Jan Davis: Clearing the way for growth

The TFGA welcomed the state government’s announcement this week of a review of a policy that would soon end all land clearing on Tasmanian farms, forever.

The pending ban was to come into force as a result of a clause included in the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement 1997 that sought to end broad-scale clearing and conversion of native forest on both public and private land.

The authors of the RFA determined that Tasmania should keep a certain percentage of the native forest cover that existed at the moment the RFA was negotiated, ie in 1996. They deemed that the figure would be 95 per cent. Once we got down to that level, all land clearing should cease.

From January 1 2015, under those rules, farmers would have to reduce their clearing to a total of 20 hectares over any five-year period, which is hardly enough to graze a few additional cows. In effect, this policy stops new farmland being established.

Tasmanian farmers have long shown their commitment to protecting and preserving the environment. In fact, they are the largest funders of environmental and conservation activities in this state. So our opposition to this policy is not to protecting and preserving threatened species.

Rather, we’ve never been able to reconcile the fact that there is so little scientifically verified data to support this policy.

How do we know that we are closing in on 95 per cent? And 95 per cent of what? Did somebody count all the native trees in Tasmania in 1996? If so, who and how? Who is counting them now? Does anyone know exactly which species are at risk? Does anyone know where precisely those threatened species are? The list of questions goes on.

This is pretty fundamental information: the data has to be evidence-based and has to be incontrovertible, given the ramifications it has for farmers.

Furthermore, this policy was set almost 20 years ago. More than half the state is now protected in reserves; and these protected areas continue to expand. We’re told the expansion of these reserves is designed to ensure that the habitat of threatened and endangered species is protected.

One of the justifications for the accepting the outcomes of the Tasmanian Forests Agreement was that it would bring ‘peace in the forests’. In other words, there was a tacit acceptance that this was the last throw of the dice for anti-forest protestors. The terms of the agreement were meant to ensure that the most important areas of environmental concern were protected in reserves.

If this is the case, then what is the basis for a continued blanket ban on any clearing? Even if there is evidence that some areas of important conservation value remain unprotected on private land, this is clearly going to be an exceptional circumstance. Measures can be taken to deal with such a situation, but this should not extend to a ban across all farmland in the state.

This policy has stifled increasing production on private land and added to the burden of regulation imposed by many other overlapping regulations, including the federal government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act; the state government’s Nature Conservation Act and the Tasmanian Forest Practice Authority regulations; and various local council edicts.

The government’s commitment to review this policy is therefore welcome. It will enable an evidence-based assessment of the current situation, and allow fine-tuning of regulations to reflect actual environmental risk, rather than a blanket approach of negativity.

As part of that review, we will be seeking hard data from those supporting the continuation of the policy as it stands – data that shows firstly why such a ban might be an appropriate response to the current environmental situation we face in Tasmania. We’ll also be seeking hard evidence that demonstrates incontrovertibly that, if there is evidence supporting a ban, that a blanket ban is more effective than a targeted ban.

We’ll also be submitting evidence to the reviewers of the impact this policy is having on us, and the price we are paying to keep the Tasmanian landscape fixed unchanging at a point decades in the past.

On that basis, we’ll be seeking recognition that, if farmers are expected to bear the cost of environmental stewardship in Tasmania, they will have to be paid compensation for the economic activity they have been forced to forego.
TFGA chief executive Jan Davis