The Land, Coal Seam Gas and Coexistence

by Muhammad Makki

A snapshot to visualise and to give a glimpse of understanding -

The Land, Coal Seam Gas and Coexistence

 

First published as a shorter version in the Have Your Say column Courier Mail Saturday April 26

 

Muhammad Makki

 

It was getting much cooler in Goombi as the sun set after a bright and dry day. I was driving back to Chinchilla on a dusty unsealed road after meeting a landholder who hosts CSG- LNG pipeline. Something she had said to me through a piqued face stuck in my brain:

"Why don’t you open up your backyard and the front gate and let CSG in and then see how it goes” or let me say “suck it and see”."

 

The quiet country, with agriculture as a dominant avocation, is now depressed, and is experiencing a rapid change under the influence of coal seam gas (CSG) development. As the evening wore on in the Western Downs it reminded me of the ‘pain’ of being overridden, disempowered, exhausted and under siege, every day. Here now the sun sets quietly, full of stories unheard. The rules of the country and the complexion of country life are changing imperceptibly and the once fantasised setting is dissolving into doubts because of escalating CSG developments. Who cares if the very fabric of a farmer’s land is negatively impacted somewhere deep in the country; a world away from the sports clubs, fancy restaurants and cosy cafes of Brisbane.



Imagine morning on a farm, sitting on a chair watching dawn break, enjoying the tranquillity of your surroundings with a coffee listening to the birds and thinking, ‘What to be done today?’ – moments just singing out. The land, like an old trusted friend, brings freedom and long, honest working hours bring pleasure at the end of the day.

 

But your life is turned upside down as soon you open a letter from a CSG company titled, ‘Proposed Infrastructure for Your Land’. As soon you opened the letter your life becomes so stressful, with endless pressures and everything seems to be at stake: the farm, business, pride and motivation for being on the land. And then imagine yourself reading repeatedly the sentence:

“if we are unable to reach mutually acceptable access and compensation agreement, [the company] may, as a last resort, ask the Coordinator-General to acquire interests in land on behalf of [company] for the purpose of the project”.

You should know that you don’t have any legal power or right to say, ‘No.’; you simply have to ‘suck it up’. One can see the fear right there in your eyes, as clear as anything. 

Painting – ‘The letter and the landholder’ by Muhammad Makki

 

And then soon you will find yourself in a state of emotional stress, engaged in countless hours of reading and replying to emails, letters, phone calls, attending community meetings, information sessions, asking questions and trying to find answers, and attempting to make sense of complicated scientific terms. And imagine when you’re dealing and negotiating with more than one CSG proponent. This takes time, and when you are responsible for thousands of acres land and livestock that number in the hundreds, there is no time to waste. 

Imagine also restrained by a limited bank balance that you don’t have many moves left, and you are compelled to sign the agreement with CSG companies. Picture your paddocks and land becoming work sites for months, trampled by beeping utes going up and down and unknown persons on your property at times working around the clock under floodlights. Your land is overwhelmed by gravel or cement well pads, fenced with connecting roads, access points, underground power, gas and water pipelines, vents, and compressor stations. You discover that the auto steer tractor you purchased at enormous cost is no longer usable, because of the underground pipes and other infrastructure has fragmented the paddocks into odd shapes. And you notice that your cattle don’t utilise all the grass, now covered in dust because of the traffic. You worry about your underground water disappearing due to the CSG companies ‘de-pressurising’ the adjacent aquifer. You have to check and ensure now that there is no loss arising from CSG activities on your land and have to double check that gates shut properly, fences are in place, and cattle are not being exposed to plastic left lying about or any other dangerous substance. And let’s not imagine the ongoing management cost you will face for the pipeline and gas wells, which will be there for 30 to 40 years.

And now imagine your life is ‘Gas Gas and just Gas’. You will be known by the moniker, ‘Gas’, when you introduce yourself to someone in Toowoomba, Brisbane or elsewhere. At any funeral, birthday party or community hall the conversation will eventually come to CSG, and soon you will be sick of it.

And now you won’t remember the last time you had the luxury of thinking about improving livestock genetics, soil, pastures, ground cover and moisture retention; or even tennis, footy and cricket. There is no time for that anymore, and your confidence and motivation as a landholder is simply eroded.

Now the land might seem to be just a place to bury the broken dreams.

 There is no doubt that CSG industry has learnt and improved through the years, but the industry must realise that there is no fast lane out there in the country and it is the industry out of step with the pace of life of agriculturalists attuned to the variance of season and weather. If the industry does not learn these lessons, anti CSG movement is well positioned to slow the pace of development. There is no other way except for industry to reduce the severity of impacts on landholders and to reduce their distrust and doubts.

 

 

Note: This article is the personal opinion of the writer based on fieldwork experience and do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of any particular institution or organization. 

Contributor Muhammad Makki is a PhD researcher at School of Journalism and Communication & Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM) at Sustainable Mineral Institute, The University of Queensland.

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Peace in Tassie forests?

A follow on article to Election time takings about the Tasmanian forest peace plan as reported in various editions of the Daily Timber News from various viewpoints including that of Jan Davis, CEO of the Tasmanian Farmers& Graziers Association.

22/11/2012 Peace deal or piece deal

Multiple sources confirmed to The Australian that green and timber groups had agreed to protect more than 503,000ha of native forests while allocating 137,000cu m of sawlogs a year to industry.
The deal followed more than two years of difficult negotiation and was being voted on by the boards of the conservation and industry groups involved in the process.

