THE time to act against mining in the Southern Highlands is now.
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Government's were "asleep at the wheel", leaving the communities on the frontline in the "war" against mining as Australian land was being bought by foreign-owned companies that take the profits offshore.
This was the message at Saturday's Our Water Our Land Our Future rally in Bowral in which about 800 people, mostly of retirement age, came to hear from speakers including 2GB's Alan Jones and Lock the Gate's Drew Hutton.
"We want to protect our water our farmland, our health and our important natural and cultural areas from mining," Mr Hutton said.
"We are saying that when governments fail us, as they have on this issue, that ordinary people have got to step up and become heroes.
"We're in the process of creating the biggest social movement this country's ever seen."
Mr Hutton said tens of thousands of landowners had already joined the alliance and were locking their gates to mining companies.
"If these companies without a social license attempt to bring their equipment into our community then we will blockade them," he said.
"We will put farmers, landowners, environmentalist and anyone who wants to support them at the front gate.
"And if those companies want to invoke their legal right to go onto those properties, they are going to have to arrest that farmer and those people.
"And the minute they do that, the people of this country will say that is intolerable. That we're not going to accept that. Then they've lost and we've won."
The issues of coal mining, which is what Hume Coal is proposing, and coal seam gas mining, which is not occurring in the Southern Highlands, were blurred by speakers during the rally.
Coal and coal seam gas are two entirely different resources and involve entirely different processes to extract.
However, the issues regarding foreign land ownership and profits going offshore remained the same and some argued the impact on the environment was similar.
Senator Bill Hefferen, who is leading a coal seam gas (CSG) senate enquiry, also spoke at the rally, saying most politicians were only interested in the next election cycle.
He gave the example of former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie who "locked up" Cape York Peninsular, about the size of Victoria, from any commercial agriculture production so he could get preference votes from the Greens and the Wilderness Society.
"The advice the Queensland Government has is that it could take 1000 years to make good an aquifer that has been contaminated by coal seam gas," he said.
"The global energy task is completely devouring the global food task.
"Australia is the best place in the world to raise a family, breathe fresh air and drink clean water. We want to keep it that way and its up to all of us."
Mr Jones said governments around the world were laughing at Australia because it was so easy to come in and buy agricultural land.
"Countries like China and Qatar have a simple policy: from our paddock to their plate," Mr Jones said.
"They're smart enough to know that they're going to have to feed their own people in the future and they're going to feed them by buying our farms.
"We're capable of feeding the rest of the world if we look after our agricultural land."
Other speakers included Peter Martin (Southern Highland Coal Action Group) Jeremy Buckingham (deputy chair of a NSW Upper House Inquiry into CSG), Tim Duddy (Caroona Coal Action Group), Kathy Roche (local landowner), deputy mayor Larry Whipper and Goulburn MP Pru Goward.
Ms Goward said the NSW government was developing an aquifer interference policy and strategic land use plans regarding mining.
"Impatience and passion are great drivers of change and we need to harness that which is why the petition is so important and your letters to the Ministers are so important," she said.
She said the government knew what it was doing and knew that the last thing communities wanted was regulation that would fail.
