CROPPING LAND POLICY CREEPS UP ON SUCCESS

THE Queensland Farmers’ Federation has welcomed progress on protecting Queensland’s strategic cropping land, but has added that it has come with mixed messages from the Government, which is clearly being pushed toward watering down the policy.

The State Government has announced today ‘protection areas’ and ‘management areas’ to protect Strategic Cropping Land from permanently destructive mining activities.

QFF CEO Dan Galligan said that it was with some surprise that we learned the Government had taken a different tack on how SCL would be protected.

QFF has always rejected the concept of being able manage the impact that mining could have on our best soils and this new concept of mining companies somehow paying for the right to conduct their activities at the expense of agricultural soils is not one that we endorse.

“In another shift, the policy has moved from protecting existing and future cropping resources to now only identifying current or historically cropped land. This move could jeopardise the intent of this reform and sends a very disheartening signal to the agricultural industry,” Mr Galligan said.

But it is not all bad news. On the positive side, the Minister for Environment and Resource Management, Kate Jones, has been successful in pushing through the plans for the SCL policy on the areas to be known as the Protection Areas – in Southern Queensland and the Emerald-Springsure region.

“With this protection taking effect immediately, we can only applaud her for coming this far, on a difficult issue, within what is clearly a Government that is primarily focused on developing gas and mining industries above all else.

“This policy is not an easy reform to manage but its swift development is vital for Queensland’s long term future. If done right, it will ensure Queensland has a long-term economic future beyond the mining boom by protecting our best food producing soils. These soils are a finite resource; once they are gone they are lost forever.

“QFF is determined to see this nationally significant reform through and while still not perfect, today is fundamentally the most significant step forward we have seen in years.

“We will continue to work with the Government to ensure it develops and implements this policy in a meaningful way.

“There is significant refinement needed as we move toward the Minister’s time frame of introducing legislation later in the year.”