The environmental lobby group Wilderness Society has branded the conservative Liberal National Party (LNP) state government’s preliminary draft plan for Cape York in far north Queensland as “insane”.
The state government is working on a draft map that shows vast areas of Cape York would be opened up to mining, agriculture and forestry.
The proposal will undergo a further review before it is released for public comment later this year.
Wilderness Society spokesman Gavan McFadzean told ABC News while some development on the Cape is inevitable, the current proposal is “insane”.
Mr McFadzean said the environment had been overlooked in favour of broad scale industrial development.
The LNP deputy premier Jeff Seeney has dismissed the concerns as outlandish scaremongering by extremists.
“Every time anything is proposed, the conservation movement make an over-the-top claim about something being destroyed or Cape York being ruined,” he said.
“It is nonsense, environmental values of Cape York can be protected in a very appropriate way at the same time as the people of Cape York can be provided with an economic future,” Mr Seeney added.
“Dams, land-clearing for broad-scale agriculture and up to eight new mines for sand, kaolin and bauxite right across Cape York,” Mr McFadzean said.
“By any criteria, it is an extraordinary place.
“For a plan to be produced by this state government that encourages and facilitates and fast-tracks industrial development, which will destroy the very values that are being assessed for World Heritage in our view, is mad.
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Not only because it destroys the natural and cultural values of Cape York, but it deprives communities on Cape York of real economic opportunities to use those natural and cultural values to their advantage,” Mr McFadzean told ABC News.
However, Cape York cattleman and former Cook Shire mayor Graham Elmes said the current plan locked up too much prime farming land.
“What we have to do is have some major changes, for God’s sake, do the sums,” he said.
“The suitable area we have there is bigger than the Ord River and yet we are going to be handicapped by this document.”
