PRESIDENT'S Column

By Gary Sansom

President

25 Feb 2010 Land Protection Good First Step

The Queensland Government has announced the intention to give greater protection to the state's most important food growing land from incompatible development such as mining and urban development and carbon plantation forestry. The Strategic Cropping Land Policy and planning framework Discussion paper aims to make a concerted effort to conserve key food producing land for the long-term. Interested stakeholders are invited to provide comment to help develop the framework which is designed to ensure mining, urban or other development that permanently alienates the land, or reduces its productivity, cannot occur unless it is overwhelmingly in the public interest.

This is a difficult issue and it is one that many agricultural groups and organisations like QFF have been calling for change on for some time. But it is not easy. The temptation is to simply map agricultural land and lock it away from development by other industries or protect it from urban expansion. However this may not strike a balance between protecting our non-renewable agricultural resources and achieving more diversified development outcomes for regional communities.

As a first step, what the Government is proposing in this regard is a good beginning. The key elements are all there. They include improving our mapping and definition of strategic cropping land, putting in place amendments to planning and mining legislation and backing it all up with guidelines for assessment to be used when development applications are made.

To be successful all the elements must deliver in parallel. Simply mapping and identifying priority land will be useless without the legislative triggers to give the principles some teeth. Equally a legislative reference point is of limited value without some guidance as to the location and value of the land in question. Assessing the role of maps as a reference point for industry and planners will be a critical point in the debate and as we know the use of mapping as a regulatory tool in agricultural landscapes has a checkered past. So too will be the discussion on the measurement of public interest, the scale at which that is measured and who makes the judgment.

There is a huge amount of work to be done to pull these proposals together. A number of constraints around the extent to which it will take affect still exist and they need to be understood if we are to accept what can be achieved. The package suggests it could only cover about 2.2% of the States land, which is determined to be strategic cropping land. This will leave a lot of primary producers disappointed. Further, the public interest caveat means that that development projects will still occur on agricultural land.

But if all goes according to plan, the proposed new framework will provide increased clarity for agricultural, mining and urban sectors regarding the government's expectations for strategic cropping land and how the best of it should be protected from impact. This should most certainly reduce the confusion, and provide some security for investors to support sustainable industry growth in all industries. While there are at last two sides to every debate, when it comes to this issue it will become evident that there are many, many more issues to manage than just to protect or not to protect. But finally, change to the agricultural landscapes are planned for is coming and it must proceed. Strong political leadership and solutions focused discussion will need to be coordinated to make this first step become a practical reality. The Government has called for submissions on their proposals by the 12th of March and QFF urges everyone concerned with this issue to play close attention to the debate that unfolds and have your say individually or through industry organisations. The discussion paper is available at www.dip.qld.gov.au/croppingland or by contacting QFF at www.qff.org.au.

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