He's on a hunger strike, perched on a wind-monitoring mast on his Shannon's Flat property north of Cooma.

He won't come down until Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admits the Australian Government owes farmers like him $100 billion for capturing carbon in their soil.

Dangling from his wooden platform 10m above the ground, he looks like another lunatic in the climate change circus.

Except Mr Spencer is a resourceful businessman and farmer supported by a formidable legal team headed by Sydney barrister and one-time Malcolm Turnbull rival, Peter King.

As climate change negotiators in Copenhagen scrutinise Australia's dependence on agriculture to meet carbon reduction obligations, the media is suddenly keen to hear about Mr Spencer's 200 court appearances over the past decade.

He's fighting for compensation for not being allowed to clear his property under NSW native vegetation laws and says 109 million hectares of Australian families' private property has been locked up under the same management laws.

Under the guise of water reform and biodiversity, those laws were in fact the former Howard and present Government's means of reducing our carbon emissions by 22 per cent which enabled Australia to met its Kyoto Treaty obligations

''The cat's out of the bag,'' he said.

''Labor intends to manipulate ambitious cuts in Australia's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions by focusing once again on farmers' private property.''

His timber homestead resembles a bunker with press releases, newspapers and policies piling up and phones ringing incessantly.

Queensland Property Rights Australia which has long argued for the rights of landholders, reckons Mr Spencer is reliving the iconic Australian film The Castle.

Mr Spencer said the farmers' case was like the Government coming to a $1 million suburban home in Canberra and taking three quarters of its equity to fund services.

For more on this story, see today's Canberra Times.