Wilderness Society and AgForce clash over land-clearing in Queensland

Australia Broadcast Center

8 hours ago

A not-for-profit environmental group is calling for more clarity and enforcement after releasing drone footage of land in central Queensland it says may have been illegally cleared under federal law.
The Wilderness Society said it was alerted to instances of land clearing by users of its app, which it then documented with legally obtained drone footage filmed over 12 months.
Queensland campaigns manger Hannah Schuch said the clearing was primarily for beef production at properties in the Marlborough and Emerald regions.
"[The] freshly bulldozed native forests and bushland are likely to be home of dozens of threatened species, including the koala, the greater glider and the red goshawk," she said.
But the state's peak body for agriculture labelled the claims misleading and said no-one had done anything illegal.
"We're very conscious of our environmental credentials and of what we are allowed to clear and not allowed to clear," AgForce Queensland president Shane McCarthy said.
The Wilderness Society said the clearing of hundreds of hectares of land was legal at the state level but had been done without the mandatory assessment by the federal government.
Any act that has a significant impact on matters of national environmental significance, such as clearing the habitat of a threatened species, requires a referral under the federal government's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC).
The society's claims follow allegations made by the Australian Conservation Foundation that 90,000 hectares of land across the nation had been illegally cleared for beef production.
The National Farmers' Federation has rejected that claim.
A spokesperson for the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said an investigation into the Marlborough matter had been closed with no enforcement action taken.
It said the matters in Emerald remained under investigation.
Mr McCarthy said much of the clearing on beef properties was conducted to manage regrowth on previously cleared land.
He said there was a lack of clarity in the EPBC Act.
"We know of cases where people have got these notices in the mail to say 'there could be an endangered habitat, but we don't know where it is', and when the producers go down and actually look at the area … there's no chance of that being there," Mr McCarthy said.
"There's a lot of confusion."
He said landowners were conscious of animals on their land and would never knowingly clear a threatened species habitat.
"Producers are the better stewards of that land … they live there, they manage it on a day-to-day basis," Mr McCarthy said.
"They don't sit in an office down in Sydney or Melbourne somewhere and look at it on a map and then decide what should or shouldn't be done there.
The Wilderness Society has called on the government to make sure the laws are understood properly and enforced.
"It really shouldn't be up to citizen scientists and not-for-profit independent organisations to monitor what's happening on the ground," Ms Schuch said.
The environment department said anyone found in breach of the EPBC Act could be fined, directed to remediate damage or face prison time.
"The department routinely monitors and verifies compliance across our regulatory schemes and works to detect, disrupt and deter noncompliant activity," the spokesperson said.
The federal government has been working on reforming the act for several years.
Environment Minister Murray Wyatt has admitted the laws are "broken" and held a roundtable meeting this month to discuss reform.
No change is expected before Christmas, but the minister is adamant there will be reform in the next 18 months.