Green Tape Stranglehold: New Federal Environment Laws Will Crush Local Sugar Industry

Opinion Piece From the office of Federal Member for Dawson, Andrew Willcox

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On July 1^st, the Federal Government’s newly established National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) officially began 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.

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"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.

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"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, or building firebreaks are suddenly treated like a potential federal offense."

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To combat this broader federal assault on regional productivity, the Coalition has announced it will lodge a coordinated Notice of Motion to disallow the Carbon Credits Methodology Determination 2026.  

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Mr Willcox warned that this strategy of locking up agricultural land for carbon offsetting 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," Mr Willcox said.

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"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.

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"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.

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"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.

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"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.

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

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