An Australian rural landholder group says the Australian Conservation Foundation has “crossed the line” in its latest campaign against Australian cattle producers and has called for its tax-free status as a registered charity to be withdrawn.

The Australian Conservation Foundation last week launched a “Bulldozing the Bush” campaign for which it said 675 volunteer “citizen scientists” studying satellite images had helped it to uncover 90,000ha of bulldozed nationally threatened species habitat across 176 properties, “with beef production the primary driver”.

The cover of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Bulldozing the Bush report released late last week.

“That we still uncover destruction like this is why Australia is the only developed country on a list of global deforestation hotspots,” ACF’s Nathaniel Pelle said in a media release launching the report.

“It’s an embarrassing status that demands action from the federal government as we head into the next climate COP meeting in Brazil, where deforestation will be a key focus.”

The ACF report said 105 of the identified clearing cases “potentially” breached state and/or federal laws and it will, or has, report each case to Government authorities.

Scant detail was provided on each case in the Bulldozing the Bush report, and no regulatory investigations into the ACF’s accusations have yet been publicly concluded, but the campaign still generated several mainstream media reports linking the Australian cattle industry to illegal clearing activity.

‘Spurious attack’

In a statement sent to media today Property Rights Australia expressed outrage at the ACF’s actions which the landholder group described as a “spurious attack” on Australian farmers.

“The accusations are nothing short of defamation. No case can be made that the landowner actions are illegal and are anything but routine maintenance, conventional farming, or, quite possibly, for wind towers,’ the PRA media release said.

It added that landholders engaging in routine regrowth management did not meet the threshold of “significant environmental harm” under the EPBC Act.

In its report the ACF said it had been contacting landowners directly to “inform them of their obligations” and reporting landholder actions to beef industry supply chains.

“This means many operators identified as bulldozing the bush in this analysis risk being locked out of major markets,” PRA Board Member and Treasurer Joanne Rea said.

“ACF and its fellow runners are nothing less than vigilante squads inciting harm against food producers based on their ideology, not the reality of the law,”

“Surely making inflammatory accusations when there has been no illegality is defamatory and making emotional appeals for donations is unethical.

“Their registered charity status should be withdrawn.”

‘Cherry-picked definitions’

PRA has also accused ACF of “cherry picking every definition of ‘deforestation’” and using elements that align with its position while ignoring others – “The main one they invoke is the Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO definition, except that they forget to add that agricultural land including land used for livestock, and urban development, are excluded under that international definition.”

The group said it believed the ACF was using accusations of widespread illegal activity by the cattle industry in order to support its campaign to convince the Federal Government to include even more stringent red tape against landholders in the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC).

In the latest element of its campaign the ACF today accused Australia’s major banks which had made loans to the properties it says have engaged in potentially illegal clearing of “financing destruction”.

The ACF’s latest campaign comes one month after the European Commission declared Australia “low risk” for deforestation.