October 24, 2013
The State Government’s review of Strategic Cropping Land Act has been greeted with dismay by both Agforce and the Lock the Gate Alliance.
The review has proposed scrapping the Strategic Cropping Land Act 2011 and replacing it with policies outlined in various Regional Plans
Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney today released the final versions of the Darling Downs Regional Plan and the Central Queensland Regional Plan.
The Wide Bay Burnett Regional Plan (8.27Mb) was released in 2011.
AgForce expressed its disappointment, saying the SCL review failed to provide any assurance that Queensland’s high quality agricultural land would be protected.
It said the government had neglected to incorporate key feedback from farmers about how agriculture and the resources sector should co-exist.
The Lock the Gate Alliance’s criticism was harsher, saying the State Government had embarked on “an unprecedented assault on the countryside”.
The protest group is angry that the State Government is proposing to repeal legislation which has been place for less than two years.
The Lock the Gate Alliance, which has been opposing mining in prime agricultural areas, said 96 per cent of the submissions to the SCL review had come from its network; these submissions had called for Strategic Cropping Land protections to be extended.
“The government is under pressure from the resources industry to allow mining everywhere,” Lock the Gate National Campaigner Phil Laird said.
“They’re ignoring their constituents in the bush who just want some peace of mind. There won’t be any peace until there is proper protection for agricultural land, bushland and precious groundwater from coal and gas mining.
“In just one week, the government has sped up the release of new coal exploration areas, signed an MOU to speed up project approvals and proposed to tear up the Strategic Cropping Land Act. It’s an assault on the countryside that has ignored the input of rural people.”
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AgForce general president Ian Burnett said the SCL Framework fell “well short” of what was needed to ensure premium agricultural land would remain unaffected by the operations of the mining and resources sector.
He said the “Priority Agricultural Areas” outlined in the Darling Downs Regional Plan covered less than half of the current cropping area. In the Central Queensland plan, it was about 40 per cent.
“Furthermore, the plans’ priority land uses do not include improved grazing areas, such as dryland cropping or the water infrastructure essential to operating irrigated agriculture,” Mr Burnett said.
“Despite AgForce raising these concerns with the government on multiple occasions, they were not rectified in the final plans. This is very disappointing.”
In its submission to the SCL review, AgForce called for an expansion of the agricultural areas covered by the Act and an increase in the levels of protection applied to high quality soil resources.
Other changes to the SCL framework recommended in the review include exempting “low impact” resource activities from SCL assessment, delegating development assessment to local councils and giving the Minister more discretion to apply “exceptional circumstances” exemptions to resource developments.
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The SCL Act, which came into effect in January 2012, was criticised at the time by South Burnett farmers as much local farming land was left unprotected because it did not meet soil criteria.
During the election campaign, Mr Seeney promised that an LNP government would end uncertainty for both farmers and mining companies by drafting Strategic Land Use Maps after community consultation that would clearly define where mining activity could and could not take place (SBBiz, September 29, 2011).
- Download a full-copy of the SCL Review (656kb PDF)
