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'Talk about bullies!': how 2GB's Ben Fordham campaigned for farmers charged with illegal land clearing

<span>Photograph: Lee Besford/AAP</span>
Photograph: Lee Besford/AAP

‘Right now there are more than 100 farmers in north-west New South Wales facing the prospect of being forced off their land because of the aggressive tactics of the Office of Environment and Heritage, who are prosecuting them for clearing their own land,” thundered Ben Fordham on 2GB in July.

“Legal action is being taken because they cleared vegetation on their own farms! They are facing the prospect of fines of a million dollars, and having land locked up for a hundred years. They face fines of $13,000 for every day they refuse to answer questions. Talk about bullies!”

Already struggling with the drought, farmers had been “kicked in the guts” by the NSW government, Fordham said, and many fourth- and fifth-generation farmers were now considering whether it was “just too hard”.

It’s not often you hear 2GB campaigning for law breakers. Usually the Sydney radio station is calling for harsher penalties for paedophiles, protesters and others who transgress.

But for more than six months Fordham ran an on-air campaign in support of the farmers in the state’s north-west who are facing prosecution for land clearing. He painted them as the victims of heartless bureaucrats.

Related: Farmers prosecuted for land clearing allege former NSW minister gave them green light

Why are compliance officers in NSW investigating illegal land clearing? Why do we even have laws against certain types of land clearing on private property?

If you were listening to 2GB you probably had no idea. It was a one-sided argument with little attempt to hear from scientists, ecologists or the NSW environment department about why land clearing needs to be regulated, why native vegetation is crucial to the region’s future health, and why prosecutions might be necessary.

NSW is in the grip of a land clearing epidemic, and there are few places in Australia where there’s a more pressing need to preserve native vegetation than in its north-west, where Fordham’s farmers live. Despite being home to many unique endangered species, just 10% of its native vegetation remains, and what is left is fragmented.

Rates of clearing in NSW tripled between 2014-15 and 2017-18, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, as farmers anticipated a change to the state’s land clearing laws.

Cleared land near Walgett
Newly cleared land near Walgett in the state’s north-west. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Newer data shows that some 368,000 hectares have been notified or certified to authorities as land to be partially or fully cleared under the new laws, which came into effect in August 2017. The majority of this is low- or moderate-impact clearing of invasive native species. Nearly 20,000 paddock trees are earmarked for removal.

There is no guarantee that farmers, who are permitted under the new laws to self-assess whether particular clearing is permissible, are making the right decisions.

Related: Stripped bare: Australia's hidden climate crisis

Fordham’s narrative of the poor small farmer being bullied by bureaucrats is misleading. A survey by Guardian Australia of cases now before the courts as a result of breaches of the old laws reveals a number of repeat offenders whose farming empires are valued in the tens of millions. The alleged clearing is not trivial – some involves as much as 1,000 hectares, the removal of koala habitat and the destruction of the last remnants of endangered ecological communities.

The judges, in sentencing offenders, also concluded that many of them were driven by economic motives.

There is no doubt that farmers in north-west NSW, even those with multimillion-dollar enterprises, are doing it tough during the drought. Fordham’s crusade, Guardian Australia understands, was motivated by sympathy for the plight of farmers he had met over the years. For example, he regularly interviewed Jamie Warden, a farmer from Walgett, who knows Fordham’s producer through his son’s school.

But this sympathetic coverage was just one prong of a highly orchestrated campaign run by the farmers of the north-west.

Related: The bitter fight over Australia's farmers clearing their land – podcast

Last November a group of them hired Newgate Communications and set up the North West NSW Agricultural Alliance. The group has a Facebook page and a logo – but finding out anything else about it is difficult. It has no corporate existence, no listed contacts, no directors and no board. Despite repeated requests via Facebook to talk to the convener, Guardian Australia received no reply.

Eventually we received a call back from Brendan Moylan, a solicitor in Moree, who acts for a number of farmers charged with land clearing. He told us the group had been set up by farming families who were affected by land clearing laws, but declined to name names.

Newgate Communications said: “The Northern NSW Agricultural Alliance represents more than 100 farming families in north west NSW. Most of our families are multi-generational and based primarily in the areas of Moree, Walgett, Narrabri, Wee Waa, Mungindi, Burren Junction, Collarenebri and Coonamble.”

Small clues about who is behind the campaign can be gleaned from comments and likes on the Facebook page, including from at least three of the defendants now before the courts.

Under Newgate’s guidance, the group adopted a two-part approach: a round of lobbying of politicians, and a full frontal media campaign through the rural media and 2GB.

Ministerial diary disclosures show the alliance scored a meeting with the deputy premier and Nationals MP, John Barilaro, in November. An article in the Land, penned by the alliance, followed in December.

“There has been an enormous increase in the number of NSW farmers being pursued by the [Office of Environment and Heritage] because of the massive powers inadvertently handed to them by the Barilaro and Berejiklian government through the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2017,” read the article.

Related: Australia spends billions planting trees – then wipes out carbon gains by bulldozing them

“The intention of this legislation is sound – to stop unlawful and damaging land clearing – and generally speaking, the legislation is working. However, it has provided a cover for zealots within the OEH to pursue their activist ideology.”

The article was signed off: “Written by a representative of the Northern NSW Agricultural Alliance (NNAA), whose name has been redacted for fear of OEH prosecution.”

Moylan has also been interviewed on 2GB, as has Cameron Rowntree, who led the push for changes in the native vegetation laws when he was on a NSW Farmers’ Association committee.

After the NSW election in March there were meetings organised by Newgate with Adam Marshall, the newly appointed agriculture minister.

Marshall’s seat of Northern Tablelands covers the northern part of the state east of Moree, where many of the land clearing prosecutions have occurred. The Nationals lost the western neighbouring seat of Barwon to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party at the election. Land clearing was one of the hot-button issues.

In May Marshall met with a group of Walgett farmers including Rowntree and Scott Wickham, who is now before the land and environment court for alleged offences under the old Native Vegetation Act.

Matt Kean
Matt Kean, the NSW environment minister. Photograph: Brendan Esposito/AAP

Meanwhile, Fordham appealed to the government to do something about the prosecutions, on almost a daily basis. He urged the environment minister, Matt Kean, who is responsible for enforcing the land clearing laws, to head west and meet with farmers.

Kean visited Warden’s property near Walgett and Warden told Fordham he had taken the minister to see “overgrown farms where farmers haven’t been able to clear their land”.

“I think he was a little bit shocked at how much native vegetation has been left out here, to be quite honest,” he said.

The next day Fordham reported to his listeners: “Environment minister Matt Kean has visited farms in northern NSW amid pleas for the government to overturn harsh land clearing laws bankrupting drought-affected farmers.”

Soon afterwards both ministers appeared on Fordham’s program to announce a kind of amnesty on prosecutions. From 31 August there would be no more prosecutions under the old Native Vegetation Act unless that activity was also illegal under the new legislation.

Marshall said the departments of environment and agriculture would be sitting down together to review all 160-odd investigations under way to decide whether they constituted a breach of the old laws.

How this differs from what the OEH said in its policy of January 2018 remains to be seen. The environment department had already declared that it would take into account whether an incidence of land clearing would have been legal under the new laws in deciding whether to proceed with prosecution. “This will ensure that only the most serious cases are pursued to the full extent of the law,” it said.

In the meantime there are a number of cases before the NSW land and environment Court and their future remains unclear.

The farmers of the north-west have run a highly successful campaign, using a top-notch PR firm, which has resulted in the government granting a kind of amnesty in all but the most egregious land clearing cases.

Fordham’s campaign was just the public lever to get the government to listen.