I met Rick Farley seventeen years ago in Rockhampton, when I taught business law at the Capricornia College of Advanced Education and he headed the Queensland Cattleman’s Union. He lived in a beach house at Emu Park, a laid-back battler’s paradise.

He left paradise for the Canberra hothouse to lead the National Farmers Federation, helping to broker a compromise between farmers and Aborigines on native title in highly charged negotiations with the Keating government after the High Court’s Mabo decision. He also helped pioneer the Land Care policy, a grass roots program under which Australian communities came together to restore and protect ravaged lands.

He’s been in the rough and tumble of high-stakes policy and politics for a long, long time, and his approach has been to reach out for common ground and to think in the long-term interests of his constituents and the nation. He’s one of the people who’s done the hard work needed to bring together farmers and greenies on issues like salinity, to help people see that on some matters, their goals are the same.

I’ve just published his Australia Day speech, delivered yesterday (Our land, our duty of care), and highly recommend a read. To me, Rick is already a great Australian, a man who genuinely strives to serve the public interest. He is someone who – if put in a position of power – could be trusted to act with integrity.

“My perspective has been shaped over a long time by a very diverse group of Australians – cattlemen, farmers, conservationists and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” he writes. “I thank them all for the education they have provided me. It also has been shaped by over 25 years in the political and public policy arena, which represents both the best and worst of our national endeavour. This is my Australia – warts and all.”

Rick’s speech eschews the blame game – “We’ve made mistakes along the track, but we can try to correct them” – sets out the crisis we face with our land and water, proposes a vision, and sets out the structures and processes by which it might be achieved. He wants an environmental levy, and he wants all proceeds delivered to a new ‘Sustainability Commission’. No-one trusts governments or their bureaucracies any more. We know from experience that environment funds are abused to look after special interests governments want to curry favour with. We know they cook the books to pretend they’re spending new money when really they’re cutting money in other programs. We know the goals get lost in turf wars and cost-shifting between the federal and state governments.

A Sustainability Commission should be established by the Parliament, but be completely independent of political control by ministers. Like the auditor-general, the head of the commission should report directly to Parliament, and also at six monthly intervals to the Australian people via a letter box drop. The people fund it, so it reports to the people, honestly, about what’s been achieved, what hasn’t, what the roadblocks are and how they can be breached. The Commission could become as powerful and respected as the ACCC is under Alan Fels, if the right person is chosen to lead it – a person who inspires trust, communicates well with Australians, is tough enough to break through the spin of interest groups and is reasonable enough to find common ground. We need leaders, alright, but few if any of them are in the major political parties.

Rick’s vision is for regional resource management plans. I think they should be produced and run by local communities after expert advice from and endorsement by the Commission. The problem with centralised bodies divorced from communities is that they never know the local conditions, the local power structures, the local talents, the local dynamics. To get real breakthroughs in our land and water management, there’ll have to be intense, passionate, detailed debates and trade-offs in local communities all over Australia. There’ll be local complexities which can never be solved by one blueprint alone. Local communities can do it, and local leaders will emerge if communities are unlucky enough not to have one or more of them already. The process itself will help build or rebuild communities, and community spirit. If local communities own the problems, they’ll solve them. The Commission could provide incentives – for example special grants for communities which reduce their water usage.

I’d also like to see the Commission help individuals to change their habits. There’s stuff all of us could do to lower our use of water, to recycle our waste, to live in harmony with, rather than at war with, our land. But who’ll help us? After hanging around with greenies lately, I’ve done one little thing – stopped buying tailor mades and started smoking rollies instead. That’s 11,000 cigarette butts a year I won’t be inflicting on the environment. A little thing, sure, but something. I’ve also learned that there’s no need to flush the toilet after peeing – it’s just wasting water. A little thing, but something. And I feel good changing my habits a little, for a good cause. It reduces the alienation of city life – you fell a little bit connected with the world around you. These greenies have a lot to teach us about living well.

We need elders – men and women who know the game and how tough it’s played because they’ve played it, tried to fix problems and find solutions, done the tough negotiations, know how to bring people together, thought deeply about the problems we face and know how to harness scientific, academic, and people with practical skills to make things happen. There aren’t many people who can do all this, let alone want to keep doing it. It’s hard, largely thankless, mostly badly or unpaid work, and because such people often lock horns with powerful, rich, unprincipled people, they can get hurt. Badly hurt.

Rick is one of them, and I reckon retired NSW Liberal MP Kevin Rozzoli, our planning commentator for the NSW election, is another. His second column, The courage to reform, is on the NSW state election site now. (We’ve just put up the bare-bones site at NSWelection. Bells and whistles to come.)

