QCG Stop bullying Wandoan farmers

I signed this petition today and thought I would share this as I think farmers should have more rights that what our laws allow.

Click here if you want to support our farmers too.

QGC: Stop bullying Queensland’s Wandoan farmers.  Treat them with the ‘fairness, respect and decency’ they deserve by giving them more than 21 days to prove their strategic cropping land status.  

The Wandoan farming community, who thought its farmland was protected as ‘strategic cropping land’, has been served with a notice from coal seam gas (CSG) company QGC proposing to strip 175 farms of their strategic cropping land status.

QCG has given these farmers just 21 days to complete farm surveys and collate evidence of farming history in order to prevent the foreign-owned  resource company from removing 125,000 hectares from  the Queensland strategic cropping land trigger map. 

The timing of QGC’s application has only deepened the community’s distrust of and disillusionment with the CSG industry.  By lodging the application just before the repeal of the Strategic Cropping Land Act 2011, QGC may negate the need to comply with more stringent environmental protection measures set under new legislation (the  Regional Planning Interests Act 2014) if wanting to pursue CSG developments in the area.

It is a completely unrealistic for QGC to expect that 175 field surveys can be commissioned and completed over 125,000 hectares within just 21 days.   

To do so is completely out of line with QGC’s ‘purported’ corporate principles of treating people ‘with fairness, respect and decency.’  

Such conduct, though legal due to a poorly constructed section of the strategic cropping land legislation, simply serves to further distress farmers already at their ‘wit’s end’ from dealing with CSG companies. Community depression is already endemic. 

Such conduct may also result in significant areas of valuable cropping land being afforded virtually no protection from the negative environmental impacts of CSG developments.

 Please sign to tell QGC to stop bullying Wandoan farmers and to treat them with fairness, respect and decency by allowing them at least 45 days to prepare submissions to prove their strategic cropping land status.