Yesterday NSW Natural Resources Minister Ian Macdonald unveiled the new regulations for the state’s Native Vegetation Act 2003. The regulations will come into effect on December 1.
The story goes that the NSW Farmers Association ‘capitulated’ on the Act on the promise that the regulations would be more reasonable.
Now it looks like the regulations transfer responsibilities to local ‘Catchment Management Authorities’ with farmers developing and getting their ‘Property Vegetation Plans’ endorsed by these boards that I understand include local ‘wise men’, greens and bureacrats.
According to yesterday’s press release there will be no more broadscale tree clearing, there are offset provisions (farmers can cut down trees in one area if it is absolutely necessary, if they agree to plant more somewhere else), and it all comes with $436 million for those disadvantaged, download file with media release and ‘details of package’.
The ‘compensation packages’ could be seen as very generous. At least relative to Quensland where landholders have got not much more than a ‘poke in the eye’ by way of ‘compensation’ for the latest round of restrictions.
Landholders’ Institute Secretary Ian Mott puts the legislative agenda in a ‘so how many trees will really be saved for how many dollars’ context with a piece he wrote today titled, NSW Virtual Vegetation Policy, download file .
Mott makes some good points including that:
Sparks & wildfires lost 770,000ha to hot (habitat destroying) fires in 2003 while State Forests NSW only lost 70,000ha. …
But what has this got to do with clearing controls? Well, it is all about character, scale and intensity of impacts and the capacity of wildlife to recover from those impacts.
Landsat tells us that over the past two decades, total clearing in NSW has only been about 16,000ha of which about half is regrowth clearing that will still take place. Another 25% is clearing for power lines, roads and infrastructure so this leaves a net 4000ha of annual ‘habitat destruction’ that will be covered by the new legislation. Note that no attempt has been made to quantify forest expansion to derive a net figure.
Dr John Benson, of the Botanic Gardens, has provided most of the key factoids on which the NSW policy process has relied on from SEPP 46 to the more recent changes. It was he who provided the notorious 150,000ha annual clearing estimate to the NSW Vegetation Forum. He used data from the Moree Plain and extrapolated for the entire State. It was he who, in “Setting the Scene”, his backgrounder for the 2003 legislation, advised the government that there had been 35 million ha of clearing prior to the mid 1930’s. But he then failed to include a total on a table showing cleared area in each bioregion. This missing total of 28 million hectares would have made it clear that there had been an increase in forested area, net of clearing, of 7 million hectares over the past 7 decades. That is, 1 million hectares of expansion per decade or 100,000ha of extra forest a year.
In my own district (Byron Shire) the aerial photos confirm that private forest has trebled in area (net of clearing) since 1954 and the annual clearing rate is less than 2% of the average annual expansion rate for the past half century.
But “don’t you worry about that”, the new legislation comes with a $460 million budget over 5 years (essentially a reallocation of the old DLWC budget) and this works out to about $23,000 per hectare of ‘saved’ private forest.
And if $23,000/ha is an appropriate, cost effective and responsible public outlay for protecting habitat then what is the Premier, the Minister and the policy doing about the 700,000 hectares lost to government exacerbated wildfires? At those costings it came to $16.1 billion in damage to publicly owned habitat?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.