ROSS COULTHART: This man wants to assure you that he is an environmentalist. We can't show you his face. Not because he's breaking any law. But because he's wary of how you mostly city folk will view his efforts to fix his degraded land. He says he has science on his side to prove that this clearing is the best way to return his land to its pristine, healthy condition. Today, you'll see how Australian farmers believe they're being unfairly branded as environmental vandals for clearing their land. They're fighting back — and their Boadecia is Gabe Holmes, who, with her husband Joe, owns this farm 'Loxley' near Nyngan, in far western NSW:

MRS GABE HOLMES, FARMER: Well if committing ourselves to restoring Loxley to the condition it is in now makes me a vandal then I guess I am proud to be that kind of environmental vandal.

ROSS COULTHART: Back in the big city, Reece Turner of the Wilderness Society is also a passionate environmentalist. At this public meeting in the Sydney suburb of Manly, he's using aerial pictures of clearing on Gabe Holmes' farm to fire public outrage over land clearing.

REECE TURNER, WILDERNESS SOCIETY: In this instance here we have broad-scale land clearing in order to plant crops.

ROSS COULTHART: He's made his battle-front a huge swathe of far western NSW, but ground-zero is the home-towns of Gabe Holmes and hundreds of other farmers.

REECE TURNER: So the real front-line here is around here, the Cobar, Nyngan area.

ROSS COULTHART: Those farmers say rational public debate over land clearing in this country has been hijacked by emotive Green politics. They say all they want to clear is what they call 'Woody Weeds' — invasive native scrub, which was never there before European settlement, but now covers nearly 15 percent of NSW alone.

GABE HOLMES: We're going to have to go hard because they're not going to give an inch.

ROSS COULTHART: They argue the Government's actually causing environmental disaster by pandering to the Greenies with excessive restrictions on the clearing of 'woody weeds'. And, they do have some high-powered support for their arguments. This ecologist wrote the book on the plants of western NSW.

ROSS COULTHART: So let me be clear about this Geoff — land clearing can be good?

GEOFF CUNNINGHAM: That's exactly right!

ROSS COULTHART: In fact, if we want to save the environment here we need to clear this land.

GEOFF CUNNINGHAM: We need to clear a proportion of it.

ROSS COULTHART: We've all heard the claims that land clearing rates in Australia are at crisis-point.

REECE TURNER: We estimate that there's about 100,000ha being cleared every year in NSW. That's about six Sydney Cricket Grounds every hour of every day in NSW, of our bushland…most of that's illegal.

ROSS COULTHART: You stand by that?

REECE TURNER: We do.

ROSS COULTHART: But today the Government Minister who collects the figures says that's just not true.

IAN MACDONALD, NSW NATURAL RESOURCES MINISTER: This figure is totally untrue.

ROSS COULTHART: As you'll see, not only is most of the clearing going on legal, the scientific evidence suggests Australia is now in fact growing far more trees than it's chopping down.

MICK KEOGH, EXEC DIR AUSTRALIAN FARM INSTITUTE: The net position is that the rate of revegetation — that is replanting — and the rate of regrowth is many times higher than that — probably something like 300 football fields an hour Australia wide.

ROSS COULTHART: Just 15 years ago this used to be an open cricket ground here at Five Ways, a farming community south of Nyngan. As you can see it's been completely overrun even in that short time by native trees. These days the farmers are forced to play an entirely new game — jumping the hurdles put in their way by Greenies and the Government to severely restrict their clearing of native vegetation. Well what's wrong with that you might ask? Well today, the evidence suggesting that the restriction that we've placed on the clearing of native trees is in fact causing serious environmental damage.

Cobar farmer Alastair McRobert is showing me around his 15,000ha farm — 90 percent of which is covered with what he calls woody weeds. He says that before European settlement this landscape never used to look as densely forested as this because burning by aborigines and lightning strikes kept the country open — looking much like this.

ALASTAIR McROBERT: These forests weren't here. They're not forests. They're weeds. They have just grown up into the landscape and encroached on beautiful native grasslands. And taken it over, smothered them out and they're degrading the soil.

ROSS COULTHART: The best evidence for how that landscape now covered with native scrub used to look is buried here in the archives of the NSW Parliament. For, 105 years ago, the so-called woody weeds were becoming such a problem that a Royal Commission was called to investigate. Farmers were being forced off their land by the encroaching scrub.

QUOTES FROM 1901 ROYAL COMMISSION: The scrub came about the year 1870. There are miles and miles of it now covered with scrub that were beautiful plains with plenty of feed on them when he first knew it.

