NATIONALS leader Matt Canavan says his party will this weekend audit all the international treaties Australia has signed up to, saying some of them are being weaponised by the Labor Government.

Matt Canavan talking to the media ahead of the Nationals conference this weekend.

The main example Mr Canavan used was a deal made between Labor and Greens last year to make sweeping changes to Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation act, which will mean a lot of land management activities previously regulated by states will now also be regulated by the Federal Government.

One treaty that informed EPBC changes was the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997. Mr Canavan said the Government referred to some treaties that were signed more than 50-years-ago.

“They used international treaties, the external affairs power, to effectively take over the farmland of a quarter of Queensland in the Great Barrier Reef Catchment area,” Mr Canavan said in a press conference today.

“In that area, now if you farm within 50 metres of a watercourse, you have to go seek federal or government approval for doing that, and that has led to enormous heartache and strain on our nation’s farmers. It’s totally unjustified.

“That level of land planning clearly should be left to state and local authorities, but now farmers have a tripartite headache where they have to go to local, state, and federal bureaucrats just to do the very thing we need more people to do – grow our food.”

About 4000 agreements on the database

Asked about the role of recent treaties in the Pacific, Mr Canavan said there was clearly a need for some treaties. He said his main concern was treaties that were sitting in the background and were not really known by the Australian people and could be weaponised by a “socialist government”

“Some of the treaties we sign, the alliances and the defence treaties are very good and we need to do that,” he said.

“There are over 4000 different agreements that are on the Department of Foreign Affairs treaties database. Not all of them are still in force, we think probably about 2000 are, but we don’t really know how many.

“Some of these treaties on that database were signed by the King of England when he had that power before World War Two to sign up the British dominions for treaties. Some of them are with countries that no longer exist and so why don’t we know all these details? Let’s get to the bottom of it.”

Global tyrannical order lecturing Australia

Mr Canavan said a big part of the Coalition’s agenda was to unlock energy reserves and move away from Australia’s target to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. He said moving away from some international treaties will allow that.

“We need to be able to say no to the international do-gooders, the global do-gooders who want to lecture us about what we should do.

“For too long, a global tyrannical order has been trying to tell Australians, lecture Australians about what energy they should use, what cars they should drive, what food they should be able to eat, even what we should be able to say.

“Our focus in this audit will be on those agreements that do restrain the sovereignty of our nation, and that are imposing undue costs on business in this country. The focus won’t be on, therefore, those agreements like defence and trade, which clearly don’t do those things. They unleash economic opportunities. They improve our national security.