Australia is being turned into a giant national park with almost no public debate

One of the greatest land grabs since European settlement is underway. Few Australians have heard about it.

This week Environment Minister Murray Watt announced that the portion of the Australian landmass covered by nature reserves has reached 25 per cent.

Over the next four years the Albanese Labor Government intends to add an area the size of Japan to that figure to reach a target known as “30-by-30”.

Along with 189 other national representatives four years ago, then Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek agreed that 30 per cent of Australia’s land would be prohibited from development and commercial use by 2030 at a United Nations conference in Montreal, Canada.

Farmers are starting to push back against the environmental project. Some complain it is driving up the cost of farmland, reducing agricultural production and may leave the environment worse off in some places.

“The biggest question has to be: what’s the outcome of locking up that land?” says western NSW sheep, cattle and goat farmer Kylie Baty. “I don’t think it’s a question that’s being asked loudly enough.”

The official objective is to create a healthy planet by protecting biodiversity and ecosystems.

Low profile, big change

Even though it represents one of biggest shifts in land use in the modern era, the Albanese government has done little to publicise the plan.

Ministerial records indicate Ms Plibersek, who is now social security minister, did not issue a media release in 2022 announcing she had signed up Australia to the international agreement known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Ms Plibersek gave interviews from the conference in which she emphasised the global agreement was designed to protect endangered species. Her office did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

This week her successor, Murray Watt, disclosed that 25 per cent of Australia is now covered by the National Reserve System, up from 22 per cent when the Labor Party was elected in 2022. The milestone received almost no media coverage.

One study has estimated around 12 per cent of Australia was protected in 2010. The land added since Labor took power is equivalent to the size of Germany, Italy, Portugal and the UK.

“This is crucial to supporting threatened species and the habitats they call home, and ensuring generations to come can enjoy Australia’s unique native wildlife and landscape,” Mr Watt said in a press release.

Farms to parks

This latest milestone was reached through the transfer of 4.7 million hectares of the Sandy Desert in the Northern Territory to the Central Land Council, an Aboriginal organisation that will be paid $1.3 million a year to manage the land.

The area is known for long parallel red sand dunes. The funding will make it easier for the traditional owners to travel to remote parts of the desert “enabling them to share their knowledge with future generations,” the Land Council said.

In other places, the federal government funds the purchase of farms through state governments. Last year it opened a tender to buy land under a $250 million scheme known as the Australian Bushland Program.

State departments applied for the money from the program through AusTender, the federal procurement system. They are using the money to buy new land or convert land they already own into nature reserves.

In the Bourke Shire Council area in Western NSW about half a dozen farms have been turned into nature reserves over the past five years, according to Ms Baty, who is also a councillor.

She estimates the cost at over $120 million, spending that has driven up land prices, making it harder for existing farmers to acquire extra land or new farmers to establish themselves.

The best known in the broader area was Thurloo Downs, a cattle-grazing farm almost twice the size of the ACT that a NSW Coalition government bought for $108 million in 2023.

Located in a remote corner of the state, it is being turned from one of Australia’s most successful sheep and wool farms into a national park that will employ five people. On Friday, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service said the park is not expected to open until 2027. The previous scheduled date was last financial year.

A priority of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water reserve system through Aboriginal-controlled Indigenous Protected Areas like the one in the Sandy Desert.

Farmers say strict rules already protect endangered species, including plants, on farmland. They question if public servants have the resources to kill pests and weeds across vast areas of the continent.

The other view

On the other side of the debate, some scientists complain the government is acquiring land that sometimes has limited environmental benefits to meet the target.

“The framework does not just require 30 per cent protection measured nationally,” environmental academics Paul Allan Elton and Hugh Possingham wrote in March. “The protected area system is also supposed to be ecologically representative and ‘well-connected’, not simply a national land area target.”

The Coalition has been wary of criticising the target because it shares responsibility for its adoption. In June, 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and then Environment Minister Sussan Ley publicly endorsed an international campaign to increase nature reserves, explicitly cited the 30-by-30 ambition.

At the time Mr Morrison was trying to win US and British support for the AUKUS nuclear-submarine agreement.