Queensland premier says Coalition is ‘blaming the trees’ for the fires

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Annastacia Palaszczuk has lashed out at the federal government after it announced an inquiry into land-clearing laws following the recent bushfires.

“If you want to know what caused those conditions, I’ll give you an answer – it’s called climate change,” the Queensland premier told reporters. “It is only the LNP who could watch Queensland burn and then blame the trees.”

The federal parliamentary inquiry will look at all states and territories and how their laws on vegetation and land management affect farmers.

But Queensland’s laws, introduced in May to stop broadscale land clearing, will be in the spotlight amid claims they exacerbated blazes that raged across the state for two weeks.

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“If Queensland’s laws are locking up agriculture’s potential and making fires worse, we need to know about it,” the federal agriculture minister, David Littleproud, said as he announced the inquiry on Friday.

But Palaszczuk said her government’s land-clearing laws had changed nothing in terms of what farmers could do to protect their properties from bushfires.

She said every candidate at the next federal election must reveal their stance on global warming, so voters would know if they were supporting climate change deniers or not.

Under Queensland laws, farmers and landholders can still establish fire breaks without a permit but some other clearing activities require permits.

Rates of land clearing soared in the years after the LNP scrapped restrictions in 2013, making Queensland a global hot spot for deforestation.

But cattle producer David Marland said his story showed the new system was failing.

He holds a lease to run cattle on 18,000 hectares of the Bulburin national park, between Gladstone and Bundaberg.

In December last year, he spent $2,500 putting in fire breaks in the park and then lodged an application to carry out fuel reduction burns.

He had not received the permit before the fires tore through his leasehold area, forcing him to move cattle out of the national park because there is nothing left for them to eat.

“I’d met all the criteria,” he said. “They had months and months to process that. The rest is history. There’s nothing there now.”