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7. Environmental Issues

The Government wants to quarantine the upgrading of pastoral leases from the `Right to Negotiate' of native title holders. Its Wik Taskforce has proposed lifting of the `future act' regime of the Native Title Act from any activities on pastoral leases which come within the definition of `primary production'. This definition has been plucked from the Income Tax Assessment Act.

It is the widest possible definition of farming activities on land. It will authorise State and Territory Governments to permit full primary production rights to pastoral leaseholders (who presently hold much more limited rights) and thereby extinguish native title.

The effect of this will be to upgrade pastoral leases to a level akin to freehold title. This is clearly unacceptable.

It would also have disastrous environmental consequences.

Pastoral rangelands cover 42 per cent of the Australian land mass. The proposition that native title can be wiped out through the backdoor by upgrading pastoral leases not only affects the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples, it represents the most radical transformation of land title since colonisation.

Pastoral leasehold lands are leased for the purpose of extensive grazing of sheep and cattle on natural vegetation. Leasehold tenure is a land management tool, a license issued by various governments to regulate land use. Through conditions attached to the lease, governments have attempted to ensure protection of the land and to manage the range of activities that pastoralists can engage in. Most pastoral lease regimes have also historically accommodated Aboriginal interests.

Freeholding will remove these environmental regulations from large areas of the Australian land mass. For example, in Queensland, tree-clearing controls apply to leasehold and not to freehold land.

A Federal response to Wik that amounts to extensive freeholding of pastoral leases would massively undermine Australia's environmental health and the national public interest. Conservation groups have warned that freeholding would allow unsustainable land uses such as broad scale land clearing, intensive irrigated agriculture, native forest logging and unregulated tourism to occur on an as-of-right basis.

The hysteria from the NFF about uncertainty is a smoke screen to hide an agenda aimed at gaining freehold title.

Specifically, the Australian Conservation Foundation has stated that the indiscriminate upgrading of pastoral leases would:

• enable non-pastoral land uses to occur throughout the rangelands, thereby introducing new kinds and levels of threats to the ecological integrity and biological diversity of the rangelands;
• `reward' leaseholders with freehold title regardless of their previous and current performance in resource management;
• reduce public access to information about environmental values and the conservation status of land converted to freehold;
• increase the occurrence of land speculation;
• remove the capacity of governments to act in the public interest by adjusting stocking rates, setting logging rates, requiring land rehabilitation, and re-establishing or conserving wildlife corridors and riparian vegetation; and
• provide a huge windfall gain for pastoralists in the form of increased security of tenure.

All of this would occur at the expense of the rights of native title holders and to the nation as a whole.

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