Last Sunday, the Gillard Government decided to sneak an announcement in quietly about a new proposed superhighway throughout Australia. Not the NBN; not a highway from the mainland to Tassie.
It is the National Wildlife Corridors Plan. This means exactly what it says: the establishment of a series of pathways to enhance the survival of the nation’s furry critters.
Specifically, the pathways will connect reserved areas that already exist. The way that Environment Minister Tony Burke explains it is that “you can look at a map of reserved areas and sometimes it looks like someone has dipped a toothbrush in paint and splattered different unconnected dots across the land”. The plan is to join the dots so that the animals have a survival route.
Now that is all very noble and worthy, and we’d all support it.
However, these corridors invariably track through private land, including farmland. In the Arcadian world, we presumably run fences along the corridors and cheer the animals as they wander through to longevity. Unfortunately, it’s not going to work quite like that.
The federal government is going to ask communities to identify and nominate areas they believe will contribute to this national network. That will include “high quality habitat on private land” and, almost inevitably, land that is already being grazed.
Is this all beginning to sound a bit familiar? Guess who will be doing the nominating and what exclusions they will want on each piece of nominated land?
The Tasmanian land under the microscope is:
• natural grazing land in the southern Midlands;
• grazing modified pastures and dryland cropping areas in the northern Midlands;
• threatened species communities around Avoca and Fingal.
They are described generically as the Midlandscapes and feature lowland native grasslands, grassy woodland bush runs, dry heath forests, lowland alluvial systems, upland riparian systems, valley floor wetlands, wedge-tailed eagles and vulnerable marsupials and birds.
Mr Burke says the declaration of a National Wildlife Corridor area will be administrative and will not result in any additional restrictions on property rights or land uses. In addition, participation by neighbouring landowners, he says, will be voluntary. But the whole scheme will be covered by legislation. So we have a legislated outcome with voluntary participation.
Does that sound odd to you? Sure does to me.
The TFGA has some serious questions it would like to ask.
For instance, if the Minister declares a nomination, what chance does a landholder have to decline to participate? And, we wonder, will government landholders be required to commit to the plan before asking farmers to do so? Where is any compensation going to come from? The federal government has already made it clear it has no funding for environmental and conservation activities. For example, the development of a plan to manage the lowlands grasslands areas in the Midlands declared under the EPBC Act has ground to a halt because there is no funding available. How then do they intend to fund these projects? Will funding be ongoing or one off for costs such as fencing, game, weeds and fire management? Who will bear cost of fencing on boundaries between corridors and private land? Good design must also include mechanisms to support collaboration between stakeholders, with ongoing funding. Good design must address the issue of managing rapidly increasing populations of grazing and foraging animals bordering productive land.
More importantly, how will this new plan fit with the myriad of other legislation that covers similar things: EPBC Act, state threatened species acts, even local government expectations like the proposed biodiversity offsets rules under consideration in southern Tasmania.
What you smell here is a farmland version of bracket creep. First, it’s voluntary; then, under pressure from ENGOs and Green coalition partners, it becomes an imposed regime; that imposed regime becomes intergenerational as covenants on freehold land become binding on the next generations of Tasmanian farmers.
And we’ve been screwed again.
