The NSW Government thinks it has solved the problem of rare plants and animals on developers’ land, writes Wendy Frew.
THE discovery of a small shrub at North Rothbury in the Lower Hunter Valley sent a flurry of excitement through scientific circles. Botanists soon realised Persoonia pauciflora was unique to the area and didn’t grow anywhere else in the world. “It was exciting because it came from such a mundane kind of place,” says Peter Weston, principal research scientist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, who was involved in formal identification of the plant.
“If you find a new species in North Rothbury, an area that has been settled for 100 years, what else is out there?”
But suddenly disaster struck. Somebody ripped out 300 of the last 500 of these rare plants from the site of a major housing development planned by Hanwood Pastoral Company. The Department of Environment and Conservation has failed to uncover the culprit.
The company issued a statement in June through its solicitor. It said in part, company directors had no knowledge of the disappearing plants, viewed the situation most seriously, had begun their own inquiries and would co-operate with the department’s investigations.
Persoonia pauciflora is not the first plant to fall victim to foul play. The discovery of a threatened species on a development site can delay a project, and that costs money.
Illegally removing rare or threatened species from building sites is so common government scientists are wary of publicising new discoveries.
But the NSW Government believes it has found an answer to the inevitable clash between protection of native plants and animals and the money and benefits flowing from housing estates. It’s called biobanking.
The Department of Environment and Conservation has spent time and money researching the idea, developing methods to measure biodiversity and crafting a scheme that will provide a financial incentive for land owners to look after their land and rare species such as Persoonia pauciflora.
If a development threatens a species in need of protection, construction can go ahead if the developer can find another area of land – a biobank – supporting the same species or ecological community. The developer looks after that land or pays someone else to do it. The conservation work is turned into credits and traded between developers.
The department says the scheme will ensure much more biodiversity is protected as well as speeding up the planning process and providing developers with more certainty. It hopes biobanking will eventually replace the Threatened Species Conservation Act, which all parties say has failed the environment.
But environmentalists and some academics claim biobanking is a sham. They say we can’t continue to build McMansions, motorways and malls and protect wildlife. They say biobanking is being driven by pressure from property developers who have donated millions of dollars to NSW ALP coffers.
“It seems to me this is an exercise to allow politicians and bureaucrats to sleep soundly at night, believing they can have their cake and eat it, too,” says the head of the school of biological, earth and environment sciences at Sydney University, Associate Professor Paul Adam. “To say we can have
development and we can protect everything in the environment is a bit self-delusory.”
His views are echoed by much of the NSW environment movement who say there are many flaws in the proposal. First, the scheme is voluntary. If developers don’t like biobanking they can have their projects assessed under the Threatened Species Act.
Second, it does not stop the planning minister overriding environmental concerns for certain developments.
Last year, the state’s major planning law, the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, was amended by Part 3A, a change that handed planning control of almost all coastal areas and contentious sites to the planning minister. It abandoned stringent environmental requirements for controversial projects such as mines and big apartment blocks and stripped the community of a say in those projects deemed critical infrastructure.
“We can have all the arguments we like about biobanking and the Threatened Species Act and its failure, yet then you have a planning minister marching along with Part 3A, making all of that irrelevant,” says a Cessnock councillor and member of the Greens, James Ryan. He has watched with dismay as developers clear valuable native bushland in the Lower Hunter for housing projects instead of making use of already cleared land.
Central Coast environmentalist John Asquith is also worried that biobanking will not be applied to any development deemed Part 3A.
Asquith does not reject the idea of biobanking but he has grave reservations about being able to measure biodiversity, as if it was the same as measuring salinity or carbon. “The first big problem is how do you measure it, and scientists are still undecided about that,” he says. “Secondly, you need the assessment tools and the trading mechanism but the problem with a trading market is it becomes a force in itself.”
