A SOUTH WEST beef producer has launched a petition in a desperate final attempt to stop proposed vegetation management laws that are set to threaten his livelihood on the land.
Charleville beef producer Scott Sargood is calling on Queenslanders to sign the petition which requests landholders be able to sustainably manage regrowth/thickening and the importance of using Mulga as a fodder.
It also calls on the House not to impose any further legislative restrictions on fodder harvesting.
Mr Sargood has established his own Facebook page with educational videos in the hope of attracting more support. As of midday Tuesday, the petition had 3155 signatures.
Mr Sargood and his wife Adma own three adjoining properties between Morven and Charleville covering 34,300 hectares of mulga country.
The Queensland Country Life visited them earlier this year where they were thinning and feeding mulga to keep their Santa breeders alive.
Thanks only to their mulga, they were able to sustain their breeder numbers for the past five years.
“The government are treating it as a computer program and trying to make everything predictable,” Mr Sargood said at the time.
“The only predictable thing about nature is that it is unpredictable. Nothing grows straight in nature so it’s very difficult to lay one lot of rules down to suit the whole of Queensland when we have got so many different types of ecosystems and environments in the state.”
The petition is sponsored by Warrego MP Ann Leahy who said last term Labor’s proposed amendments were more extensive and aggressive than simply overturning the LNP’s 2013 changes.
“We all know that in the last parliament the State Labor Government introduced some of the worst anti-agriculture vegetation management reforms that landholders had seen in the last 20 years,” she said.
“The Palaszczuk Labor Government’s rollback of the LNPs workable and practical vegetation management framework will remove property rights, reduce the productivity of the agricultural sector and threaten jobs in our region.”
The petition will close on March 29 and is available at http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/work-of-assembly/petitions/petition-details?id=2854