FAR from allaying producer concerns, the proposed ‘new approach’ to NSW land management and conservation has caused consternation on the far North Coast.
This week at Casino NSW Farmers held the first of six information sessions, which will take place around the state, with Kristian Holtz, leading bureaucrat with the Department of Primary Industries, clearly explaining the proposed process.
It is expected final recommendations on biodiversity reform will be brought to the spring sitting of NSW Parliament with landholder maps detailing dos and don’ts released early in the new year.
The new rules on native vegetation management will exclude land farmed since 1990 – when aerial mapping resolution improved – while applying an increasingly thorough set of codes to vegetation undisturbed before that time.
For many landowners on the eastern fall of the NSW Dividing Range the future of their often extensive timber reserves, most of which have been maturing long before 1990, will remain under a cloud as the process of allowed land use will skip forestry in its initial phase.
For the time being timber harvesting will fall under the old rules but it is what comes next that worries landholders, especially as ‘risk’, size’ and ‘scale’ of operations will determine whether they get the go ahead at all or whether they remain as ‘offsets’ for other, more damaging developments – like mining or far western broad acre cropping.
Superannuation uncertain
For tea tree producer Robert Dyason, Coombell via Casino, the decision in 1970 to leave a large portion of his former dairy and beef property as native forest has resulted in large areas of regrowth eucalypt – spotted gum, Iron Bark, grey gum and red gum – providing natural habitat as well as an eventual superannuation from those trees as timber and poles.
“I am 63 years old and I am really worried,” he said. “My wife and I have worked to retain native conservation benefits at no cost to the community while National Parks and Wildlife Service manages their land at a rate of $35 per hectare per year and now there is the chance that we will get nothing in return.”
Mr Holtz told the Casino meeting that owners of land deemed valuable for conservation would be compensated with funds derived from a $240 million fund topped up with contributions from developers of projects that clear land for commercial gain.
Whether that fund will match what the timber industry is worth now – and is projected to be in three decades when there is will be a shortfall of supply – remains to be seen.
Industry at risk
For Michael Combe, of Grafton pole supplier Koppers, the market for treated hardwood logs used for power poles is strong stable and the process of growing them is compatible with biodiversity.
“Forestry is not land clearing,” he told the Casino meeting. “It is sustainable management on a long term basis. Yet we have been hit the hardest. We have been left right out of this process. This will write-off an industry.”
Tenterfield grazier Bronwyn Petrie has been fighting for changes to the ‘broken’ native vegetation act for years as a member of a NSW Farmers working group but has not found much solace in the proposed new direction of land management.
“This is not all about western land,” she said. “There needs to be accurate mapping of land cleared for grazing and steep land because unless a farmer has ploughed his land or poisoned it it will be deemed suitable for conservation.”
Accuracy questioned
Tabulam horticulturist Alan Hartley also doubted the accuracy of maps as his older avocados had been deemed ‘native vegetation’ during a recent survey.
Timber NSW chairman Andrew Hurford told Mr Holtz that the industry was ‘concerned’.
“The die has been cast,” he said. “A lot of things will be locked down before the phase two discussion on forestry.”
Mr Holtz, meanwhile promised to take forestry concerns ‘back to central government’ for review.
Many at the meeting expressed concern that even with extra funding how would the limited resources of the Local Lands Services cope with the new policing of land use.
