NSW land clearing set to accelerate?

Today’s announcement by the NSW government of its response to rampant land clearing and dodgy offsets has some welcome elements. However, there is a grave risk that developers and rural landowners will accelerate plans to clear native vegetation before the new laws come into effect.

"As long as the current laws, inspired by the National Party in the previous government remain, their loopholes and sheer destructive impact will be used.  No effective and comprehensive laws will come into play until late next year at the earliest.  The government needs a stop-gap power to curb the bulldozers and chain saws starting up across the rural lands and developers taking advantage of weak offsets that lead to a loss of endangered habitat," said TEC Director, Jeff Angel.

The Henry and LLS report (Independant review of the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016), to which the Minns Government is responding, was an indictment of the environmental and economic failure of current land clearing laws, causing the equivalent of over 300 soccer fields being cleared every day.

We urge fast tracking key recommendations including:

  • net positive for nature requirement
  • consideration of the cumulative impacts of past development
  • ruling out dodgy and future mine-site rehabilitation offsets
  • improved ‘serious and irreversible impact’ guidance
  • reinstating caps on land clearing
  • urgent development of amendments to the Land Management (Native Vegetation) Code 2018 (the Code) to strengthen environmental protections that will reduce areas approved to be cleared and increase the area of native vegetation protected and managed in perpetuity
  • enforcing protection of high value areas and greater deterring of suspect and illegal clearing 

Prioritising critical amendments is essential as the government is embarking on an extensive process of review and legislative reform, which should not allow further damage to our environment in the interim.

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