ROSS COULTHART: The 1901 Royal Commission found the woody weeds were a major cause of what was back then perhaps the worst depression Australia had seen. It forced hundreds of farmers off the land. These accounts, many from the original settlers, leave little doubt that, contrary to what many of us might think, much of western NSW — before settlement — was sparsely treed grasslands.

DICK CONDON, FORMER NSW WESTERN LANDS COMMISSIONER: The original native grasses were very tall and very deep rooted and the trees were long way apart.

ROSS COULTHART: Dick Condon's the former NSW Western Lands Commissioner, with nearly 60 years experience as an soil scientist in this western country. So, in this area it's not the case that we're losing forest. We're actually getting too much of it?

DICK CONDON: We are definitely. It's getting worse and worse.

ROSS COULTHART: Now you realise to folks sitting back in the big city that's an astonishing concept?

DICK CONDON: I realise that but that's what's happening. We don't need forest. We need open space for the species that use that grassland.

REECE TURNER: Again the white area is cleared land and that is the wheat sheep belt. The real front line we are talking about here is on the western side of the wheat sheep belt.

ROSS COULTHART: But the Wilderness Society is telling the public that that same western NSW country — marked in white on his map — was once largely forested, and is now being denuded by largely illegal land clearing.

REECE TURNER: There is controversy about exactly what the land looked like. But there were mosaics of woody weed areas if you like to call them that, or thick areas of native bushland where native animals existed quite happily. These are natural environments that in some cases should just be left to remain standing.

DICK CONDON: The Greenies back in the big city don't really know much about the environment. We have 12m hectares of that stuff out there throughout NSW with the environment degrading and degenerating with time. It will only get worse with time.

ROSS COULTHART: The aerial pictures may give one impression but down on the ground there's little if any animal life in this scrub. So you'd argue this land is actually getting worse since it's been locked up.

ANTHONY GIBSON: It's a terrible environmental outcome this is. It's a real crime what's happening here.

DANNY DUTTON: You look at the soil Ross. It has a bleached, sapped look whereby all the nutrients, any available moisture is being taken up by the regrowth.

ROSS COULTHART: And no grass.

DANNY DUTTON: Well look around us. Not a blade of grass anywhere.

ANTHONY GIBSON: No bird sound. No tracks of animals. They can't live.

DANNY DUTTON: It's become a wilderness. A sterile wilderness.

GEOFF CUNNINGHAM, ECOLOGIST: There are probably many places in Australia where one would say land clearing is undesirable but I think the problem is that in this area that it's different.

ROSS COULTHART: Surely if we lock up and leave these sites, they'll regenerate themselves.

GEOFF CUNNINGHAM: I've got my doubts. There's been lots of research work and observations indicate that just locking it up will not create those grasslands again.

ROSS COULTHART: Ecologist Geoff Cunningham wrote the authoritative text on the plants of western NSW. He's studied what the encroaching scrub does to its competitors.

GEOFF CUNNINGHAM: It chokes out the native grasses including the native herbs. And in fact bares the soil, allows the soil to be washed away in heavy rains.

REECE TURNER: We haven't seen any scientific evidence to show that biodiversity is being impacted negatively by these woody weeds.

ROSS COULTHART: Do you accept that at the moment there are woody weed areas causing major environmental damage?

REECE TURNER: No we don't accept that there are major environmental damages being caused by woody weeds.

ROSS COULTHART: So this used to be open grassland?

KEVIN CAMPBELL, FARMER: Yes it did.

ROSS COULTHART: Farmer Kevin Campbell says has the evidence, if anyone cares to come and look. Why is it that you've got a mini-grand canyon here in the middle of this gully?

KEVIN CAMPBELL: It's because of the loss of the native grasses and ground cover which has caused allowed the water to run and congregate and cut gullies.

ROSS COULTHART: He bought this farm in 1993, planning to clear the scrub and restore native grasses for grazing. But in this area of NSW, the new Native Vegetation laws now deem any trees older than 1990, such as these, to be 'remnant' vegetation. The only way Kevin can clear them now is by seeking permission under laws he says are excessively restrictive.

What would you say to the environmentalist in Sydney or Melbourne who's watching, saying that farmers like you have to be stopped from over clearing land?

KEVIN CAMPBELL: Well that really gets up my nose. I find it frustrating because the environmentalists are meant to be responsible people. And they're not. They're creating problems that we've got right here. I can't do anything about it and it's only getting worse. It'll get to the stage where it won't be worth recovering.

AUDIO FROM STATE GOVT VIDEO: This program uses a wealth of natural resource information collected from each region within the State.

