Exclusive: Landowners who campaigned against tightening land-clearing regulations are under investigation for what WWF calls ‘broadscale clearing’

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Queensland farmers campaigning against stronger tree-clearing regulations – and who have said farmers are “the country’s greatest environmentalists” – have bulldozed thousands of hectares of native vegetation.

Under the previous LNP government, regulations were relaxed to allow farmers to clear large areas.

The environmental group WWF said the clearing of almost all immature trees on one property in central Queensland – Corntop –appeared to go beyond what even the current regulations allowed.



The rules state that at least 30 immature trees per hectare – and all mature trees – must be left standing. Martin Taylor, conservation science manager at WWF, said these ecosystems could naturally have thousands of trees per hectare.

The Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines confirmed it was investigating a complaint about the clearing at Corntop.

“There used to be a forest there and now it’s just a pasture with a few scattered trees,” Taylor said. “That’s broadscale clearing.”

The practice was allowed under legislation relating to the “thinning” of vegetation, intended to “restore a regional ecosystem to the ... densities typical of the regional ecosystem”.

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Taylor said the regulations were unacceptable if they allowed this sort of clearing.

“Any pretence that this is some sort of legitimate correction of an ecological problem is just nonsense,” he said.

He said regulations that dictated an arbitrary number of trees per hectare could not have anything to do with “restoring” the ecosystem, since there was no requirement to compare the state of the property to more natural ecosystems in nearby national parks.

Draft changes to the regulations, increasing the number of trees that must be left and banning clearing of endangered ecosystems, have been proposed and are expected to be tabled in the Queensland parliament this month.

The changes are fiercely opposed by the farming lobby, with AgForce organising a protest against them later this week. The owners of Corntop have been vocal campaigners against the tightened regulations.

In May, Janeace Anderson, one of the property owners, told a parliamentary inquiry into the tree-clearing laws: “Firstly, I state that this country’s greatest environmentalists are our farmers and our graziers.”

Anderson, who was presented to the inquiry as an AgForce regional representative, continued: “Radical media are portraying the image that we are practising large-scale land clearing, when this is clearly not the case.

“What we are doing on our properties is taking proactive expensive measurement steps to protect the long-term health of our environment and the viability of our business. We are doing this through the practice of thinning using the current vegetation laws to restore our land back to its original open woodland condition, as much as we are allowed.”

Repeated attempts to contact the landowners and Agforce for comment have been unsuccessful.

When former Queensland premier Campbell Newman weakened land-clearing laws in 2012, tree-felling rates skyrocketed. In 2013-14, 300,000 hectares were cleared, double the rate in 2011-12.

The associated emissions from the land clearing that year were equivalent to those saved by the federal government’s emissions reduction fund.

The changes were also thought to have caused a doubling the number of native animals that needed rescuing.