Queensland is again back in the news for all the wrong reasons. Coal capital, One Nation on the rise and now once again a world beater at clearing the bush.
For 30 years, Queensland was my home. I left for love and to start a family but my heart stayed in the state. The beauty of the rainforests, the splendour of the reef, the vast forested wildness of Cape York and the expanses of the outback all left an indelible impact. I also miss the honesty, directness and the no nonsense approach of Queenslanders.
For a generation, Queenslanders from all walks of life sought to create a new and vibrant Queensland after the repressive nothingness of the long Bjelke-Petersen era.
We were sick to death of being called the police state, of being the place where creativity was mocked, where race relations resembled apartheid-era South Africa and where the natural environment was under constant siege from all manner of state-sanctioned exploitation.
As a young “greenie” in Brisbane in the 1990s, one of the hardest things about being a Queenslander was the knowledge that massive amounts of forests and bushlands clearing was going on up and down the coast and throughout the vast rangelands of the interior.
All through the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush were levelled by enormous bulldozers and massive metal chains each and every year. In the year 2000, almost 800,000 hectares of forests and bushlands were lost. The cost to wildlife was massive with conservative estimates of tens of millions of animals killed each and every year.
And then after 30 years of unabated destruction, Queenslanders from all walks of life came together to say enough was enough.
Across the state, communities convinced the government of Peter Beattie to step in and stop the chop. After a few missteps, in 2004, Beattie included tough new laws to dramatically decrease deforestation. These laws passed with the support of the Queensland Liberals, then in one of their periods of independence from the Queensland Nationals.
Even the peak farm body, Agforce, provided muted support for the new laws. It appeared Queensland had turned the page on a new chapter, one in which protecting the environment and building a sustainable economy was paramount.
In Canberra, the Howard government supported the laws – reducing the rates of deforestation in Queensland meant a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and meant Howard could claim that Australia was on track to meet emissions reduction targets required under the Kyoto protocol.
And the laws worked. By 2010, clearing had reduced to 78,000 hectares, still a lot but substantially less than the bad old days. But then the tide turned.
In 2012, the newly-elected government of Campbell Newman broke an explicit election promise and gutted the land clearing laws. The old school Nationals were jubilant and the dozers were back into the bush en masse.
The legacy of Newman’s folly is written large in destroyed forests, soaring greenhouse gas emissions and further stress on an already critically ill Great Barrier Reef.
The release on Thursday of the 2015/16 annual land clearing data is heart breaking. Incredibly, 396,000 hectares of forests and bushlands were cleared, a 33% increase on clearing from the previous year of 2014/15. In total, a staggering 1.25m hectares of bush have been cleared since Newman took the axe to the laws.
Attempts by the new Queensland government to strengthen the laws in 2016 were defeated by the LNP and the cross benches.
The cost to wildlife is staggering with a recent report by CSIRO estimating that 50 million mammals, birds and reptiles are killed every year due to deforestation in Queensland and New South Wales.
Soaring emissions from deforestation, conservatively estimated by the Australian government as releasing 49m tonnes of greenhouse gases per year (9% of all Australian emissions), have almost completely cancelled out reductions in emissions delivered through the federal $2.24bn Emissions Reduction Fund.
And finally, massive amounts of clearing in the catchments that feed that Great Barrier Reef make a mockery of iron clad guarantees to reduce clearing made by the Australian and Queensland governments as part of the multi-billion-dollar Reef 2050 plan which saved Australia from the embarrassment of having the reef listed as “world heritage site in danger”.
Queensland has a brighter future than this and Queenslanders, when confronted with the awful reality of what is happening, will again demand action and leadership.
It is time for the LNP to recognise the folly of their actions in 2012, it is time for the Australian government to be firm and demand change on climate, reef protection and environmental grounds, and it is time for the Queensland parliament to commit to strong laws to end deforestation in Queensland.
- Lyndon Schneiders is the national director of the Wilderness Society