The Queensland Government has proposed a new category of restricted land called “Strategic Cropping Land” which bans mining or development. This could blight 4% of Queensland, representing an area more than twice the size of Holland and including many areas likely to contain valuable mineral and energy resources.
The justification is “to secure food security for future generations”. It is just another phase in the war on carbon fuels aimed at preventing development of new coal mines and power stations in Australia. It is more about Green ideology than about concern about farmers or food.
If politicians were concerned about food security they would not have sterilised millions of acres of grazing land under scrub clearing bans, conservation zones, heritage areas, national parks and other anti-farming bans.
Nor would they have encouraged the diversion of cropping land from producing food for humans to producing ethanol for cars; or used false global warming dogma to justify covering food producing land with feral forests of carbon credit trees.
Farmers will soon realise the liability generated by these new blots on their land title. The value of their land will drop because it is no longer attractive to any development, not just exploration or mining.
Farmers will become pastoral peasants on cropping land controlled forever, paddock by paddock, by an anti-farming, anti-mining bureaucracy. Landowners, not bureaucrats, should decide what happens on freehold land.
The bans rob explorers who have spent scarce capital exploring land about to be sterilised, and destroy regional jobs.
One group, Big Coal, will be quietly pleased by the new restrictions. Well developed producing mines will survive until current resources are exhausted, but explorers seeking new mines in new areas are blocked. And our foreign competitors producing coal are delighted.
These foolish bans will not last. When the flow of coal taxes and royalties to governments diminish, “Strategic cropping land” will suddenly be reclassified as “Projects of State Significance”. But other generations will be the beneficiaries.
Deep Green and Big Coal have had a Big Win.
Farmers, explorers, energy consumers and regional jobs, Big Losers.
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