Environmentalists are also worried about who will be involved in the scheme. The developer Hardie Holdings, which has donated $126,000 to the state Labor Party in recent years and hired former ALP powerbroker Graham Richardson as a lobbyist, is already moving to capitalise on the scheme. Under founder Duncan Hardie’s guidance it has bought 7000 high-conservation hectares that could be traded for precious land that developers want to build on.
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The company has been implicated in several cases of alleged illegal clearing of bushland but this will not act as a barrier to its involvement in biobanking so long as it plays by the rules, the Government says.
Not all property groups are happy with biobanking, either.
Last month the state’s biggest property group, the Property Council of Australia, withdrew its support for the scheme and called for the passage through Parliament of the biobanking bill to be delayed until details of exactly how it would work were finalised and trials were run.
The council joined the Urban Development Institute of Australia in calling for changes to biobanking.
The Opposition spokesman on the environment, Michael Richardson, says a major concern is the lack of detail about exactly how credits will be generated from biobank sites, how a value will be placed on them and how they will be traded. He says “the devil is in the detail”.
“From the developers’ point of view it has not turned out to be the bonanza they wanted,” he says.
However, another major lobby group, the NSW Urban Taskforce, of which Hardie Holdings is a member, favours biobanking. Its executive general manager in NSW, Sue Robinson, says up to now there has been no clear process for approving developments. “[Biobanking] is very useful when you have very large sites that have a range of conservation values [which can be assessed] so you can balance that with appropriate offsets,” she says.
Robinson says many taskforce members who have major land holdings they want to develop favour biobanking because they have other parcels of land in the same area they could use to offset the environmental damage of their projects.
The deputy director-general of the Department of Environment and Conservation, Simon Smith, who is the driving force behind biobanking, dismisses criticism it is irrelevant because it does not deal with Part 3A. He says the department is developing methodology that could be used for the negotiation of environmental offsets either under biobanking or for Part 3A developments.At the moment [judgements about what land should and shouldn’t be conserved] are just opinion but this underpins negotiation of offsets with science,” says Smith.
He is also convinced many developers will use the scheme despite the financial costs involved because it would speed up the approval process and provide a developer with confidence his project would go ahead.
As it stands, he says, there are thousands of small pockets of high conservation land that are difficult to protect because they are surrounded by urban development and are too small for a viable plant or animal community. Better to let a developer use the land in exchange for a larger parcel of land elsewhere with similar conservation values and ecological communities. But some areas will be so valuable they will remain off limits to development.
“It is the Government’s job to reconcile competing claims for land use � the current system is death by 1000 cuts for the environment,” says Smith. “Biobanking does not make development permissible where it was not permissible under the current system � some areas cannot be offset and biobanking will not let you bulldoze those.”
Smith says that under the Threatened Species Act, which makes it illegal to kill threatened or endangered plants and animals, a signal is being sent to land owners that there is value in “trashing their land”.
His department knew some developers were illegally clearing land to reduce the conservation value and improve the chance their development application would proceed, he says. “We need to find a way to create a positive financial signal for people to look after their land.”
Persoonia pauciflora could prove the case. Much of what’s left of the population after its disappearance from the Hanwood estate is growing on nearby land owned by Hardie Holdings. It’s here Hardie wants to build a township housing 56,000 people. Once dubbed Sweetwater, Hardie now promotes it as Huntlee and has lodged its application with the office of the Planning Minister, Frank Sartor, as a Part 3A development.
Originally left out of the State Government’s draft regional strategy, Sweetwater is being reconsidered by Sartor in a scaled-down version.
HOW BIOBANKING WORKS
. Landowners can earn “credits” from the government in return for improving or maintaining the biodiversity on their property.
.Those credits can be sold to a property developer whose project may damage environmentally sensitive land elsewhere.
.Ecological communities on the land protected and on the land developed must be similar.
.Land already protected by national park or reserve status or that is extremely environmentally valuable cannot be traded.
.Some of the money raised by the sale of credits will be held in a government trust and paid to landowners annually to carry out work on the land, such as weeding, fencing and eradication of feral animals.