Queensland government bill sparks land seizure fears for farmers and environmentalists

Matt Wood gives Neville a pat behind his ear – as if the one-tonne Droughtmaster bull were an oversized labrador puppy – while his wife, Caitlin, watches hundreds of pasture-fed hens scratch beneath old macadamia trees her dad planted.

Their talk is of building their regenerative agricultural operation amid the rainforests at the top of Springbrook mountain: adding goats to control fireweed and maremma to protect their chooks from wedge-tailed eagles and letting wild trees grow.

“You wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t the lifestyle you want to live,” Caitlin says. “But we wanna make sure that lifestyle isn’t to the detriment of the environment.

“We would like to improve the sustainability of this environment”.

But looming above the dream they are working towards is a dark shadow.

The Woods fear the Queensland government is amassing new powers that would enable it to seize land like their 120ha property in the Gold Coast hinterland and hand it over to developers to build a cableway first proposed more than 27 years ago.

Such powers are contained within a bill before a parliamentary inquiry that is due to hand down its findings on Friday.

Critics say the state development and public works organisation (critical minerals) and other legislation amendment bill 2026 will allow the government to bypass other laws – such as the Nature Conservation Act – for development it deems state strategic projects.

They say it would also lower the bar by which the government can compulsory acquire land, including for private commercial development.

“We have conservation acts, we have regulations and a private party wanting to develop something has to go through those dedicated requirements,” Matt says.

“But if the government deems that, for whatever reason, they want that party to be above that – that seems just ridiculous”.

The cableway is front of mind. Developers first proposed one – which would have passed through World Heritage rainforest and been the longest in the world – in 1998. That plan was rejected by the state government in 2000, but revived by the Gold Coast’s local government two decades later.

On Tuesday, councillors voted to stop funding studies into such project, which the city says could deliver hundreds of jobs and tens of millions of dollars to the economy and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors.

“I mean it’s great that the council is not wasting more of ratepayers’ money towards this,” Matt says.

“But we are still concerned that there is a private proponent, that there is someone who wants to take it from here … it certainly feels like there are plans that are moving forward, regardless of what we say.”

‘Streamlining’ the process

Liza Balmain is a Darling Downs cotton and grain grower who worries the government’s proposed new law could be used to override the last regulatory hurdle holding back coal seam gas extraction on her farm.

Arrow Energy’s Surat gas project has most of the environmental and resource approvals it needs to sink its wells into the farms around her community of Cecil Plains, Balmain says.

But because her and neighbouring farms till the most fertile soils in the state and tap into a vital underground aquifer, Arrow also needs to obtain a regional interests development approval (Rida), introduced to preserve highly productive agricultural areas.

“Arrow has been trying to get in here since 2010 and we’ve just been keeping them at bay – but a big part of that is the Rida process,” Balmain says.

“That would be their last hurdle, which is a big hurdle for them to surmount to be able to develop on our farms.”

Balmain is among more than 70 farmers and 275 regional Queenslanders who have signed an open letter calling on the government to withdraw the bill and restart it “with a process of genuine community consultation”.

Neither of the developments Wood and Balmain oppose involve critical mineral resources.

Yet it was with a pitch to keep Queensland “front of the pack” in “the race to secure critical minerals investment and jobs” that the deputy premier, Jarrod Bleijie, unveiled the bill on 2 June.

Bleijie told parliament it would “streamline the approvals process” for important projects by giving the government powerful tools to “resolve” barriers “that would otherwise stall projects”. This would facilitate projects through “almost every process undertaken and decision made about it across the regulatory space”.

“Critical minerals are the immediate focus,” he said. “However, these amendments will create pathways and powers applicable for any project of strategic significance to the state.”

Weeks later, while visiting north Queensland, Bleijie gave an example of a project that might fit the bill: another cableway, which would run to a mountain in a national park above Airlie beach. According to the ABC, Bleijie said opposition to the Whitsundays cableway characterised the bill as a means of overriding existing laws to approve major projects.

“Guess what? That’s what the legislation is all about, and that’s what it’s designed for,” Bleijie said.

“If there are issues with land ownership and tenure, we can utilise acquisition powers a lot quicker now under this new legislation”.

Carte blanche

The acting director of the Queensland Conservation Council, Anthony Gough, says the “incredibly far-ranging” bill made it “hard to overstate” how much change it would have to project approvals – and how much power it would place in the hands of one minister.

He says QCC members feared it might be applied to “any project in the state”, including an oil refinery in Gladstone, a defence hub for Rockhampton, and various new dams.

Gough says a so-called Henry VIII clause that overrides existing legislation could give the development minister “carte blanche to fast-track all sorts of developments, including in national parks and other sensitive areas”.

“So the minister of the day can, with the stroke of a pen, cut out whole laws from the decision-making process, can effectively say: ‘that law doesn’t apply to this project because I don’t want it to’,” Gough says.

“Previously these laws have been applied in natural disasters, or in wartime. To apply them as a business-as-usual measure is unheard of.”

It is not only among environmentalists that the bill has raised alarm bells.

The Queensland Law Society’s president, Peter Jolly, wrote in a submission to parliament that the proposed law amounts to a “systematic removal of third-party appeal and objection rights across multiple frameworks”.

The “complete removal of merit-based appeals to the Planning and Environment Court”, Jolly wrote, entailed “a functional denial of natural justice”.

While Agricultural peak bodies, Indigenous groups and social justice advocates have submitted serious concerns with the bill, the proposed law does have backers.

The Local Government Association of Queensland supported its overall intent to “improve infrastructure coordination, reduce duplication and enable more efficient project delivery”.

Mining peak bodies and some critical minerals companies have backed it. The Australian Energy Producers said it would help “pave [the] way for new oil and gas supply”.

In a statement, Bleijie said “relevant existing approvals and assessments, such as RIDAs, aren’t affected by the bill”.

“The Crisafulli government is sending a clear message to the resources, critical minerals, even tourism sectors, as well as communities. Queensland welcomes projects that create jobs, support regional communities and strengthen our economy.”

But Balmain described that statement as “very open-ended”, one that would give farmers “no confidence whatsoever” that the bill could not be applied to Arrow for it to bypass applications that would otherwise be required for future wells.

The managing lawyer for Queensland’s Environmental Defenders Office, Andrew Kwan, said “proposed changes of this unprecedented nature and scale” should have begun with widespread public consultation.

Given that did not happen, Kwan said, the likes of Wood and Balmain had a “wide and justified basis to be concerned”.