Planning and Environmental Law Blog

We are specialist Planning and Environmental Lawyer. His key areas of speciality within the P&E jurisdiction are: Local government, Heavy industry,Transport and Linear Infrastructure and Town Planning Advisory and Litigation.

Our Services:-

1. Planning and Environmental Law Blog
2. Planning and Environmental Law articles
3. Journal of Planning and Environment Law

Vegetation Management and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2018

Purpose
In 2015, the Queensland Government made election commitments to:

protect the Great Barrier Reef by strengthening vegetation management laws to protect remnant and high value regrowth native vegetation (including in riparian zones);
reduce Queensland’s carbon emissions by re-instating vegetation protection laws repealed by the previous government;
retain existing self-assessable codes as long as they provide appropriate
protection; and
re-introduce riverine protection permits to guard against excessive clearing of riparian vegetation.

How the law does this
The Act does this by:

1. extending the protection of high value regrowth vegetation to align with High
Conservation Values by:
2. Increasing the land types on which high value regrowth is regulated (as
category C) to include freehold land, indigenous land and occupational
licences; and
3. amend the definition of high value regrowth to be vegetation that has not
been cleared for 15 years;
4. removing high value agriculture and irrigated high value agriculture as a relevant purpose under the Vegetation Management Act 1999. This will remove the ability to apply for a development approval for clearing for high-value and irrigated high value agriculture, and removing supporting provisions such as relevant purpose decision making criteria;
5. provide consistent protection to regrowth vegetation near watercourses in all Great Barrier Reef catchments, by extending category R to include regrowth vegetation in watercourse and drainage feature areas in three additional Great Barrier Reef catchments–Eastern Cape York, Fitzroy and Burnett-Mary catchments;
6. reintroduce provisions in the Water Act 2000 to require landholders to obtain
riverine protection permits for clearing vegetation in a watercourse;
7. provide enhanced compliance measures that will assist with enforcement of
vegetation management laws consistent with other similar contemporary natural resource legislation;
provide an option to landholders to request an area mapped as a category X area to be converted to a category A area, where the area contains remnant vegetation or high value regrowth vegetation on the ground; and
8.support the implementation of the revised accepted development vegetation
clearing codes (accepted development codes) including changes to area
management plans.
Assent given

On 9 May 2018, Queensland Parliament gave ascent to the Vegetation Management and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2018.