Bureaucrat mob out of their trees

IT’S not hard to get the impression that the Queensland Government doesn’t know what it is doing with its Vegetation Management Act. Trees are coming back in Queensland much faster than they are being “pulled”.

Bill Bode from The Plains Station at Prairie said earlier this year that State Government scientists were wrongly including “repulled” land in tree clearing statistics.

What this means is that land cleared 30 years ago and that has been recleared, say, 25 years after becoming overgrown with regrowth, is being described as newly cleared.

It means the same area of land is being counted as newly cleared every time regrowth is removed.

Richmond Mayor John Wharton says the vegetation laws are pushing the Queensland farming sector backwards faster than anything else farmers have to deal with on a day- byday, year- by- year basis.

He says what the Government doesn’t acknowledge is that trees are growing over huge parcels of country that was once traditionally open grassland. He puts this down to one thing and it is very interesting. What he says this “one thing” is the humble grader.

Firing up new growth

Graders have stopped the massive bush fires that used to burn across the inland’s open plains and now trees are appearing where they never used to grow out on the open plains. Before there were graders, fires burned willynilly across the state.

Forty or 50 years ago a lightning strike at Longreach, for example, could ignite a bushfire that would burn all the way to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. And then came graders and with them more roads and firebreaks. That put the brakes on large- scale bushfires.

“Just about every station has a grader. They are used to make firebreaks and they are used to fight fires. A grader is better at fighting a bushfire than water,” he said.

The point he is making is that for the last 40 to 50 years we haven’t seen the massive bushfires that were almost yearly events before the coming of the grader. Coupled with this is the fact that it is now almost impossible for a landholder to get a permit to burn.

This adds to the fact that trees are spreading out over country where they have never been. Almost everyone who knows the inland plains stretching from Prairie through to Cloncurry and for hundreds of kilometres north and south of the Flinders line knows that they are naturally treeless, ditto the Barkly Tableland.

But how many times have these same people been taken aback when someone has asked them “when was this all cleared”?

Cr Wharton told me this week that he nearly fell over recently when scientists he was talking to asked him when the inland plains had been cleared. If they don’t know that these plains are naturally treeless, then what hope have we got?

Mapping not helping

PROOF that Bill Bode and Cr Wharton are right on the money in terms of the Government’s dog’s breakfast approach to vegetation management emerged this week courtesy of Queensland Government scientist Dan Tindall. Mr Tindall admitted that satellite mapping technology cannot properly measure regrowth, only the destruction of vegetation.

Yes this means every time land legally cleared years ago by great grandpappy is cleared of regrowth it is corruptly recorded as virgin country that has been cleared for the first time.

It might suit the statisticians and spin doctors in government wanting to give ministers ammunition to use in their anti- clearing debate and to reinforce their argument for a ban on clearing, but it is, dare I say it, fake news. And to cap it off now the State Government is looking at slugging landholders with a $ 3130 fee when they apply to clear land.

How can a government say it supports agriculture and food production when it runs programs that are contrary to both those ideals?