It appears that the long wait to get started on $12.5 million worth of cluster fencing projects in southern and western Queensland may finally be over.
On Monday, South West NRM was calling for expressions of interest for up to $2500 per kilometre of high integrity exclusion fencing materials to provide wild dog and invasive animal protection to clusters of rural properties in the Balonne, Bulloo, Maranoa, Murweh, Paroo and Quilpie shires, for what it called phase two of its collaborative area management program.
State government sources were unable to confirm that the Queensland Feral Pest Initiative was finally underway but SWNRM chair Mark O’Brien was confident when Queensland Country Life spoke to him last Friday.
According to Mr O’Brien, confirmed by Monday’s email, they would invite a short period of expressions of interest, closing after Easter, which, on prior funding rounds they expected most applicants would fit into.
“We expect some really good applications straight up that will get the tick. Some missed out on SW NRM funding last time only because we ran out of funding,” he said.
The organisation has been a champion of wild dog exclusion fencing, or collaborative area management fencing as it prefers the term, and has managed two funding rounds to date with landholder and state government funding.
Mr O’Brien said funding criteria for these was ‘best bang for buck’, ie strongly held sheep country with a lot of collaboration and an optimum size, but neither of these are strongly evident in the criteria handed down by the federal government this funding round.
“What we instigated was much more than building a fence to stop dogs; it was a social experiment to force graziers to work together,” he said. “With this new round, there’s no minimum or maximum size.
“According to the federal Agriculture Minister, it’s about going to where the dogs are bad and stopping sheep production.
“Our fences had an environmental benefit but this isn’t defined that way. Agricultural Minister Barnaby Joyce is unapologetic about profitable agriculture.”
In December last year the state and federal governments announced that $12.5m previously announced funding would be spent on fencing parts of drought-stricken Queensland off from wild dogs, $6m to SW NRM and part of the Balonne shire, $525 to the Remote Area Planning and Development Board in the central west, $700,000 to Goondiwindi and Balonne shires, and $550,000 to the Maranoa Regional Council.
In an agonizingly slow process for producers trying to protect the last of their drought-affected animals from being eaten, the state government announced in February that it was signing off project milestones for the funding round and sending them to proponents.
In the meantime,Mr O’Brien said because SW NRM had already enabled two rounds of cluster fencing, they were able to look at where other fencing could be positioned to take advantage of what was already there.
Environmental corridors would be taken into account, according to Mr O’Brien, who said society would live to regret it if access to rivers was blocked off.
“Our original thinking was to run fences 1km either side of a water course.”
Interest free loans
He said SW NRM was now preparing a Fencing for Farmers plan to put to the federal government, which would offer interest free fencing loans that would get paid back as graziers gained productivity.
“If the numbers we are hearing are right – lambings going from 30 per cent to 80 per cent – on 5000 ewes, that’s an extra 2500 lambs at $100, or a quarter of a million dollars a year.
“A fence might cost $300,000 – where else can you get productivity like that?”
Mr O’Brien said the beauty of the proposal was that it wasn’t asking government to take any money out of its budget.
He added that with other granting rounds SWNRM had been unable to grant money to individual properties, noting that if dry seasons persisted the Australian public wold soon weary of drought support.
“If fencing clusters are going to defer us going into drought by two years, we’d be irresponsible not to encourage it.”
Some 25 years ago, Queensland’s south west, including Paroo, Quilpie and Murweh hosted 3 million sheep. These days there are less than 200,000.
“The money announced for fencing is life-changing for these communities,” Mr O’Brien said.
