The Right Sort of Green.

Environment Minister and Member for Glass House Andrew Powell has announced that 128 hectares have been added to Mapleton Conservation Park. This sounds splendid, and in fairness it is. Trees are generally improved by governments deciding not to remove them. There is a small administrative detail. The 128 hectares were already Mapleton Forest Reserve. Its tenure expired at the end of 2025 and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service recommended transferring it into the Conservation Park. So the forest was a forest before the announcement. It remains a forest afterwards.

Still, one should not be churlish. In Queensland at present, any collection of trees which finishes the week in approximately the same place deserves a small celebration. The Government says the Mapleton addition demonstrates its “practical and strategic approach to conservation”. It is protecting the “right places”, investing in their management and ensuring they remain available for future generations.

The right places.

That is where the Goose became interested. While 128 hectares at Mapleton were quietly changing status, the Government has been developing some rather more ambitious ideas about land elsewhere.

Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie introduced the State Development and Public Works Organisation (Critical Minerals) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill in June. Despite the reassuring specificity of “Critical Minerals” in the title, its reach is considerably wider. The Bill creates new mechanisms for projects deemed sufficiently important to the State, including intervention in approval processes, access to land and, in certain circumstances, compulsory acquisition. The Government's own impact analysis lists one of the costs with magnificent restraint: “Interferes with property rights of subject landholder.”

There are times when bureaucracy achieves a clarity unavailable to satire.

The same document identifies another possible difficulty: “reputational risk for proponent and government” where access is granted against the express wishes of a landholder.

Quite.

The Bill is still before Parliament, although the parliamentary committee examining it has recommended that it be passed. Among those concerned enough to make submissions were two organisations rather close to home. Wildlife Queensland's Sunshine Coast and Hinterland branch declared its “strong opposition” to the Bill. The Blackall Range Land Use Planning Association was more measured. It supports economic development and critical minerals, but warned about weakening local planning, concentrating decisions in State hands and the cumulative effect of development on coastal and hinterland environments. It made the awkward observation that individual projects may appear acceptable when considered in isolation. Anyone who has watched the Sunshine Coast being developed one perfectly reasonable development at a time may recognise the principle.

Then there are the minerals. Queensland is positioning critical minerals as part of a much larger international supply chain. When introducing the Bill, Mr Bleijie explicitly placed it in the context of the Australia-US critical minerals agreement and the billions of dollars being committed to projects intended to secure supplies of the materials needed for defence and advanced technology.

The vocabulary is becoming familiar. Projects are strategic, approvals must be faster and friendly countries require secure supplies. Land, inconveniently, sometimes has people living on it. And hovering somewhere near all this is Gina Rinehart.

Mrs Rinehart met Mr Bleijie in January. His ministerial diary records the purpose with the wonderfully unrevealing description “Ministerial and Portfolio Related Matters”. A few months later they were both at the Australian Open Swimming Championships. Mr Bleijie's diary describes the company generally as invited guests, industry stakeholders and community members. Mrs Rinehart's own account is warmer. It describes the Deputy Premier as part of “her party”. None of this establishes anything improper. It merely places everyone conveniently within the same paragraph.

Mrs Rinehart has been considerably less reticent about what governments might do with land. At the Townsville Bush Summit in June, she proposed offering Elon Musk the use of sparsely populated Queensland islands “at no cost” for SpaceX satellite construction and launches. She had recently invested about $1.4 billion in SpaceX. She suggested free land and tax concessions to attract Taiwanese microchip manufacturers. Free land was also proposed for Israeli defence businesses to manufacture drones and other military technology near Townsville. And then came perhaps her most revealing prop of the afternoon. Mrs Rinehart produced an orange toy bulldozer, invoked Elon Musk's chainsaw for cutting American government bureaucracy, and declared: “We need an orange bulldozer.”

One begins to understand why 128 hectares of safely redesignated forest at Mapleton might deserve its own ministerial media release. Here, land that was already Forest Reserve has become Conservation Park and the Government can quite properly tell us that it is protecting Queensland's natural environment. Elsewhere, the same Government is constructing machinery intended to accelerate strategic development and, as a last resort, allow land to be acquired for projects deemed sufficiently important. At the same time, Queensland's critical minerals are being positioned within an increasingly strategic relationship with the United States, while Australia's most prominent mining billionaire publicly suggests giving selected foreign businesses Queensland land for nothing.

No clever dot-connecting is required as they are sitting quite close together. Perhaps this is exactly what a “practical and strategic approach to conservation” means. Some land is environmentally significant and some land is strategically significant.,and the Government gets to decide when it changes from one to the other.

For now, Mapleton should enjoy its 128 hectares. The trees have been officially protected. One hopes nobody discovers anything particularly valuable underneath them.