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Recent national changes to land-clearing and environmental laws will affect Hawkesbury residents. The changes intersect with a traumatic history of wildfire, regrowth, and ongoing fire management challenges.
A new version of the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act adopted after a deal between the federal government and the Greens imposes tighter controls on clearing native vegetation. Under the reforms, landholders (including farmers and rural residents) will need to obtain federal approval before clearing or removing native vegetation if it may affect protected species or other environmental assets.
Many land-holders argue that previous practices including clearing regrowth, thinning dense bush, or managing overgrown paddocks were part of sustainable land management. For them, a blanket “one-size-fits-all” approach threatens to criminalise long-standing practices.
As one resident put it “This is people from the city making decisions that are impractical and will lead to increased devastation of our landscape and death of species because they are stopping custodians of the land doing their job."
Hawkesbury is still living with the consequences of the catastrophic 2019/20 bushfires. The massive Gospers Mountain fire, one of the biggest in NSW history, burned through vast tracts of bushland in the Blue Mountains, Lithgow and Hawkesbury LGA. That fire built by multiple NSW RFS strategic backburns, left much of the landscape severely damaged and primed for dense regrowth in the years since.
Many of the burnt zones lie on the “interface” between national parks and rural villages, the very zones where people live, farm, or recreate. This regrowth, while natural, now presents elevated fire risk because dense new vegetation burns easily and may rapidly carry fire into populated or agricultural areas.
Because of this, local residents, farmers, hobby farmers, rural home-owners have a vested interest in being able to manage regrowth: clearing undergrowth, creating fire breaks, or reducing fuel loads around houses and farms.
Local stories of struggle and frustration
The NSW Rural Boundary Clearing Code allow Hawkesbury residents to clearly 25 metres inside their boundary fences within a range of restrictions. Land owners can enter their property address and recieve approval or not https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/plan-and-prepare/boundary-clearing-tool
In the aftermath of the 2019/20 fires, many locals attempted to reduce their risk using this tool however this does not address many problems faced by property owners. One striking example is a farmer and resident Martin Tebbutt, based in Bilpin. Despite repeated attempts over more than five years to get approval from local authorities to clear or create a fire-break on a 200-acre block of Crown Land opposite his property, he was met with delays and refusals.
Many others in the Bilpin District and nearby areas feel similarly exposed: regrowth has been dense, hazard reduction by the RFS and land managers minimal, and community calls for proactive clearing or ongoing bush-fire prevention often deflected by environmental or bureaucratic concerns.
What’s at stake as clearing & scrub thinning becomes harder
Increased bushfire risk for residents with thick regrowth in the interface zones, risk of catastrophic fire spreading to homes, farms or villages remains high. The RFS and state land-management bodies are already stretched. With less hazard-reduction (due partly to limited capacity and partly to regulatory or budgetary constraints), managing regrowth and fire risk becomes much harder and more expensive.
Farmers or rural property owners who previously relied on clearing regrowth to protect property, manage grazing, or reduce fuel loads may find themselves further constrained. Under the new laws, even clearing for hazard reduction might require expensive assessments or lengthy approval processes.
Blanket laws may treat all land and vegetation the same, even when local conditions vary dramatically between World-Heritage national park forest and rural farmland close to houses. Those risks undermining both environmental protection and community safety.
What needs to happen and could help
Authorities should consider local history, fire risk, and land-use patterns and not treat every clearing request the same. However distrust in Hawkesbury Council and its administrative capacity makes this unlikely.
Similarly Hawkesbury Fire Control inability to manage a consistent hazard-reduction policy for interface zones (Crown land, National Park / rural village / farmland) they are responsible for needs to be addressed. There should be a streamlined, transparent hazard-reduction approval process especially for long-term residents impacted by the 2019/20 fires.
Assistance with hazard-reduction clearing (mechanical or controlled burns), guidance on fire-resilient land management, and community-based planning needs to include land owners, managers and local interested community organisations.
People like Martin Tebbutt who live with the fire risk and bear the cost should have a voice in decisions about clearing, hazard-reduction and vegetation management. "These well meaning regulations may result in larger, hotter fires destroying more of the native vegetation and wildlife they are intended to protect."
The Law Change Isn’t Abstract — It Hits Home for Hawkesbury
While the 2025 national law changes on clearing and vegetation management may have been framed around protecting biodiversity and preventing “unchecked clearing,” for Hawkesbury those laws intersect directly with a painful, recent legacy: the 2019/20 megafires, dense post-fire regrowth, and ongoing fuel-load risk in village–bush interfaces.
Without careful, localised implementation and community input, stricter clearing laws risk trapping rural households already living with trauma, risk, and uncertainty in a dangerous bind: unable to clear regrowth, yet surrounded by bush that could fuel the next disaster.
