Farmer Jim is thinking of felling one of the 20,000 trees on his property for fence posts, but he has a problem -- he has used up his 30-tree (0.15 per cent) exemption.
So he looks at one of the 19,970 remaining trees: He has to consider what slope it is on: whether it is a rare species: whether it has, or might soon have, any hollows: what native animals or birds are feeding off it or are likely to do so: what effect it has on the forest canopy: whether it is near a stream: whether it is of Aboriginal significance ...
Then he will be in a position to make a lengthy submission to government seeking permission to fell.
Welcome to the world of tree-by-tree approvals.
Over the decades government legislation has diluted freeholders' rights in a bid to provide for essential public services, to control harmful activities and, more recently, to prevent excess development. This has resulted in extremely interventionist regimes. Such regimes are necessary, particularly in crowded urban areas. But they are not costless.
While planning regimes have generally not destroyed the economic value of a whole class of property and deprived landholders of the incentive to care for it, state governments are now in the process of doing just this.
They are establishing native vegetation legislation that will quarantine large areas of Australia, effectively eliminating freehold tenure. In opting for coercion rather than co-operation, for preservation rather than management, they will also ensure that their environmental objectives will not be attained.
At the national level, the legislation is intended to prevent widespread additional clearing of private native forest and woodland. At the local level, this will be done by depriving landholders of historical legal rights and existing economic value.
The method of expropriation is through the familiar requirement for official permission that will be hard to obtain and seldom granted. Permits will generally be required from government before native vegetation can be disturbed. Native vegetation is widely, if vaguely, defined, but will encompass most native forest and woodland.
Some exemption has been granted so that landholders can remove or take a number of trees per annum. The exemptions bear no relation to existing rights. In one NSW regional plan, it is 30 trees per property. On a property with 100ha of trees (not uncommon), there could be up to 40,000 trees.
Restrictions on land and water use, fauna protection and Aboriginal and heritage protection are all on the shopping list of activist groups. In addition, as farmers grapple with prolonged drought, and volunteer bush fire brigades risk their lives on public and private land, the more mundane and complicated business of policy formulation is pushed out of the limelight.
Moreover, media commentators tend to avoid the complexities of bad regulation. There are simpler, more interesting targets, such as farm subsidies, or more exciting, if long-discredited, fantasies such as turning the coastal rivers inland.
The usual defenders of the rural sector have been muted or, in some cases, have been bought off by chimerical promises of compensation, such as the National Farmers Federation's joint bid with the Australian Conservation Foundation to get $65 billion from the public purse to solve salinity and buy out farmers.
There has been a whisper of compensation for expropriated rights, but political promises in this area are notoriously fragile and compensation is always hard to get and slow to be delivered. Full compensation for loss of capital value and for ongoing maintenance of areas that government has effectively expropriated would be enormous.
Other potential champions of the rural sector, such as the NSW Opposition, are desperately trying to look like a pale green shadow of government. The Green movement has strongly supported the legislation. More sinister, it has also attempted to stifle debate by seeking to exclude landholders even from their minority role in consultation processes on the grounds of their direct interest.
This is rather like excluding voters at an election, or ratepayers from local issues, on the grounds that they will be damaged by the actions of government. The fact is that this policy is costless both to those who promote it and to most of those who pass it into law.
It has substantial benefits for those in the bureaucracy who devise the policy, because it provides employment and power. The costs to the real stakeholders, the landowners, are very high. The costs to the community generally are well into the future beyond the next election, while the policy dynamic is profoundly biased against the rural sector.
But there is a better way: If the state and Commonwealth governments were serious about the future of our native vegetation, they would focus on the detection and regulation of large-scale land clearing.
Aerial and satellite surveillance permits regular detailed inspection, and hence control, of those who flout the law. Instead of alienating thousands of private forest landholders -- who are not clearing -- government should enlist their support.
It is a myth that the average farmer knows or cares less than the average Green about land on which he has worked for years.
In NSW, the area of parks and reserves has risen from one million hectares to five million hectares since 1970 while the number of parks has increased from 100 to an unmanageable 580.
The area of state forest there is 2.8 million hectares-- still substantial, though no longer a viable resource at current extraction rates.
A more co-operative regime would allow for sustainable forestry activities, while providing for protection of significant environmental values.
We are surely beyond the point of believing that large, regular random blazes in neglected public parks are preferable to the alternative of detailed forest management.
Perhaps the states also might look at the big picture before deciding to lock up land in addition to that which they already conspicuously fail to manage.
In those regions where forest cover in public hands is more than 20 per cent, the need to lock up more land should be presumed unnecessary. For the Green movement there will never be enough parks or enough regulations that simply reject human activity.
But other people must live on this continent, and their productive activities must support the public domain.
We need to look at more intelligent and tailored solutions. Perhaps it is time to say enough is enough.
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