GREEN TAPE STRANGLEHOLD: WILLCOX WARNS NEW FEDERAL ENVIRONMENT LAWS WILL CRUSH LOCAL SUGAR INDUSTRY

The Federal Member for Dawson, Andrew Willcox, has warned that the Albanese Labor Government's heavy-handed rollout of new environmental laws on July 1 will paralyse local agricultural production, leaving regional sugar cane farmers trapped in a compliance nightmare and threatening the viability of local mills.

From tomorrow (July 1), the Federal Government’s newly established National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) officially begins operations. Armed with expanded auditing powers and the ability to issue immediate 14-day "stop work" orders, this new federal body has the ability to enforce massive new financial penalties under a radically altered Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, with corporate fines skyrocketing up to $16.5 million.

The upcoming enforcement push follows intense scrutiny by the Coalition, alongside peak industry groups. Modelling from AgForce highlights the staggering scale of the threat, revealing that the complex federal self-assessment and referral process is expected to drain up to $3.5 billion annually from Queensland agriculture alone, with roughly 30 producers already trapped under aggressive federal compliance investigations.

Mr Willcox said local sugar cane farmers are already experiencing the suffocating effects of a bureaucratic hold by the federal environment department. Landowners trying to clear Category X land, which is freehold land explicitly classified as cleared or exempt under state vegetation laws to allow for routine farming, are being stopped in their tracks by federal authorities.

"Our local cane farmers are being forced into a bureaucratic nightmare by a government completely detached from the realities of food production," Mr Willcox said.

"I have local landowners coming into my office who are trying to manage and expand their crops on Category X land. They have done the right thing, yet they are being bullied by federal department officials who tell them their land is 'under investigation' without providing a single solid reason why. It is an absolute joke.

"Labor has rushed these laws through to secure a political win with the Greens, completely altering the 'continuous use' exemption. Now, if a farmer has regrowth older than 15 years, or if they are within 50 metres of a watercourse in the Great Barrier Reef catchment, routine activities like clearing scrub, putting in fencing, or building firebreaks are suddenly treated like a potential federal offense."

To combat this broader federal assault on regional productivity, the Coalition has announced it will lodge a coordinated Notice of Motion in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to disallow the Carbon Credits Methodology Determination 2026. This urgent legislative push aims to stop Labor from using multi-million dollar corporations and carbon credit schemes to permanently lock up productive land and destroy regional jobs.

Mr Willcox warned that this strategy of locking up agricultural land to appease a box-ticking carbon offset agenda represents a dangerous precedent, running alongside Labor's broader plan to lock up an additional 39 million hectares of land, nearly twice the size of Victoria, to meet its 2030 targets.

"Locking up this land completely destroys its productivity, abandoning active land management and turning prime agricultural acreage into a weed-ridden haven for feral pests, like wild pigs, to breed and spread unchecked onto surrounding properties," Mr Willcox said.

"Blocking farmers from utilising their own land poses a direct, existential threat to the region's sugar milling infrastructure.

"Our local sugar mills are already locked in a severe battle against block encroachment, which is steadily reducing the total hectares of cane being grown in our region.

"A sugar mill requires a strict, massive volume of cane to remain operationally and financially viable. If our farmers are stopped from clearing their Category X land to open up new cane blocks, the total tonnage will drop below that critical threshold, and the mills will simply close.

"The profit margins for our cane farmers are incredibly slim. If a local mill shuts down, it becomes entirely cost-prohibitive to transport harvested cane to a mill further away. The transport costs alone will wipe out any return, meaning all the surrounding sugar cane farms will have to stop farming completely.

"Hundreds of landowners across this country are facing this exact same bureaucratic freeze, and it is stifling production, damaging local economies, and threatening national food security.

“Our farmers need practical support and regulatory certainty, not a centralised, Canberra-based environmental police force strangling their productivity."

ENDS

Contact: Amanda Wright | Media & Communications Adviser
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