Green councils’ blatant theft of private property
FARMERS and residents in rural NSW are finding their wealth destroyed by green councils locking up their land with environmental zoning, writes Miranda Devine.
Rendezview
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INSANE environmental bureaucracy is strangling the bucolic Bega Valley in green tape as landholders have found their property values slashed and their land “sterilised” for human use.
Take Wayne Doyle, a 63-year-old forester who bought a beautiful 110-hectare farm almost 20 years ago on the Wonboyn River in the Bega Valley.
He planned to retire there, and raise a few beef cattle, comfortable in the knowledge that he was sitting on a valuable nest egg. Or so he thought. But green ideologues in the Bega Shire Council had other ideas.
He’s worked hard since he was 17 and all his savings went into the farm and his superannuation. When he went through a divorce in 2008 he had the land valued at $345,000. He borrowed money to pay out his wife’s half in cash as part of the divorce settlement.
He got on with life, knowing that his land would be worth much more when he retired and got around to subdividing it and selling five two-hectare blocks, as he was entitled to do under the existing rural 1A zoning.
But unbeknownst to him, Council rezoned his land four years ago to the environmentally sensitive category of E3, which is two steps down from a national park, and forbids him from subdividing the land, improving it, changing its land use or even building on it as he wants.
He cannot even build a farm shed or clear a fenceline without lodging a punishing and prohibitively expensive Development Application requiring consultant reports costing as much as $100,000 with no guarantee of success.
In effect his land has been “sterilised” and the value slashed by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When he had the land valued again last year for taxation purposes, he found that, instead of having increased in value over the past decade, its worth had plummeted to $198,000.
The E-zone overnight had destroyed his life’s savings.
“They’ve just stolen our land rights with no compensation and without telling us”, he says.
“It’s been zoned by council without any notification or inspection or justification. I wasn’t aware of it. “The valuation says that because of the E3 zoning, the value of the land has dropped to $1800 a hectare.”
Doyle’s story is repeated across the valley and anywhere in NSW where there are environmentalists and bush, landowners are waking up to the fact their property rights have been erased with the stroke of a pen, as green-tinged councils uses a state planning template to sterilise land of any human use.
What Premier Bob Carr started when he closed down the thriving forestry industry, leaving the land to stagnate as increasingly fire-prone national parks, councils across the state are continuing by stealth as they impose excessively restrictive environmental zones on private property.
A great five-kilometre wide swathe of the Bega Shire coastline has been slapped with E-zones.
One of Wayne’s neighbours, a quadriplegic, now has found he can’t build a hut on his property for his daughter to live in so she can take care of him.
His brother, who has nine hectares along the river, has been rezoned to the even more stringent E2 zone, which is “virtually a national park”.
About 25 kilometres north of Doyle, on the beautiful shores of Twofold Bay, Bruce Lyon, 85, has owned the historic Seahorse Inn boutique hotel for almost half a century, along with 1800 hectares of rural land. He has long been planning to subdivide some of his property into 1.2 hectare blocks of land to sell for $140,000, each with full water and sewage services which he has built at his own expense.
But the E3 zone stopped his plans in their tracks and slashed the value of his property by an estimated 70 per cent. Another 400 hectares in nearby Boydtown is about to be rezoned from rural to e-zone.
“They’re taking our lifestyle away and sterilising our land,” he says.
The Bega Valley has come to a standstill, the council’s head planner quit on Friday, and the locals are screaming blue murder.
Two weeks ago concerned landholders met at the Merimbula RSL club to demand that the NSW government immediately remove E-zoning on all private land in their shire.
It is the only reasonable solution. The government can no more confiscate people’s property rights than it can destroy the greyhound industry without suffering at the ballot box.
But if you want to know why the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party came from nowhere to grab the seat of Orange from the Nationals and post massive swings in recent by-elections in places like Cootamundra, look no further than this state-sanctioned theft of private property by green bureaucrats.