FAILURE TO REGULATE INTENSIVE HORTICULTURE IN NSW

Greens MLC  Cate Faehrmann has been urging the NSW Government to regulate the intensive horticulture industry, citing issues with land-clearing, excessive and illegal chemical use, soil erosion, spray drift, and the potential for worker exploitation. 
 
This news was doubly depressing for me, having initiated the Clarence Environment Centre’s (CEC) unsuccessful campaign to have the industry regulated 18 years ago, following illegal clearing near Halfway Creek which caused major erosion and river pollution.
 
By 2016, the problems could no longer be ignored, resulting in the formation of the Inter-agency Blueberry Working Group which reported all the problems Ms Faehrmann has identified as still occurring today.
 
As for achieving any control over the industry, the working group was a failure, able only to provide advice and “encourage” best practice. Its existence did, however, provide politicians with a convenient response to complaints that continued to flood in.
 
There were successful prosecutions for illegal land-clearing and water usage, including repeat offenders, evidence that some growers simply treated fines as “a cost of doing business”.
 
The failure to regulate the industry is no accident. All of CEC’s complaints over the years were brushed aside, with one Planning Minister saying he was against regulation because “it encourages non-compliance”!
 
The State Government even changed laws to allow the building of more and larger dams, seemingly in response to fines imposed for illegal dam-building.
 
NSW Government agency Local Land Services claimed to be powerless when granting permission to a blueberry grower to clear what they deemed to be “regrowth forest” on a property where some $10,000 of taxpayers’ money had previously been spent on bush regeneration.
 
We also had battles with Water NSW, one over evidence we presented of water theft not being acted upon, and secondly over a planned massive blueberry venture where water availability was an issue. The latter case went to a tribunal hearing where Water NSW’s taxpayer funded lawyer was brought in to prevent me giving evidence on behalf of the CEC.
 
We wish Ms Faehrmann’s campaign well but doubt it will achieve much. There are powerful political forces working to maintain the status-quo.
 
-    John Edwards

Originally published  under the title "Blueberry Free-for-all" in the Voices for the Earth column in The Clarence Valley Independent , 29th  October,  2025. 

CLARENCE VALLEY COUNCIL'S WEAKENED COMMUNITY ADVISORY COMMITTEES

In December last year Clarence Valley Council made major changes to the structure and operation of  its community advisory committees. Previously these committees provided the opportunity for more detailed interaction between community members and Council.  The advice at advisory committee meetings was actually two-way - with council staff providing information in the specific area of the committee’s function and the community members responding.  As the community members of these committees were volunteers with a range of expertise, experience and local knowledge, their input complemented the competencies of staff and councillors.

 So what has changed?  The number of advisory committees has been reduced from ten to four.  As a result some areas are not adequately represented and there has been an amalgamation of responsibilities for each committee.

The Environment and Sustainability Advisory Committee (E&S Committee) is a good example of the problems with the new advisory committees.

This committee replaced the Biodiversity and the Climate Change Advisory Committees and covers a very extensive area.  Its remit includes the following strategies – Environmental Management, Biodiversity, Bush Regeneration, Urban Tree Management, Solid Waste Management, Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction.  It also has responsibility for a Koala Plan of Management and Coastal Management Programs.   

As meetings are now limited to two hours and there have only been two meetings this year, the range of areas to be covered indicates a lack of commitment by Council to either actually having effective community input or any commitment to the need for urgent action on very important environmental issues. 

Another major change has been the staff composition on all these committees.  Instead of the relevant manager, each committee meeting is now attended by the General Manager and the relevant Director at the next level of the bureaucracy.  An obvious result of this has been strengthening control on what is actually discussed at these meetings with any input seen to be undesirable being squashed pronto.

It is increasingly obvious that Council is having advisory committees merely as a box-ticking exercise and that it has no genuine interest in community input. 

-        Leonie Blain

 

CLARENCE VALLEY TOPS THE CHART FOR WILDLIFE PRESERVATION

On September 13th over a dozen Clarence Valley residents with gazetted Conservation Agreement (CA) properties received results of their surveys for the Land Libraries program from NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust ecologists.

Last year after training in equipment and sound capture techniques, these landowners were issued with two motion sensor cameras and one bio-acoustic meter per property to help with a statewide CA wildlife survey.

The Land Libraries project aims to promote public appreciation of biodiversity by collecting as much data as possible from private properties to help with long term investment and development decisions.

The landowners, who came from Pillar Valley, Swan Creek, Jackybulbin, Tullymorgan, Coutts Crossing, Copmanhurst and Shannondale were happy to learn that their records topped the charts in a number of areas. They clocked up 100,800 of 720,000 hours of survey effort, with 3,161 records from an overall 11,664, covering 605 of 1,200 identified separate species.

They had also forwarded a range of personal photographs from their properties to the NatureMapsr website for confirmation and lodgement with the NSW Bionet Atlas, adding to the now vast knowledge of Clarence Valley's shrubs, forbs, trees, fungus and wide range of birds, mammals, frogs, insects, and one endangered gudgeon.

It should be of interest to Clarence Valley Council, which owns and manages lands around Shannondale, that the most active mammal from that area was the Vulnerable Rufous Bettong. Also a previously unrecorded not-so-common Common Dunnart was a first for the property, while Brush-tailed Phascogales turned up at several sites. The night-time acoustics hero was the Powerful Owl with 208 calls, while Squirrel Gliders and Koala were active on several consecutive nights, as were 12 microbat species, including seven threatened and one federally listed as endangered.

Since  Council now knows a few species that its wonderful natural bushland supports, hopefully it will take more interest in its land and join in the surveys when the program is opened up next time around. The program’s success and the interest it has created makes this more than likely to happen.

-        Pat Edwards

 

 Published in the Voices for the Earth column in The Clarence Valley Independent , 1st October,  2025.