Death by a thousand cuts: the industry doing ‘more damage than mining’

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The 285 family businesses left to manage almost half WA's land, the regulators missing in action for decades, and the lone man who is lifting the lid on it all.

It’s turning on the computer for strictly an hour a day. It’s using the evaporative air-con only if the temperature exceeds 45 degrees. It’s plugging the holes in the Landcruiser with foam, buying everything from the op shop, and eating chicken-neck stew. A lot of chicken-neck stew.

While the rangelands are theoretically a renewable resource, overstocking by both managed and unmanaged animals has been the norm, leading to widespread degradation. Erosion and lack of biodiversity now threaten the resource's ability to renew itself, Pollock writes.Degradation began to emerge during times of drought, culminating in the “outback Armageddon” of the 1930s. But the land has never had time to recover, instead being subjected to sustained maximum stock levels.

The average age of pastoralists is 60 and few are handing stations down to their children, who want nothing to do with a tough business proposition in a declining landscape, Pollock writes.Pastoralists therefore have no incentive to keep the land in good condition or mount a decade-long rehabilitation project; “Certainly, their accountants would advise them against it,” Pollock writes.

The damning government State of the Environment report in 2007 showed the land was still declining. In response to the resulting pressure to act, regulator the Pastoral Lands Board announced the monitoring sites installed on each station in the 1990s, that were regularly checked by a team of trained and experienced agriculture department staff, were never in fact meant to be the basis for regulation, and would be scrapped.

The chairman’s reply told Pollock that he was “correct that the board has done very little to develop policies ... I hope that over time and in the near future ... we can begin to tackle some of the big, difficult problems.” The 2013/14 report on the condition of the WA fisheries resource was hundreds of pages long, for example. It described Department of Fisheries officers being at sea 90 days a year, doing regular land, sea and aerial patrols, using specially equipped 4WDs, quad bikes and vessels, sophisticated surveillance equipment, with an enforcement unit patrolling the coast from Onslow to Kalbarri.

The Minister says the reform includes legislative change so the board’s lone environmental member will be appointed by the environment minister of the day, not the lands minister.She says there will still be three pastoralists on the board, but “they won’t all be pastoralists antithetical to progress.”

Pollock wants a stewardship program to financially support pastoralists while they destock, to recover from historical degradation, while also creating new models to managing rangelands. And while the $400 million figure is a useful starting point for imagining a large-scale solution, partial implementation would be enough.Wooleen Station

 

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