Land clearing at Croppa Creek, NSW. Credit:Via Facebook The report also recommended conserving habitat at a regional or even state scale. Farmers, it said, had been left to carry an unfair share of responsibility for preserving nature in the state. "Landholders have a direct interest in ensuring biodiversity is sustained into the future and they deserve greater autonomy in managing their own land," the report said. Mr Grant took up that point in comments released on Thursday. "The Liberals and Nationals recognise the value of farmers and primary producers as environmental custodians and we will ensure farmers alone are not left with the challenge of protecting our environment," Mr Grant said. "Landholders have a direct interest in ensuring biodiversity is sustained into the future and they deserve greater autonomy in managing their own land."

Labor leader Luke Foley said his party was proud of the existing legislation that "has delivered an end to mass clearing and helped build resilient farming communities". "Scrapping the laws is pandering to the worst instincts of the National Party," Mr Foley said. "It is Baird capitulating to [Nationals' leader] Troy Grant." "While Labor has always been open to updating and improving the laws and their application, we will not countenance any backward steps on their environmental outcomes," he said. "Reopening this debate will simply deliver years of uncertainty to farmers, most of whom are happily working within the laws as they stand." 'Ignorant ideology' The National Parks Association of NSW said it was alarmed by the government's plans.

"Once again, they have elected to pander to the loud ill-informed minority who have for years called for a weakening of land-clearing protections," Kevin Evans, chief executive of the association, said. "The ignorant ideology behind this decision will see nature coming off second best once again." Mr Evans said the rate of land-clearing from agriculture had fallen 68 per cent since the Native Vegetation Act was passed in 2003. NSW may follow Queensland, where 275,000 hectares were cleared in the last financial year following a weakening of protections by the former Liberal National Party government of Campbell Newman, he said. In comments released on Thursday, Environment Minister Rob Stokes dismissed concerns about the impacts of the proposed changes, saying that the government was pledging a record $100 million over five years to protect the state's unique and endangered plants and animals. "The reforms offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve landscape health, ecosystem function, land-use productivity and conservation outcomes across NSW," Mr Stokes said in the statement.

NSW Farmers, an industry lobby group, welcomed the government's plans, noting that it had set a deadline for a draft bill by November 2015. "We are keen for an outcome for farmers as soon as possible, yet understand the complexities involved with this large piece of work," Fiona Simson, president of the group, said. "We will be holding the Coalition parties to their timeline on this should they be returned to government." "Some of the key outcomes for us include the repeal of the Native Vegetation Act 2003, the removal of the unworkable and unnecessary 'improve or maintain' standard and the move towards the treatment of land use change as a planning consideration," Ms Simson said. 'Lurch to the right' Concern about native vegetation clearing on farm land flared last July when an Office of Environment and Heritage compliance officer Glen Turner was killed near a property at Croppa Creek, north of Moree. Ian Robert Turnbull, 79 at the time, has been charged with Mr Turner's murder.

Repealing the laws "represents a significant lurch to the right to appease radical elements in the farming community," Kate Smolski, chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council, said. "It will be a black day for the state's threatened wildlife and fragile soils if this proposal becomes law. "Premier Mike Baird risks being remembered as the Premier who took us back to the dark days of broad scale land clearing", Ms Smolski said. "By leaving it so late in the campaign to announce this major policy shift, the Coalition will not be able to legitimately claim an electoral mandate for trashing the state's most important nature conservation laws." Nationals MPs, including Primary Industries Minister Katrina Hodgkinson, have dropped public hints during the campaign that farmers would welcome the changes to the biodiversity laws. "The recommendations of the review are a recipe for disaster and would devastate biodiversity and what little native vegetation is left in NSW," Mehreen Faruqi, the Greens environment spokeswoman, said. "Without an overarching Native Vegetation Act, there would be no coordination of native vegetation protections across the state, leaving a piecemeal approach to be administered by already under-resourced local governments," Dr Faruqi said.

A recent report compiled by WWF-Australia estimates about land clearing for agriculture alone killed some 330,000 native animals a year on average between 1988 and 2005. That number dropped by 116,000 after the act came into force in 2005. The group called on land-clearing restrictions to be extended from farmland to infrastructure projects and urban sprawl to reduce the threats to the state's biodiversity.