WHILE rural lobby groups support the concept of Strategic Cropping Land (SCL) legislation, many believe there is still work to be done to ensure it truly protects prime agricultural land.
That was the conclusion from primary industry groups at the Environment, Agriculture, Resources and Energy Committee's public hearing on the proposed SCL legislation in Queensland Parliament last week.
The State government remains committed to enacting the legislation next year, followed by a two-year review to iron out any discrepancies.
But many primary producer groups repeated their serious concerns over the effectiveness of the bill in its current form, particularly with the current arrangements on the 50-year timeframe for temporary and permanent impacts.
The groups feel this needs to be reconsidered as soon as possible.
The legislation states if a proposed development falls within a protection area, land that is confirmed as SCL against the criteria must not be permanently impacted.
Both temporary and permanent impacts are defined in the legislation as enduring on SCL for at least 50 years, preventing cropping during that time.
Temporary and permanent impacts are assessed and determined by the Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM).
AgForce policy director Drew Wagner said the current time frame was "way too long".
"To measure it in a timeframe of 50 years, when we are seeing industries like the coal seam gas extractive processes only lasting 10 or 15 years per well, and an industry in its entirety only lasting 35 to 40 years - how can we accurately look 50 years into the future and understand what permanent alienation actually means?
"There is nowhere globally where impacts such as this show you can return soil structures and profiles and productive capacity like we are seeing in these areas identified as SCL to anywhere near the productive nature they have right now."
Queensland Murray-Darling Committee chief executive Geoff Penton said the 50-year timeframe was beyond any current planning process that the State government has on any form of agricultural or resource management.
Cotton Australia national water policy director Michael Murray said 20 years would be a more reasonable timeframe because it provided a reasonable amount of business planning certainty and was within a person's natural lifetime.
"At 50 years nobody will hold any personal responsibility in terms of anyone having the corporate knowledge of what went on or say, 'yes, we made a mistake' or 'we didn't make a mistake'.
"It is outside all normal planning," he said.
Kingaroy Concerned Citizens Group (KCCG) secretary John Dalton said the South Burnett group hoped Queensland MPs would "refine legislation that needs refinement".
However, he said it was hard not to be cynical about the legislation's intentions when the current criteria for slopes set at 5 per cent for the volcanic soils around the South Burnett would protect only 37pc of the cropping land outside Kingaroy.
Partitioning the red volcanic soils of the South Burnett into the ninth SCL zone would allow the slope to be re-set to 8pc, which would give a protection rate of 95pc.
"The consequences of not getting this correct are a loss of protection for 65pc of local food producing land," the KCCG's submission noted.
"It could also allow permanent alienation of the land due to bauxite mining or coal seam gas operations."
Queensland Farmers Federation chief executive officer Dan Galligan said the group was disappointed that the criteria focused solely on soils.
"We represent a number of intensive industries, particularly the irrigation industry," he said.
"Consideration for the importance of irrigation infrastructure associated with land is one key criteria.
"Essentially, it would be crazy for us to suggest we are going to alienate irrigation schemes in Queensland if they want strategic cropping land.
"So access to water is certainly one of the issues that we will be looking at in the two-year review as well."
The committee is due to report to the State government within the next week.
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