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| Mulga woodlands, photo sourced [here] |
‘Drought drives mulga hunger’, an article
published late February in the Queensland Country Life warned of extremist
environmental groups using the increased tree clearing rates in the Statewide
Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS)
report due in August to pressure the Palaszczuk Government to introduce new
restrictions on vegetation management. We didn’t have to wait that long as in
late March a group of “concerned scientists” had the opinion article published,
‘Land
clearing in Queensland triples after policy ping pong’ published on The
Conversation web site, that used the QCL
article dishonestly as they omitted the reasons given for the increased rates.
To wax lyrically about Queensland’s
woodland and forests being lost is deceptive when there is no breakdown yet
available between remnant and non-remnant vegetation.
No mention was made of
the largest contributor because of drought, with 80% of Qld drought declared, the feeding of
the regenerating acacia, mulga,
as invaluable fodder to livestock.
The coal seam gas industry has made a
contribution with the
construction of three export pipelines that take the gas to the port of Gladstone, 2 of
which are around the 540 km’s in length and extensive
infrastructure including the clearing for gas wells, in field
pipelines, very large water storages, compressor stations and water treatment
plants. Other contributing factors include mine sites and urban encroachment.
This did not fit the environmental paradigm as the article falsely claimed that
the Vegetation Management Act had been rapidly watered down by the Newman
government bringing back broadacre land clearing for agriculture.
To the contrary the Newman
government amendments were modest including the restoration of basic
tenets of our legal system, civil rights that the wider community take
for granted but were denied to landowners under the Vegetation management
Act. The clearing of remnant vegetation
remains extremely restricted. The “concerned scientists” berate the removal of
high value regrowth from the Act which is a nonsense invented by
environmentalists and ignores that their high value regrowth is encroaching on
high value pastures. In the research
report, ‘Recent
reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass’, published on March 30
2015, vegetation in Australia has actually increased with the encroachment of
trees into grassland a key factor. The report states:
“We also found unexpectedly large vegetation
increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America.
Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this
increase.
On average, Australia is
“greener” today than it was two decades ago. This is despite ongoing land
clearing, urbanisation and the recent droughts in some parts of the country”
 |
Mean annual change in vegetation biomass between 1993 and 2012. Blue represents an increase; red a decrease.
Image modified from Liu et al., 2015. image sourced [here] |
The “concerned scientists” article, ‘Land clearing in
Queensland triples after policy ping pong’, is alarmist and attempts to make
very broad associations to pull at the heart strings. For example:
“There are 778 species
listed as “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” in Queensland. Loss of habitat is a
major threat to most of them. In addition, 45% of Queensland’s ecosystems are
threatened because of land clearing”
The opinion article fails to give any data
at all that any clearing has been allowed where there is endangered fauna and
flora. It also pulls out a favourite
trump card of the environmentalist of a calamity about to fall upon cute and
cuddly, in this case the koala, with no substantiated specific data in direct
correlation to the projected increase in SLATS figures.
The
core proposition by the “concerned scientists” and where they are seeking
political action is:
“But in 2012, a newly elected Liberal-National
government rapidly set about watering down many aspects of environmental
legislation. The Vegetation Management Framework Amendment Act 2013 brought
back broadscale land clearing for agriculture, and the protections for
high-value regrowth on freehold and indigenous land were removed.”
Again this can clearly be demonstrated as
an exaggeration. The Newman government elected in early 2012 did not bring its
first amendment to the Vegetation management Act until May 2013. Hardly
rapidly! Far from a complete “watering down” of the Act, the amendments in May and
December 2013 were in the scale of things modest and most certainly
necessary. Amongst the amendments was
the restoration
of civil rights denied to landowners under the Vegetation management
Act and improvements were made to how the Act worked such as the application
for fodder harvesting of mulga which retained a code of how drought feeding to
staving livestock was to be conducted. Also the introduction of guidelines
for vegetation thinning to counter the environmental and production problem of thickening
as authenticated by a lifetimes work by internationally renowned woodland
scientist Dr Bill Burrows. The term high value regrowth was always without
foundation and was rightly removed. This is after all land that had been
cleared and is being maintained for agricultural production.
The article recites the so-called “litany”
of perceived problems of land clearing as if they are automatic in every
instance and without background which points out instances where improved grass
cover from clearing actually decreases erosion and improves water quality but
that does not fit within the environmental paradigm. There is not much science
to this article but much environmental activism.
Most agricultural land clearing is
undertaken on land that had been cleared once before. The fact is that most
agricultural production essential to feed our population by necessity occurs
off land that is thinned of its vegetation or a large percentage cleared. Land has been set aside for different
purposes and its time environmentalists reserve full conservation management to
National Parks only and don’t transfer these expectations to agricultural
production systems.
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| Editorial 26th March 2015 Queensland Country Life |
