Mining companies should just get on with the job rather than planting trees to ease corporate guilt at the expense of usable land, WAFarmers CEO Trevor Whittington says
As a former chief of staff to a Western Australian Minister for Mines, I’ve heard my fair share of public relations pitches from mining giants.
Frankly, they don’t need to buy our love. All they need to do is keep a low profile, comply with the Mining and Environmental Acts, find and extract minerals efficiently, make big profits, pay their royalties and taxes and leave the community better off than when they arrived.
If they manage that, everyone wins – including the climate catastrophists who enjoy the benefits of the royalty stream the government receives but continue to lecture us about the evils of the mining industry.
What I really can’t stand are mining companies that convince themselves they must engage in activities designed to make them look good while imposing costs on others.
This brings me to the WA Government’s Environmental Offsets Policy.
According to principle (1): environmental offsets are only to be considered after avoidance and mitigation options have been pursued, and (2) offsets are not appropriate for all projects.
There is no requirement for a mining company to undertake an offset when it already has a tried-and-true mitigation program in place, approved by the government.
The decision-making of one mining company has recently gone south.
They feel compelled to offer “offsets” on top of their mine rehab process, for which they have no legal requirement to provide.
In a recently released EPA document, they propose to “restore” over 4,000 hectares of good farmland to a feeble imitation of a jarrah forest.
They own the land, so it’s theirs to do with as they please, but who told them it was a brilliant idea to sterilise it by turning it back to bush?
This is the same mad formula a different mining giant is following: take freehold cleared farmland and ease their guilt by planting trees that will never be harvested and the land will be lost to agricultural production, including tree farming.
As I’ve argued previously, this move by big multinationals to buy green and government love is a huge risk to the 4,000 broadacre farmers managing the state’s 18 million hectares of freehold farmland.
It implies that farmers are oppressive occupiers of the land and that cleared land is the ultimate sin, one that can only be washed away by returning it to the Edenic paradise of pre-settlement.
But fear not – a saviour has arrived.
We are now blessed with modern-day messiahs in the form of mining companies which are ready to bless the earth with the return of the trees that will wash away the sins of the past. The “restored” forest will be a blessing for all, a sign that the gods are smiling upon these mining behemoths.
No doubt, further blessings will follow as the newly replanted soil is gifted to local Indigenous groups to manage at taxpayers’ expense, while the mining company claims to have paid penance for its past sins.
The end result? The loss of our farmers and the bread and olive oil they produce.
The loss of land to trees means they farmers will have to take up jobs as servants of the state or the mining company – or, if they’re lucky, they might be allowed to continue working on the land as firefighters when it all goes up in holy smoke.
What have we achieved? We don’t need more conservation estates in Western Australia; rather we need better management and funding of existing conservation estates.
We need to control feral animals, thin the excessive small trees and conduct more regular and frequent prescribed burns to prevent catastrophic fires.
Even better, we should be allowed once again to harvest old-growth forest and use the wood as our new main building product as a carbon offset.
If the WA offset system were followed as written – it’s only four pages long and not hard to follow – the sinners would recognise that revegetation of existing mine sites is more than enough penance to remain in business.
There’s no need to sterilise good farmland out of a misconstrued vision of sainthood.
If these companies are in desperate need to purge their guilt, they could get creative, as encouraged under the offset policy, and focus on longer-term strategic outcomes.
For instance, they could “sponsor” a national park, fund additional prescribed burns, or finance Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions fire crews to prevent fires before they fry the bilbies and other wildlife.
If the state government were serious about addressing environmental impacts, they’d offer a shopping list of offsets or guilt payments, vetted through a cost-benefit process, for the mining companies to throw their dollars at rather than locking up good farmland.
Off the top of my head, here are a few ideas: rabbit, fox and cat-proof fencing for a million acres, hunting these pests to extinction, partnering with farmers to revegetate marginal salt land, working with pastoralists and Indigenous landholders to cull pigs, donkeys, and camels, or funding research into the most efficient carbon-sequestering mallees. The list goes on.
The economic value of the agricultural land being sacrificed is enormous – probably close to $50 million, before adding another $21 million to establish the pseudo-jarrah forest.
Then there are the management costs, the value of foregone agricultural production, and the loss of 10,000 tonnes of grain, which is enough to feed 100,000 people a year.
The good that could be done for the environment with $71 million towards restoration and enhanced management of the existing conservation estate would be of far greater environmental value.
Imagine what could be achieved with prescribed burning if there were an extra few million dollars – more areas could be managed, lowering wood fuel hazards and reducing burn intensity, not to mention predator control, forest thinning and water generation for riparian-dependent ecosystems.
It’s time we stop bowing to false idols and return to practices that truly honour our stewardship of the land, before the last grain of bread is sacrificed on the altar of misguided penance.