficient. The small staff was overworked, sometimes inexperienced, and unsupported to manage the intense workload of field inspections, administration of warnings and stop-work notices, and preparations for prosecution, which had to occur within the two-year statutory period for bringing an offence to court. Officers were shuffled from department to department. A staff member takes a redundancy and is not replaced. Another takes leave. A prosecution falls apart because the person who was in charge has moved on.

  Phil Spark shakes his head when asked about the situation, saying that even good people are caught up in the department’s culture of caution. ‘It’s very, very big. It’s really big.’

  When Alison McKenzie wrote her letter, Spark had been hunched over his computer for weeks. He was doggedly compiling a dossier on the events that led to the death of his ally. It was wrong that the process to address Turnbull’s land clearing had been so inadequate. It was wrong that questions remained unanswered. It was tremendously wrong that Turner had been put in a position that led to his death. Each night Spark sat up late, after a day in the field, working on a request for a coronial inquest to investigate how Glen Turner came to be unprotected after a threat was made against him in the course of his professional duties. This is what Spark did in his spare time. His wife called it him ‘playing golf’.

  By May, he had a file. He’d collected all the correspondence between himself, Alaine Anderson and the authorities from the years of the Turnbull clearing. He had copies of his submissions to the state and federal agencies; he had the letter from the Environmental Defenders Office advising him on what terms in the native vegetation protection legislation the Turnbulls may have violated back in 2012; he had a timeline that itemised every single development, as far as he could tell, in the sorry tale of efforts to uphold that protection and their failure. He wrote a polite, infuriated letter to accompany his submission to the NSW Coroner’s Court.

  He had a strong relationship with Alison McKenzie by now. Her grief had transmuted into an adamantine commitment to continuing Glen’s environmental defence. He was requesting the inquest on behalf of Turner’s family: Alison, Fran, Glen’s parents, the kids. They wanted someone to address all sorts of failures. The OEH was compromised, the staff unable to do their work properly; the legislation they were supposed to be helping enforce wasn’t being applied. According to Spark, shortly before his death Turner made a statement describing his work situation and outlining his concerns.

  Spark had a litany of questions, starting with how, in light of a memorandum of understanding between the OEH and the New South Wales Police Force that gives compliance officers access to information about the police history of any property owners before
an inspection, the threat to Turner wasn’t reported. Turnbull had no prior record of convictions or trouble with authorities. But Turner – who had previously been injured by a hostile landholder with a quad bike – had reported the incident to his managers. Where had the police been, after a government officer was threatened by another man who owned guns?

  Meanwhile, up on the Gold Coast, Grant Turnbull’s father-in-law, Leslie Slater, who’d worked on Grant’s properties from time to time, was starting his own fat file of correspondence. He wrote to SafeWork NSW, to the state government and later, like Spark, to the Coroner’s Court. He had, he said, evidence of ‘a great injustice’ and ‘an immense cover up’.

  Glen Turner and Robert Strange, Slater asserted, were seen in Talga Lane that afternoon. A person, unknown to Robert Strange, and whose identity had apparently been suppressed by the Supreme Court, had witnessed the men standing across the fenceline on ‘Colorado’ that evening. As the court had summarily rejected the defence’s ‘tendency to harass’ argument about Turner, this witness had never been called. The implication was that, though trespass didn’t justify murder, it informed the pattern of supposed harassment. In addition, the OEH, despite having removed Turner from the investigation, didn’t tell him to stay away from the Turnbulls when he called in to Arthur Snook that night:

  Mr Glenn Turner from the OE&H was illegally trespassing on Mr Turnbull’s property well out of his working hours after being instructed by his superiors to not proceed on that day, on being confronted by Mr Turnbull, Mr Turner threatened to bring down and destroy all the Turnbull family farms. Mr Glenn Turner was at this point highly affected by drugs at the time of his death. Mr Ian Turnbull was at the age of 81, charged with murder and given a 34 year conviction with a 24 year non-parole period, clearly extreme by any judicial standards.