On a cool Saturday morning in the Julimar State Forest, north-east of Perth, volunteer naturalists move quietly through wandoo woodland with cameras and notebooks. The Julimar BioBlitz surveys held there have logged more than 360 species in this one patch of bush — critically endangered woylies, more than 30 species of orchid, black cockatoos wheeling overhead. A few hundred metres away, along a track cut through the same forest, a drill rig tests one of the largest new metal discoveries in the world. Both scenes are entirely legal. Both are happening at the same time, on the same landscape, under the same government. That contradiction — a forest worth surveying for undiscovered species, and worth drilling for nickel and copper — is the story of land clearing in Western Australia.
What the government did
WA regulates native vegetation clearing differently from most of the country. Since 2004, Part V of the Environmental Protection Act 1986 has required a permit before most clearing can occur, administered by the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) for general land uses and by the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety (DMIRS) for mining and petroleum activity. Before 2004, broadscale rural clearing needed no state approval at all — one reason the Wheatbelt carries the deepest clearing legacy of any WA region.
Roger Cook has led the government since succeeding Mark McGowan as Premier in June 2023, and has largely continued that permit-based system as inherited, while making two decisions of his own that matter to this story. In late 2023, the government approved further exploration drilling for Chalice Mining's Gonneville nickel-copper-cobalt discovery across a roughly 30-kilometre corridor inside Julimar — land the government's own 2019 Plan for Our Parks had flagged as a future conservation park, but where mining tenements, excluded from the reserve proposal for their "employment potential," still allow clearing for drilling. And in November 2024, the EPA — at the government's direction — revised its greenhouse gas guideline for major projects so that large emitters eligible for the Commonwealth's Safeguard Mechanism are assessed there instead of by the state, a further retreat from the state-level emissions scrutiny WA's own regulator first attempted in 2019.
On the other side of the ledger, the government reached a target it inherited from 2019 and then completed: by January 2025, WA had created more than five million hectares of new national and marine parks and other conservation reserves, lifting the state's protected estate by roughly 20 per cent (approx.), an area the government says is equivalent to Tasmania.
The strongest case
An economy still built on farms and mines
Most of WA's clearing debate is a legacy question, not a Cook government one. The Wheatbelt was cleared under deliberate state policy across the twentieth century — soldier-settlement and group-settlement schemes that opened millions of hectares to wheat and sheep, decades before any government now in office existed. Grain, wool and livestock still anchor dozens of regional towns.
Mining is larger again. Resource royalties and North West Shelf grants are forecast to deliver about $7.7 billion (approx.) to the 2024-25 state budget — close to a third of general government revenue — and WA generates more than 45 per cent (approx.) of Australia's national exports. That money funds the hospitals, schools and police this site holds the government to account for elsewhere. Clearing for mining is also typically a narrow, linear footprint — pads, tracks, pits — against a Pilbara and Goldfields landscape where, on the state's own mapping, most rangeland subregions retain the great majority of their original vegetation. And the 2004 permit system, imperfect as this analysis goes on to show, is real regulation where none previously existed: independent scorecards comparing state land-clearing performance have consistently placed WA well ahead of Queensland and New South Wales, the country's heaviest broadscale clearers. Plan for Our Parks, too, is a genuine and now largely delivered conservation commitment, not a promise left on paper.
The evidence
The scale of historical clearing in the south-west is well documented. An estimated 75 per cent (approx.) of the Wheatbelt's native vegetation has been cleared over roughly 150 years of agricultural settlement, and remnant bushland in some intensively farmed catchments is now down to single figures as a share of the pre-European extent. That clearing did not just remove habitat — it raised water tables and mobilised salt, leaving roughly 1 million hectares (approx.) of the south-west affected by dryland salinity, a legacy state environment reporting has warned could keep expanding for decades.
The region being cleared is not an ordinary landscape. Conservation International's Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund classifies the Southwest Australia Ecoregion as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots — one of roughly three dozen recognised globally — covering about 356,700 square kilometres and holding more than 4,000 endemic plant species and over 100 endemic vertebrates found nowhere else on Earth, including the honey possum and the numbat. Hotspot status itself requires having already lost more than 70 per cent of original habitat, which is a measure of how much is already gone before any of this decade's clearing is counted.
