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April 27th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda NSW Nationals leader Andrew Stoner says his MPs support a draft plan to regulate coal seam gas mining despite a party submission calling for better protection for agricultural land.
He says there is no rift in the coalition over the plan.
In their submission to the public consultation process, the NSW Nationals’ Resources and Energy Policy Committee are calling for the permanent quarantining of some agricultural land from mining and extraction in the state’s regional land use policy.
The submission also calls for the draft aquifer interference policy and the CSG Exploration Draft Code of Practice to be beefed up, and the buffer zone for open cut mines to be widened from two to five kilometres.
NSW Nationals chairwoman Christine Ferguson on Friday said she hoped the submission would “assist the government in strengthening the policy even further”.
“We suggest that these recommendations will strengthen the policy even more and hope that they are given favourable consideration by the government,” Ms Ferguson said.
Mr Stoner said the submission was part of a “natural in-house debate”, but Nationals MPs in the coalition government backed the draft policy.
“The submission is welcome, and will be considered alongside the hundreds of others the NSW government expects to receive,” Mr Stoner said.
“The NSW Nationals parliamentary party supports the NSW government’s Strategic Regional Land Use Policy and will be closely involved in the process going forward.”
The submission’s push for changes came after Planning Minister Brad Hazzard’s launched an attack on farmers, whose opposition to the draft plan had made them “almost irrelevant” in the consultation process.
Farmers and environmentalists are upset at the O’Farrell government’s draft plan, announced in March, which classified one million hectares in the New England region and 400,000 hectares of the Upper Hunter as high-value agricultural land.
But major mining and exploration – including coal seam gas proposals – will not be banned in areas set aside as prime agricultural land.
The NSW Farmers Association will on Tuesday hold a protest outside state parliament in Sydney, which it says will attract thousands angry about the government’s the draft plan.
Association president Fiona Simson said the government had failed to deliver on its election commitment to protect land and water resources by quarantining some areas from mining, and the draft plan “pulled up short on delivery”.
“We have worked consistently with the (coalition) for the past three years in the development of their draft policy, which is one of the reasons we are so disappointed in what has actually come out of those negotiations, and one of the reasons why we have had to take such a strong stand,” Ms Simson told AAP.
“We have been fully engaged in the process, and we certainly want further meaningful negotiations to have the outcome that was firstly promised and secondly that the community expects of the government.”
Ms Simson said while the consultation process had succeeded in getting stakeholders around the table, it had “failed in its outcome”.
“We have certainly been spoken to, but we are not sure how well the government has listened,” she said.
Speaking on ABC Radio, Planning Minister and Liberal MP Brad Hazzard accused farmers of an “unusual game of simply trying to stop anything”.
“I think that is particularly unproductive, and it’s reaching the stage where the farmers are becoming, through their association, almost irrelevant to the process,” Mr Hazzard said.
“They should buy relevancy, and get back in there and take part in the process instead of just sniping from the sidelines.”
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