THE Bligh Government is likely to regret its decision to attempt to protect 1 million hectares of regrowth vegetation from land clearing because of the impact it will have on property values.
That's the stark assessment from Graham Kenny, a director of the leading Queensland agribusiness consulting and valuation firm Devine Agribusiness.
"Assuming the moratorium areas remain permanently protected following the review of land clearing laws, then the government may well have some significant headaches to deal with in years to come," Mr Kenny said.
"The most obvious difficulty is expected to arise as a result of the drop in property values.
"To be classed as endangered regrowth these ecosystems must have been previously targeted for clearing and they were targeted for clearing because they had a lot of productive potential.
"The affected land is therefore very productive and consequently high value land.
"If the future productive capacity of that land is reduced by outlawing the control of woody regrowth, then its value must reduce signifi-cantly.
"This will essentially take improved land, and make it unimproved, effectively expropriating the very improvements, which for the past 150 years governments have been encouraging landholders to undertake, and in which landholders have dutifully invested thousands of dollars."
Mr Kenny said compensation for affected landholders had to be addressed.
"Some may believe that the Carbon value of regrowing brigalow suckers will in some way help to pay for the lost agricultural value," Mr Kenny said.
"However, with the progress of the CPRS looking doubtful in Canberra and the global carbon price having collapsed, that is unlikely to yield anything of significance in the foreseeable future.
"They will probably try to wriggle out of paying any compensation.
"The reality is that if you are emerging from the drought with more debt than usual and limited equity, and the value of your property is reduced by 20 or 30 percent, then in this credit-constrained world, it may well be curtains for you financially.
"How does the government propose to handle this situation?"
Mr Kenny said a second difficulty related to how the affected areas will be defined.
"It is all very well for the Government to come up with a new map and say these are the so called 'endangered' hot spots we must protect," Mr Kenny said.
"However, there must have been a methodology for preparing that map and it is likely to be challengeable.
"Given that this initiative was announced on March 15 and the mapping was released on April 8, there is unlikely to have been a lot of thought go into defining the subject areas.
"As we have seen in the past they are likely to have to use legislation to uphold the integrity of the mapping.
"There will still be a methodology and if it can be demonstrated to have been incorrectly applied then the map may be open to challenge."
Mr Kenny said case after case had demonstrated that the integrity of the mapping which underlied the vegetation management framework in Queensland was at best, questionable.
"Queensland has about 65pc of its original vegetation in an intact remnant condition," Mr Kenny said.
"Some 1 million hectares of regrowth represents about half a percent.
"If the maintenance of biodiversity is the goal then perhaps all the time and energy that will go into this exercise would have been better spent on protecting the endangered remnant areas from threatening processes, such as exotic weeds and feral animals."
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