Lawrence Harvey
Independent

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Harvey’s entire platform is laid out in a series of four images in his Facebook group (1, 2, 3, 4). It’s not, alas, terribly clearly explained at those four links, each of which is essentially an un-edited brain-dump, but I’ll do what I can.

Harvey is dedicated to bringing the bush back to a healthy state – not too dense, not too open (but definitely more open than most national parks currently are), as he believes this will have environmental benefits, not least weakening the effects of bushfires. And by bush here, he is mostly talking about the forests of Gippsland in Eastern Victoria, the most densely wooded part of the state, and the site of some its worst bushfires in 2019-2020¹Given his level of passion on the subject, we can safely assume that Lawrence Harvey would hold a hose. I am not sufficiently across the science of this to be able to say, but he specifically talks about restoring the spacing of trees to what it was before colonisation, and drawing on the land management techniques practiced by Indigenous Australians at that time. At very least, this sounds reasonably plausible.

On the next image, he asserts that Gippsland is carbon neutral. He bases this on the fact that it has two coal fired power stations, but is 80% forest. I fear this may be an over-simplification, but let’s move on. Harvey is very much opposed to putting a nuclear reactor in Gippsland, as the Liberal Party is currently calling for. In fact, he has his own idea for a wind turbine, which is apparently illegal? I don’t really understand what he means here, and I certainly lack the engineering knowledge to see whether or not his idea is any good.

His third image returns to the themes of his first one, talking more about forest restoration. Harvey passionately believes in this: the forest is sick, society is sick, fix the forest fix the world. I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

His final image (to date, anyway) concerns diesel fuel, which Harvey believes Gippsland needs to be self-sufficient in. (And yes, it’s always Gippsland, Harvey never mentions himself as running for the Senate in Victoria, or for the Australian parliament. In fact, reading between the lines, there’s hints he thinks Gippsland should secede.) But if not diesel, then vegetable oil or methyl-ester, which can be made from plants.

Lawrence Harvey is, from one angle, a man looking for a way to make logging sustainable. From another, he’s the closest thing to Treebeard you’ll get a chance to vote for in this election. For myself, he’ll be landing some distance down my ballot, ahead of the far right but not much else.