ROSS COULTHART: What has the farmers furious is a computer program called the Property Vegetation Plan, or PVP, Developer, which this NSW Government video boasts should help fair and scientific assessment of land clearing applications.

What happens if you get a red?

AUDIO FROM VIDEO: If you get a red it means basically you can't proceed.

ROSS COULTHART: But right across NSW farmers are finding those lights stay red, not green.

KEVIN CAMPBELL: It doesn't work. It's too hard. This black box that we've got to get through. There's bloody 70 or 80 pages of law that we've got to sit through and it's done by a computer. It judges whether I can do anything and at the moment it hasn't judged that I can do a bloody thing.

ROSS COULTHART: One way farmers like Kevin can apply to clear scrubby land like this is by offering so-called offsets. This means he has to agree to lock-up other bush on his land in order to be allowed to clear. Only problem — computer says 'No'.

KEVIN CAMPBELL: The modelling showed that even with 5,000 hectares as a trade-off, I couldn't restorate (sic) 431 hectares. Now 5,000 hectares is bigger than my property as a whole.

ROSS COULTHART: The farmers want the right to argue the environmental merits of clearing their land. But once the computer program makes its decision, the new laws actually forbid farmers from challenging the scientific assumptions underpinning the software. When we told NSW' Minister for Natural Resources Ian MacDonald just what the computer program had told one farmer he had to provide as an offset, the Minister didn't believe us.

He had to have a ratio of 100ha to one. He had to retain 56000ha to clear 560ha.

IAN MACDONALD: He got that in writing?

ROSS COULTHART: Yes.

IAN MACDONALD: He's got that in writing — and what was he clearing?

ROSS COULTHART: He was clearing what him and experts have said is INS — woody weeds.

IAN MACDONALD: Well I find that difficult to believe that that's a credible example.

ROSS COULTHART: This is the report confirming that an offset of 100 to one was indeed required by the Government's computer program. Because the scrub on the farm near Cobar was older than 1983, it's deemed under the new laws to be 'remnant' vegetation. So any evidence it's not is effectively irrelevant.

MICK KEOGH: If you ask for a justification of the calculations, ah, there is none. It's simply I'll stick a thumb in the air and let's make him replant 20 or 30 times what he's proposing to clear.

ROSS COULTHART: Mick Keogh, the executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, suggests that Government policy has been captured by bureaucrats pushing an environmentalist agenda.

MICK KEOGH: Quite often you see a situation where irrespective of what Government policy is individuals get a real bent on a particular issue and almost use it as a vehicle for a campaign within Government.

ROSS COULTHART: There's a perception that what has been built into the computer software that is dictating Government policy on this issue is a 'lock it up and leave it' approach, a zealous conservation agenda within your own Department which is saying these trees are good, we must at all costs stop these trees from being pulled down despite the scientific evidence to the contrary?

IAN MACDONALD: No that's totally false. We are about ending broad-scale land clearing.

ROSS COULTHART: Cobar farmer Alastair McRobert says another restriction under the new clearing laws called 'stem retention' is blocking him from clearing any of the scrub on his farm.

ALASTAIR McROBERT: For me to go in and clear and leave these old growth trees because they've got high ecological value — to go through and restore this landscape so it's got native grass cover and native grasses which the birds and animals thrive on — I would have to leave, under the regulation, I would have to leave 20 stems per hectare under 20cms at breast height per species. Now there would be four or five species of different tree species through this landscape — woody weeds — that have to be retained per hectare, plus every stem size above 20 cms at breast height.

ROSS COULTHART: So basically you're stuffed here — you've got to keep this as remnant forest haven't you?

ALASTAIR McROBERT: Well it must stay the degraded landscape it is.

ROSS COULTHART: To local aboriginal community leader Tommy Ryan, the scrub the greenies are fighting to keep is as useless as the weeds in his garden. He's perplexed there's any debate at all about the need to clear the invasive native scrub. It's got so thick he can no longer find aboriginal sacred sites.

TOMMY RYAN: We can't get to some of those sites because the scrub's too bloody thick to get near them.

ROSS COULTHART: For 40,000 years Tommy's aboriginal ancestors burned the land. What he believes environmentalists and politicians don't understand is that the animals and plant-life in this landscape became dependent on open grasslands.

TOMMY RYAN: They burned this bloody invasive scrub they've got here. It burnt all that and you got good feed coming back, and kangaroos, emus and all that come back and eat around it.

ROSS COULTHART: Now millions of hectares of this country's once open grasslands are, farmers say, effectively being locked up by the new laws. NSW Minister Ian MacDonald has ordered a review of the Native Vegetation rules.