Kevin’s column asks why we haven’t seriously tackled an epidemic of land-use and abuse problems in NSW, and details the mess we’ve created by failing to plan for the benefit of the community and instead treated every proposed development or land sell-off as a one-off deal isolated from its surroundings or community impact. His case study of the long fight by Western Sydney residents to preserve part of a big former Australian Defence Industry site for parkland in a choked city is a good micro example both of the mess we’re in and the growing power and commitment of local communities to take on government and developers. Imagine if all the unpaid time and energy newly activist community groups are putting into fighting the government and its sleazy arrangements could be spent working WITH it for the good of everyone!

I asked Webdiarist Jozef Imrich, who as a librarian in NSW Parliament House has known Kevin – a former Liberal deputy leader of the Liberals and Speaker of the lower house – for a long time, for his thoughts on the man. He wrote:

“Please permit me to do more than cite the qualifications and experiences of the former Parliamentary Speaker. There are many young readers who will benefit from an outline of a good family man and a good leader.

Unlike Vaclav Havel and Kevin Rozzoli, most people have forgotten that democracy is a dangerous business. Independent politicians like John Hatton know that for Kevin the parliamentary speakership was less a job than a life calling. Kevin was willing to accept the dangers of democracy by voicing dissent in the party room and by being fair on the floor of the Legislative Assembly.

They say that a master can never be a hero to his butler. However those who have worked for Kevin Rozzoli know he combined the soulful characters and plots of the real world with the smooth pulsing flow of a well written political saga.

Besides being one of the best natural parliamentary speakers around, Kevin has operated in a world hot spot, the Australian Bear Pit, at the historic period of hung Parliament. He gave warnings and put his sights on politicians in hostile environments, not just dreamed about it. When he describes what it’s like to be in a democratic confrontation, you’re reading the most factual representation possible because hes been there, done that. Like Havel, Kevin is the real thing. Kevin is one of those people who has a resume so chocked full of impressive achievements that it leaves one wondering how he managed to fit it all into one life.

Kevin took an active role in trying to raise the standards of behaviour and debate in the Parliament. He has been more active than almost all his predecessors in NSW in writing and speaking in public forums about the value of the parliamentary institution and how this value can be lost if parliamentarians themselves show a low regard for it. As Speaker he exercised a firm but even-handed control over those perennial problems of members’ use of travel entitlements and other entitlements the State gives them.

He’s also shown by personal example the way in which personal responsibility can be maintained in carrying out the full range of a member’s electoral and public duties. Although not a lone voice in speaking out against misuse of parliamentary entitlements, and privileges, there would be no stronger advocate than Kevin Rozzoli for a strong, self-regulating, transparent and publicly responsible parliament exercising an appropriate supervision of its members.

Kevin’s presentations at Parliament were captivating, not just because of the breadth and depth of his knowledge but also due to his style of delivery, which makes every person in the room feel as if he was talking to them personally. Kevin is leaving Parliament after three decades, but parliamentary loss will be university students’ gain. He’s been appointed as an Honorary Associate with the Faculty of Economic and International Relations at Sydney University.

It is ironic that in the closing days of the parliamentary term he received a citation from a Voter Help Line as the NSW MP most likely to help NSW constituents. Kevin was found twice as effective as the next member. So much for the judgement of the Liberal Party. (The Liberals recently disendorsed Kevin, triggering his retirement.

I hope that Kevin’s talents can be utilised somehow in reforming planning in NSW. Like Rick he’s got a lot to give, and like Rick, he’s got the integrity the community craves.

I’ve received many emails about Paddy McGuinness’s recent Herald column on the Canberra fires, all distressed or angry, most from Canberra residents. As someone who calls Canberra home and has many frightened friends there, I felt the same way when I read it, and fervently wished I hadn’t.

It’s a classic of the neo-liberal style – divide, blame, ridicule, accuse. Hate speech, really. But why waste your time complaining, why waste your energy getting angry? People like Paddy feed off the emotion of people’s responses. Yet Paddy’s diatribes give nothing. They tear down. In short, they aren’t useful.

I’ve said before that the extreme players in the culture war industry – right and left – are best left to themselves. In their world there’s no room for engagement, finding areas of disagreement, searching for consensus, or moving forward. Instead they yell abuse at each other and get off on it.

So don’t bother reading them. There’s something much more important happening in Canberra. People have had to work out what possessions they need to take with them, and found there’s not many. They’ve met people in their street they’ve never met before and cried with them. They’ve discovered the joys of community that our country towns already had and are now fighting a losing battle to preserve. They’ve realised that in John Stanhope, a man devoid of charisma and blessed only with intelligence, decency, and integrity, they’ve chosen the perfect person to lead the rebuilding of their city.

So don’t bother with Paddy. Read something that makes you think, that gives you hope, instead.