When you can't see the forest
Copyright 2000, Sydney Morning Herald
August 29, 2000
When Michael O'Brien discusses the Native Vegetation Conservation Act, his voice rises with anger in a disconcerting crescendo. He has lodged applications to clear about 90 square kilometres, including a single application for more than 58 square kilometres on a property called the Brigalows in the Central West near the Macquarie Marshes.
O'Brien thinks the development proposal would be the largest in NSW and concedes "it's not going to be easy to get over the line because [it is] near the Macquarie Marshes".
He has spent $30,000 on consultants for environmental studies and the paperwork required by the native vegetation conservation laws. He wants to remove trees at the Brigalows so that the land can be planted with crops, but points out the property is largely grassland (also protected under the legislation).
Still, O'Brien's application was marked by the Department of Land and Water Conservation (DLWC) "further information required" so he will submit a new proposal for 40 square kilometres. "The act's a bloody disaster," O'Brien says. "All I am doing is mopping up existing cultivation paddocks."
The Central West of NSW is probably the single most denuded landscape in the nation, almost totally converted into crops. Still, the Brigalows application will almost certainly eventually get over the line - 95 per cent of applications do.
Almost every day since the vegetation act came into force at the start of 1998, applications have been lodged to remove trees at a higher rate than that of the logging industry. The NSW timber industry is not permitted to clearfell, and harvesting is allowed only on about 60,000 hectares of public forests each year. But clearing on private land is closer to 100,000 hectares a year.
But the story is more complicated than it first seems because the legislation does not take into account the way the environment varies across the State. A forest on the coast is very different to a Dubbo woodland, where there may only be a few trees to every hectare. To be told that an application covers 100 hectares does not tell you whether it affects 10 trees or 10,000, whether those trees are rare natives or common exotics.
When Duke Energy put its gas pipeline across 800 kilometres, through rivers, national parks and 1,200 private properties, it applied to clear 700 hectares. Yet that relatively small area would have involved far more trees than much larger areas in the west of the State because of the high rainfall country involved.
Documents obtained by the Herald, including a full register of every individual and company that has applied to clear land in NSW, reveal that vegetation is being destroyed in every region of the State. The problem is not just on the western side of the Great Divide, but is knocking on the door of Sydney. Leisure clubs, golf courses for senior citizens, coastal developments, gas pipelines, water catchment protection programs and even rifle clubs have required extensive destruction of trees near Sydney in the past two years.
As the Government's Native Vegetation Advisory Council has warned, land clearing jeopardises Commonwealth/State agreements on salinity, biodiversity and greenhouse gases.
Despite the perception that land clearing is a "farmers' issue", many State and local government agencies and several large companies are among the biggest land clearers in NSW. State Forests, the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Sydney Catchment Authority have between them applied to clear hundreds of hectares.
Around dams, for example, the Catchment Authority has an obligation to protect water supplies, and tree roots pose risks to infrastructure. More than 200 hectares of land clearing was approved to build the new spillway on the Warragamba Dam wall.
All told, the legislation put in place to protect the last remnants of bush has resulted in approvals to clear more than 200,000 hectares of land across the State, nearly half in the Central West, since the start of 1998.
But these figures cover only the tree clearing taking place within the law; exemptions in the act allow farmers and others to clear without approval and, of course, others clear illegally. No-one has accurate figures on how many trees are disappearing under these two extremely grey categories.
As an extreme example, however, investigators from the DLWC and the Environment Protection Authority recently issued stopwork orders over 13,000 hectares covering three neighbouring farms, following an allegation that up to 8,000 hectares near Mungindi had been aerially sprayed illegally with herbicide.
Altogether, more than 400 alleged breaches of the Native Vegetation Conservation Act have been reported to the department but not one prosecution has gone ahead.
What is known is that those operating under exemptions and those removing trees illegally are clearing large ares of land and causing immense headaches for the administrators of the legislation, the DLWC.
Exemptions include a two-hectare rule, allowing farmers to remove a small number of trees each year without any questions being asked and giving them the right to keep trees away from infrastructure such as fences and buildings.
The department's deputy director, Susan Kemp, says no-one is sure of even the most basic legal interpretations surrounding these exemptions. For example, she asks: "Does the two-hectare rule mean a total of two hectares of trees or two hectares of land?"
Two years after the legislation was enacted, the answers to such questions are still unclear. Kemp is under intense pressure to bring the cowboy clearers under control. But conservationists complain she is is too accommodating of the rural lobby.
The DLWC says the total of the illegal clearing and the exemptions does not equal the area of land cleared under the formal application system, but Green groups disagree. The executive officer of the Nature Conservation Council, Kathy Ridge, says if exemption clearing and illegal clearing were added to the clearing covered by formal applications, NSW would have tree removal rates comparable with Queensland, which clears at least 400,000 hectares each year.
Mostly the problem is the tyranny of small decisions - applications to clear areas ranging from a single tree through to a few hundred hectares.
At one end is the Yanco Agricultural High School, near Leeton, which in March last year applied to remove a river red gum that was threatening the school's pump house.
The school received approval to remove the tree a few weeks after the application was lodged, but after some soul searching it was decided to lop the tree instead of killing it.
Peter Sheargold, the school's principal, said: "The tree still exists. Also, we planted 3,000 other trees to compensate [for the severe pruning]."
At the other end of the scale are farmers such as O'Brien and the Sydney-based Groeger family which wants to clear 4,100 hectares of Coolabah country in the State's far north-west.
Another application with the department that looks vast on paper is wheat grower and grazier Rob Maslin's proposal to clear land north of Forbes. According to the department, the area under application was 5,876 hectares and the area ultimately approved was nearly 1,100 hectares.
Maslin says he and his family value their trees as wind breaks and also "for sucking up water in wet years". They intend to leave timbered fully one third of their property.
Irrigator Robert Duddy is in a small minority of those whose land clearing applications have been frustrated. Duddy has spent up to $50,000 on his application to clear 4,988 hectares near Walgett, but has decided to temporarily withdraw after verbal advice from DLWC that it would be rejected because the land was regarded as too sensitive. He says he will wait for for a new land-clearing regime.
About 1,500 clearing applications have been received by the DLWC - the vast majority for fewer than 100 hectares.
Just below the big applications, such as those of O'Brien and Maslin, are another four for areas between 30 and 40 square kilometres.
These include a proposal to clear 3,895 hectares of rural land adjacent to the Northparkes Mine owned by North Ltd - being taken over by Rio Tinto. Four more applications are for between 20 and 30 square kilometres and more than 60 applications are for more than 1,000 hectares.
The engineering firm Sinclair Knight Merz also makes its way onto the land clearing list, although a spokesman for the company was unable to provide details of the operation and said the clearing would almost certainly have been done on behalf of someone else.
At the heart of the issue from the perspective of those clearing trees in the Central and Western regions is that trees on their land are far more sparse than in forests on the coast.
A spokesman for North Ltd says that while its land clearing proposal sounds huge, only 1,093 trees will be destroyed - less than one for every three hectares. "They are the trees that make broadscale agriculture difficult," the spokesman says.
The company has a policy of compensatory planting in the nearby mine site. The company has already planted 80,000 trees and plans to grow another 50,000.
For a Government which prides itself on being the greenest in the nation, the issue is intensely embarrassing. In recent months, it has ordered that the DLWC lift its prosecution rate and seek to enforce land clearing laws.
The Premier, Bob Carr, has also ordered a review of the exemptions - a decision that all sides agree is crucial if woodlands and forests are to be saved.
As the man with the biggest land clearing application in the State, Michael O'Brien sums up the state of the legislation: "No laws are no good and bad laws are no good."