…………..The Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association (TGFA) said the deal was no deal as it implied there was give and take and said it was a sell-out for every Tasmanian.

“It is unconscionable for a group of unelected environmental groups and industry representatives to be making decisions to lock up public resources in perpetuity,” TFGA chief executive Jan Davis said today.

“This is an outrage that the Legislative Council must throw out in its entirety.

“The 1600 private owners with forests covering private 27% of Tasmania’s native forest estate were given no say in this process.”

29/11/2012 Green peace, I don’t think so

Coalition Forestry spokesman Richard Colbeck said there were many other parties that significantly impacted by “this sham process, including agriculture, mining, tourism, and furniture manufacture, and they have had absolutely no say”.

“To replace the volumes lost with plantation timber will take decades and also approximately 100,000ha of land, most likely agricultural land, of which there is about 650,000ha in the State,” he said.

“Not only will the greens campaign against the conversion of farm land to plantation, they will continue to campaign against the native forest sector,” Senator Colbeck said. “That is why Bob Brown and Peg Putt have taken up more senior positions in Markets for Change, which opposes all native forest harvesting.”

29/11/2012 Forestry deal worth billions togovernment

It is predicted the Federal Government could see a $7 billion windfall from Tasmania's forestry peace deal. The chance for the windfall comes after the Commonwealth committed $300 million to the deal, which reduces native forest logging. Source ABC News

Climate law expert Andrew MacIntosh, from the Australian National University, believes the deal could raise billions for the Commonwealth through international carbon credits.

He told Radio National that new rules come into effect when Australia signs the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

"The one that's relevant here is that any reduction in native forest harvesting below the levels in the 2000's results in the Australian Government getting credits," he said.

11/12/2012 Tasmanian farmers reject ‘peace plan’

Jan Davis, CEO of the Tasmanian Farmers & Graziers Association (TFGA) doesn’t mince words when it comes to describing the fallout from the drawn out forestry peace talks/deal in Tasmania. Source: Timberbiz

“We don’t learn from past experience in this State,” she said. “The main thing that got up everybody’s nose with the Gunn’s pulp mill episode was that due process was not followed. And here we go again.

……………“Just because somebody has promised a bucket of money if a deal is done before Christmas isn’t a reason to accept a dud outcome,” she said.

“Decisions of this magnitude need to be assessed on the basis of triple bottom line outcomes – economic, social and environmental. We’re told this ‘deal’ delivers environmental outcomes, despite the fact that more and more research shows that lock-up-and-leave approaches actually result in decreased biodiversity outcomes.

Election time takings

There must be a Federal election around the corner. As a Queensland resident the signs are evident. A lead up of environmental policy announcements on the grand scale; fodder to take to the bargaining table to gain Greens party preferences and material to place in slick election advertising to entice votes from voters living far from where these grand environmental policies will be implemented; the provision of a warm fuzzy of saving the environment at no greater effort than marking the correct box on a piece of paper in the polling booth.

The 20 year rule of the Beattie/ Bligh Qld Labor governments had every election cycle punctuated by yet another uncompensated taking of the rights and imposts on the management of remote, regional and rural areas owned or managed by aboriginals, pastoralists, farmers, foresters, fishers and tree changers. Peter Beattie was a very clever politician and as Premier of Qld recognised the country/ city divide that had developed and instead of a statesman like attempt to bring people together used this divide to very successfully exploit political advantage. Beattie recognised that his power base was in the very SE corner of the state and a few pockets along the coast, the people inland were that few in comparative electoral numbers that not only could he ignore but to vilify into environmental vandals creating environmental problems that he the Premier would solve.

The maps below were prepared by AgForce in March 2012 found from a document called, Key Environmental Constraints Affecting Queensland Agriculture. All but one of the policy developments, (CSG), shown in the smaller images arose out of pre-election promises. Coal seam gas highlighted the absolute hypocrisy of the Beattie/ Bligh era attitude to environmental issues.

 

On the election of their defeat the Bligh government presented the proposed Border to Beach Wildlife Corridor. It had all the appearances of haste and political desperation, of indiscriminate scrawling of a line across a map of a state from a Brisbane office. It had no credibility, no knowledge of on ground circumstances, the majority of the land would have been imposed upon private landowners over approximately 29,153,810 ha or 16.83% of the State.

So what are the signs of a federal election around the corner? The Murray/ Darling plan has been signed off, but to be fair this has been a protracted negotiation and not a recent development. The Tasmanian forest “peace deal” which will bring no peace had a high Federal government involvement. Again like the Murray/ Darling a long running issue but both will be used to bolster the government’s environmental credentials.

There is the Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill which as was the Queensland Vegetation Management Act is championed as an environmental saviour but the legislation contains the loss of civil liberties and rights that Australians take for granted and would be surprised at their removal. There are the Commonwealth Marine Reserves and then the National Wildlife Corridors plan. The later as proved the case in the Queensland situation will prove to be the indicator of desperation in the face of electoral annihilation.

All the above Federal environmental policies deserve closer attention in following articles.

Finally look at the large map above in the image prepared by AgForce and ask these few questions. With cumulative impacts by multiple legislation where can your food be sourced from; the fibres that clothe you and the timbers that form your shelter? What is the sense of complete removal of sourcing our needs from vast areas of land and oceans only to move to concentrated areas in Australia or to overseas where in the latter case there may be no environmental consideration? Would it not be better to have a lighter ‘touch’ of a very large area of our resource base? Why as a nation that we can’t develop sound, considered environmental policy without indiscriminate destruction of people’s rights, livelihoods and loss of community?