The farmers say the impact of those laws is basically lock it up and leave it. They can't do anything about it once it's been taken over by these woody weeds?

IAN McDONALD: In certain areas they've got a point and that's what is being looked at by Dr Dennis Saunders and his review into this at the moment, which will be reporting in the near future.

ROSS COULTHART: But, with a State Election in the offing, the Wilderness Society is flexing its considerable green muscle.

Would you regard any weakening of the current restrictions on native vegetation clearing as a back down by the government?

REECE TURNER: Oh certainly. The government promised in March 2003 that it would end broad scale land clearing. We haven't actually seen that promise come through.

ROSS COULTHART: Earlier this year these before and after pictures of clearing on Joe and Gabe Holmes' farm made them public enemy number one in the Wilderness Society's anti-clearing campaign. It looks horrific. To city folk looking at that, they see beautiful green trees and you — horrible fellows — have hacked them all out and defoliated it and turned it into a barren landscape.

GABE HOLMES: Well, Ross I take exception to that.

ROSS COULTHART: Gabe Holmes is adamant none of the scrub they cleared on Loxley was genuine remnant forest, just woody weeds and they see the Department's back-down as their vindication.

GABE HOLMES: It seems whatever the Green movement decide to put out, it's printed as gospel. That decision to implement that restoration plan was taken with an extreme level of frustration. The science is there that invasive scrub must be managed. The Wentworth Group of scientists acknowledge it. The research by the soil conservation service, the western land service. All the research is there that says that invasive scrub should be managed.

ROSS COULTHART: They're keen to highlight the environmental success of past scrub clearing which has restored native grasses and fixed erosion problems.

JOE HOLMES: We had soil erosion problems coming down off that ridge.

ROSS COULTHART: How do you know that erosion wasn't a consequence of your family's farming practices?

JOE HOLMES: If it was, that's why we took moves to fix it.

ROSS COULTHART: The Greens say you're a lap-dog to the farming industry. You're basically letting them get away with illegal clearing and not enough's being done by your department to rein in outrageous abuses of the laws by farmers.

IAN MACDONALD: Well I think there's been some very wild accusations made by some people at the extremities of the environmental movement.

ROSS COULTHART: But Minister the Greenies tell us that six SCGs an hour are being cleared. If that's true, that's a scandal isn't it?

IAN MACDONALD: Well I don't believe that the figure is six SCGs an hour. This is a gross exaggeration and in fact the figures are 74,000ha per year of clearing of which 44,000 is legal and 30,000 believed to be illegal, of which some investigations are under way.

ROSS COULTHART: There is no doubt there is illegal land clearing going on.

IAN MACDONALD: There is we believe some illegal clearing of property in the Macquarie Marshes area and that is currently being investigated.

ROSS COULTHART: And if you can prove it, will you prosecute?

IAN MACDONALD: Yes

ROSS COULTHART: Another reason to be sceptical about the Wilderness Society's alarming land clearing figures — they don't include regrowth in their estimate of 100,000 hectares of clearing because no-one is measuring it.

REECE TURNER: That figure doesn't include regrowth.

ROSS COULTHART: You say a lot of people say to us if you took the regrowth of native vegetation into account the amount of regrowth would far exceed the clearing.

REECE TURNER: Sure but the native bush can't regenerate at the moment as fast as it's being cleared.

ROSS COULTHART: But Mick Keogh says that's exactly what's happening. More trees are growing and being replanted than are being cut down — and it's multiples of the Greens six SCG's an hour.

MICK KEOGH: A rough estimate is that about 300 football fields per hour is the rate of net increase of vegetation cover in Australia. It's not difficult to make that claim because it's verified by science that's been peer-reviewed and published.

ROSS COULTHART: The farmers of the far west of NSW believe they've been unfairly made the whipping boys for public concern about land clearing.

FARMER: It's making criminals out of honest people. It's affecting your family, your income. Everywhere you turn is a closed door.

SECOND FARMER: We are going to win this debate because we are right. We have an obligation, not only to our community, to our kids, but to ourselves. For our own future and the future of our community.

ROSS COULTHART: The fear here is that as NSW's State Election looms, the Government will worry less about scientific arguments in favour of clearing at least part of their land and more about inner-city green preference votes.

GABE HOLMES: The science has been generated to meet political outcomes.

REECE TURNER: It will be a real travesty if the government failed to deliver on its promise by ending land clearing to allow this issue of woody weeds to open up the biggest loophole to broad scale land clearing we can see.

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