Dear Editor,

It was great to see Graham Hockey’s response in the NT News (Jan 16) to the ABC story on land clearing.

Graham knows what he’s talking about – if you know his background – and if the ABC had bothered to talk to him instead of holding hands with the Environment Centre NT they may have produced a more balanced report rather than the one sided view they presented to the public.

But this story was less about land clearing and more about a negative cotton growing story as you could hear from the comments made by the Environment Centre.

When I hear these comments I wonder if Luddites inhabit our influential organisations.

Their comments reflect the growing of cotton over 30 years ago as if that’s the way it still is.

Their comments were similar to comments made when there were cotton trials in Katherine in the early 2000s. What you heard was an anti-cotton outcry from members of the Labor government and some leading lights in Katherine opposing the trials. You would have thought growing cotton was Satanic.

I knew nothing about growing cotton at that time so I travelled to Narrabi and southern Queensland to look for myself as I knew there had been issues such as meat contamination from insecticides used on cotton. I visited farms and the Cotton Research Station to see the changes brought on by the use of genetically modified cotton. I also did a number of trips to Katherine to see how the trials were going ,and attended the harvest of cotton from that trial.

More recently I visited Kununurra to attend a field day on cotton which showed how it was grown differently to the old days and how it could be grown successfully as a rotational crop.

The reason I write that, is to ask if those in the ABC (outside of the Country Hour) or the Environment Centre have tried to expand their blinkered view by having a look for themselves at what goes on today.

For starters they might even notice that cotton is not grown in the NT the same way as in other places. Finally, why does the ABC always quote the Australian Institute to back up a negative story on cotton or any development in the north of Australia? And is there a relationship between the Institute and the Greens?

Secondly would the Greens or Environment centre be complaining if the land cleared was to be used for growing broad scale plant-based substitutes for meat such as soybeans or peanuts?

And lastly, if there are genuine concerns about inappropriate or illegal land clearing, then we don’t need ill formed southern senators trying to win brownie points by setting up their own inquiry. We have an ICAC and an Auditor General.

But we also have a Public Accounts Committee which, if the NT government was open and transparent, would allow to investigate claims of illegal land clearing to see if they were true or not . But I wouldn’t hold my breath..