LEASES within the Gladstone State Development Area have been frozen while investigations are made into how they were awarded.
Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney made the move after it was revealed in last week's Queensland Country Life that Targinie grazier Darcy Ward lost his 6500 acre (2630.46 hectare) lease to his neighbour, Stephen Busby, but gained Mr Busby's 400 acre (161.874 ha) lease.
"I have requested that nothing happens to the leases within the Gladstone State Development Area until investigations have been completed and I have had time to properly consider their findings," Mr Seeney said.
"There is one internal and one external investigation under way into the complaints raised by the Ward family, and I want to emphasise that I will not make a decision on these matters until I have considered the finding of those two investigations."
Mr Seeney said he hoped to visit the local area shortly as part of his assessment of the issues raised.
The Targinie area has been steadily resumed by the Coordinator General's Department since 2001, and from 2003 land was leased back to some of the original owners, including Darcy Ward and his partner Julie Green.
The leases were up for renegotiation in March but the process changed and the five lessees in the area, including Mr Ward and Mr Busby, were required to complete expressions of interest.
According to Mr Ward's lawyer, the selection criteria were not transparent, focused on "attitude" and ignored land management.
It is also alleged that there was a campaign to get remove Mr Ward and another grazier from the land.
Mr Ward had expected at least another three years on his lease and had been led to believe he would only lose the land when it was resumed for industrial purposes.
Throwing his support behind Mr Ward's plight is land manager John McKay, Sunrise, Augathella, who was a regular visitor to the area between 2006 and 2010.
"This isn't ethically right," he said.
Mr McKay, who now sits on the other side of the fence as a landowner after taking over his father's property, said the people making these decisions - not the asset managers - had no idea.
"I would have been one of the people who told Darcy that the land would only be resumed for industrial use, and I would have been told that from higher up."
Mr McKay said in his negotiations with renewing leases, attitude was never a part of the criteria to the exclusion of one's track record. "I can have a good attitude, but I could end up with a bad result or a bad outcome.
"You are narrowing your criteria, and anyone call bullshit.
"It is not the expression of interest - it's the process you go through that's the issue. If you lease land you keep on leasing it until you break that lease.
"If you do something that breaks the terms of the lease, you need to get a notice to warn you, then you are advised a second time and told that if it happens again it's the end of the lease."
Mr McKay said people were entitled to know that if they had a lease they could make a return on that investment and they needed a time frame.
Mr Busby and the other lessees, Mick Goggi and Brian Bills, had every right to go for the leases, he added.
Mr Busby, who took this journalist for a drive around the leases on Monday, has hit back at allegations that he won his lease due to a friendship with the asset managers.
"It is part of the lease agreement that you have to make yourself known to the asset managers and I did that," he said.
He said he won his lease fair and square - offering the right amount of money and backing this up with a 17-page document on future plans that included detailed weed management practices.
"It has not been handed to us - it was won through a process," he said.
Allegations that he had an on-going fencing contract with the state department were a "gross lie".
"I have won two contracts out of multiple fencing contracts," he said.
The situation has left him and his family stressed, as they sold a property in the Boyne Valley and dropped the asking price from $1.25 million to $1.1 million for a quick sale on the back of winning this lease.
"I have 400 breeders arriving this Saturday for lease area 1 - what will happen?"
Mr Busby said he decided to tender for Mr Ward's leases as it would complement an 8000-acre lease he had with Esso, that backed on to the lease.
Mr Busby said Mr Ward had not done anything wrong - but he was not successful in seeking his lease.
He also wanted to set the record straight regarding reports that his cattle were starving to death, particularly a grey cow that died last week.
He said it had been injured when he unloaded cattle from the truck direct into the paddock, because he had no access to yards, and was later destroyed.
Mr Busby, who has partnered with another lessee Mick Goggi on a smaller lease, said Mr Ward had not converted all his land from run-down lots into a successful grazing enterprise.
A drive through one lease area revealed thick lantana on flats, mango rows, rubber vine and three deer.
Mr Ward said he did not deny there were weeds, but this ignored the areas in that lease where he had been working.
"There are plenty of weeds but the effort and financial cost being put in is enormous. I have diaries documenting all the work I have done, and photographs of where I have been."