Land clearing was effectively banned back in 1983—but apparently no one told the Shire of Northam. Their newly released draft Tree Retention Policy (LPP27) reads as if state and federal restrictions don’t exist. It’s packed with all the right buzzwords—biodiversity, canopy cover, climate resilience—but beneath the green gloss is a bureaucratic trap.

What could have been a practical landcare tool has been twisted by planners into a rigid set of rules—choked with paperwork, blanket bans, and costly arborist reports. Instead of supporting farmers to manage trees as part of a productive landscape, the policy treats every branch like a museum piece—untouchable and immovable.

Under this policy, if you’ve got a native tree over eight metres tall or with a trunk thicker than your thigh, congratulations—it’s now a “significant existing tree,” and you’re effectively locked into preserving it for life. Want to remove it to straighten spraying tramlines to prevent overlap of chemical, or replace it with ten better-placed natives, to fill a creek washout? You’ll need an arborist report, a development application, and a miracle.

There’s no simple offset system. No “1-for-10” replanting rule that rewards landholders for removing one poorly placed tree and replacing it with many more in smarter locations. No recognition that agriculture is evolving. As livestock declines under the live export ban, and cropping intensifies, farmers need flexibility to reduce chemical or soil compaction by removing isolated trees in the middle of paddocks.

The irony? Many of these trees were planted by the very farmers now being penalised. The landcare pioneers of the 1980s—who fenced creek lines, revegetated gullies, and built biodiversity corridors—are being punished for their foresight. Trees they planted decades ago are now frozen in time by regulation, even when better science points to smarter placement.

Meanwhile, if you’re a developer clearing for a subdivision or a government agency putting in a road, you’ll likely find a “public benefit” exemption waiting for you. That tells you everything you need to know.

Let’s be clear: no one’s asking for a return to broadscale clearing. That chapter closed decades ago. We’re not calling for heritage gums on road verges to be bulldozed or biodiversity to be sacrificed. What we’re asking for is common sense landcare—one that promotes revegetation in the right places, with the right species, in ways that integrate with modern farming systems that increase the percentage of farmland that’s returned to nature.

Farmers manage 18 million ha of the South West zone. If we’re serious about climate resilience, biodiversity corridors, and getting more trees planted on farms, we need to incentivise, not penalise. That means letting farmers take the odd one out—without drowning them in local government red tape.

Here’s a thought for the Shire of Northam: ditch the clipboard thinking. Bring in a flexible, incentive-based model—like a “10-for-1” tree swap—built into whole-farm planning. One that grows tree cover, not paperwork.

Because if we keep making trees a liability, the chemical dropped at the base of a tree will become the last resort—not out of malice, but sheer frustration, the tree will eventually die one way or the other. Farmers will plant trees but you need to give a bit for the environment to gain a lot.