Brian Scarsbrick AM and now CEO National Trust of Australia says the Bill will reverse the huge strides forward that the Landcare movement has made since 1989, improving the on-farm balance between productivity and conservation.

“Landcare, supported by successive Liberal and Labor governments, encouraged the strategic replanting and regeneration of vegetation in corridors and small paddock eco-systems on their farms to ensure greater productivity over the long term,” Mr Scarsbrick said.

“ny stock and station agent will tell you that a strategically well-treed property will attract a higher price than a cleared farm.

“There is a case for clearing re-growth or woody weeds without red tape encumbrances, but the proposed changes to the current legislation go way too far.

“The new legislation is very similar to changes to the Queensland Vegetation Act that were introduced by the Campbell Newman Government.

“Those changes resulted in a huge pulse of land clearing in Queensland, with about 300,000 hectares removed in 2013-14 alone, releasing 36 millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

“The proposed NSW bills provide an added incentive under the Equity Code to allow a landholder to clear up to 500ha of native bush every three years, which will turbo-charge land clearing rates in NSW if these bills are enacted.

“The NSW Government is not saying what affect these bills will have on the rate of clearing – no modelling, no estimates.

“One of the important reasons why Australia was able to meet its Kyoto carbon emission targets was because land clearing rates were significantly reduced under the current NSW Act and the previous Queensland Act.”

The former CEO said the proposed new Act with its dangerous self-assessment codes will dramatically increase clearing rates across NSW.

He said that self-assessment code would work directly against the Federal Government’s Emissions Reduction Fund strategies to meet Australia’s Paris Conference agreed carbon emission targets.

The proposed extensive use of a self assessment code to determine whether clearing is allowed will lead to clearing of endangered ecological communities and threatened species habitats.

The use of offsets has been compromised, he said.

“There is no requirement that offsets be the same as the bush land that is being destroyed, and a system that effectively trades one threatened species for another, which will very likely lead to extinctions of species in some areas,” he said.

 “Why is the Minister for Environment and Heritage sidelined under the new Act?

“The Minister for Primary Industries ‘deals with the land clearing applications, with significant discretion in applying the new laws’.

“The expertise in biodiversity assessment is within the Department of Environment and Heritage, not the Department of Primary Industries.

“I applaud the government’s increase in funding for ‘offsets’ and ‘set- asides’ and on-farm conservation that is on the table with this new Act, but these budget allocations can be changed with each annual budget.”

In the late 1970s, under government agency encouragement, volunteer groups began to form to combat soil erosion at a district scale.

In 1986 a Victorian program was registered under the name of LandCare. It was in the late 1980s that the Dunecare program was developed in NSW with the formation of community groups along the coast.