The tension between the state's two biggest land uses and its conservation estate is visible at Julimar. DWER approved an initial clearing permit for exploration drilling there in December 2021; by March 2023 about 100 holes had been drilled, and in late 2023 the state approved further drilling across the wider prospective area, within a mining lease reported to cover more than 40 per cent (approx.) of the proposed 286-square-kilometre park. Mining-related clearing is smaller in the Pilbara relative to the size of that landscape, but not small in absolute terms: BHP's Mining Area C exploration permit alone authorises clearing of up to 300 hectares within a roughly 3,293-hectare boundary, with 181.49 hectares cleared under it as at 30 June 2024, and the company's Commonwealth-approved Pilbara Strategic Assessment allocates 18,110 hectares of disturbance across its broader iron ore program.
On climate, the state's own regulator has twice been pulled back from independently scrutinising large emitters. The EPA's March 2019 draft guideline, which would have required new major emitters to offset their footprint, was withdrawn within weeks of release after resources-sector objections; environmental groups later reported that then-Premier Mark McGowan had personally pressured the EPA's chair to drop it. The replacement guideline, finalised in 2020, was non-binding. In November 2024, under Cook, the EPA issued a further revised guideline deferring assessment of eligible large projects to the Commonwealth's Safeguard Mechanism rather than the state process.
A forest earmarked for a national park and still open to drill rigs is not protected — it is postponed.
The critique
Put together, WA's clearing regime looks stronger on paper than it operates in practice. The permit system only covers clearing that requires a permit, and the exemptions are wide: low-impact clearing of up to ten hectares a year is allowed per mining or petroleum tenement without any permit at all, and up to five hectares a year combined is exempt for routine farm activities such as fencing, firewood collection and building works. With thousands of active tenements statewide, that exemption alone can add up to a substantial, largely uncounted volume of clearing each year. DWER's own clearing-statistics page acknowledges the limitation directly, stating that its published figures represent only part of the overall picture and do not reflect the clearing actually carried out — only what was approved.
Enforcement, where it happens, is not calibrated to deter a resources-scale operator. The Environmental Protection Act sets a maximum penalty of $500,000 for unauthorised clearing, plus $100,000 for each day an offence continues. In practice, penalties fall well short of that ceiling: a Gingin landowner fined in the Joondalup Magistrates Court in September 2024, for clearing 27.64 hectares without a permit, paid $16,000 plus $796.70 in costs — about three per cent of the statutory maximum for a single offence. Prosecutions like this show that unauthorised clearing is detected and pursued, but the size of the penalty relative to the value of cleared and developed land raises a real question about deterrence.
Regulatory attention has also thinned over time. The Auditor General's only dedicated performance audit of the vegetation-clearing system dates to 2007, when it found roughly ten football fields of native vegetation were being legally cleared every day statewide, with an unknown further volume cleared illegally. No equivalent follow-up audit of the clearing regime itself has been published since, though mining-specific compliance has had more recent scrutiny — the Auditor General found in 2011, in a 2014 follow-up, and again in a December 2022 report, that DMIRS and DWER's compliance and enforcement frameworks needed continued improvement, hampered at points by COVID-19 disruption and staffing shortages. No comparable, up-to-date audit exists for the broader native-vegetation permit system that most agricultural and everyday clearing sits within.
Julimar crystallises the underlying problem: two arms of the same government are managing the same landscape toward incompatible ends, and the mining arm currently has the clearer legal footing. A forest the state has publicly flagged as a future conservation park still has an active mining lease over a large share of its area, carved out of the reserve proposal specifically for its "employment potential," with DWER approving successive rounds of exploration clearing inside it since 2021. And on emissions, the pattern across both the McGowan and Cook governments has been consistent: when the state's own regulator has tried to impose independent scrutiny on large emitters, political intervention or policy revision has followed within a year or two — most recently in November 2024.
The risk to the future
A hotspot with nowhere else to go
The south-west's endemic species cannot relocate if their habitat degrades — by definition, most exist nowhere else on the planet. Clearing that looks marginal permit by permit, or exemption by exemption, compounds in a landscape where large parts of the agricultural zone are already past the roughly 30 per cent vegetation-extent threshold at which ecologists expect species loss to accelerate. A regulatory system that has had no dedicated performance audit since 2007, that exempts a meaningful share of mining and farm clearing from permitting altogether, and that issues penalties a fraction of the statutory maximum is not well placed to catch that acceleration early.
The climate dimension compounds the risk. Every retreat from independent emissions scrutiny — 2019's withdrawn guideline, 2024's deferral to the Commonwealth — sits alongside a state emissions profile still rising on the resources side even as land-clearing-related emissions have fallen. As global capital increasingly prices biodiversity loss and carbon exposure into project finance, a government marketing itself as a "conservation superpower" while its regulator keeps stepping back from the two decisions that matter most — how much gets cleared, and how much gets emitted — risks both claims at once.