As part of the NSW Gas Plan, IPART’s Final Report: Landholder benchmark compensation rates: gas exploration and production in NSW has made seven recommendations after a public consultative process.

Sticking strictly to what it said were its terms of reference, the recommendations include compensation for neighbours “if impacted beyond reasonable levels as set out in licenses or approvals”; payments or in-kind benefits from gas companies to landholders to “share the benefits of gas development”; legislative provisions for compensation to cover all relevant impacts on landholders; independent workshops be run to help landholders understand and negotiate land access agreements for coal seam gas; a voluntary and anonymous public register of CSG compensation payments; and a spreadsheet model developed by IPART to help farmers estimate compensation benchmarks according to their individual circumstances. The spreadsheet considers details such as the area and value of the property; the estimated reduction in the value of land; the time and costs spent negotiating the access agreement and what year the gas project is expected to enter the production stage, to name but a few.

“The recommendations by IPART will ensure landholders receive a fair go that is on par with their interstate counterparts and encourage competitive investment in NSW,” the minister for Industry, Resources and Energy Anthony Roberts said. 

 “Under the NSW Gas Plan, the Government is committed to ensuring that landholders and communities share in the benefits of gas exploration and industry growth.”

The NSW Farmers Federation has welcomed the recommendations, in particular the database for compensation rates, which president Derek Schoen said until now, “has been virtually impossible to get.”

But Groundswell Gloucester’s David Hare-Scott said that IPART has been put in a difficult position by the state.

“The result is some good work whose scope has been limited by politics.  In giving landholders a structured approach to use in negotiations and access to workshops to inform and to coach them IPART has provided concrete help.  This is supported by suggesting a voluntary anonymous register of past deals so that landholders can see what rates have been agreed to and what they might expect, until now gas companies held all that information to themselves,” he said, adding that extending compensation to neighbours not directly hosting gas structures was a welcome and necessary element.

Mr Hare-Scott however decried what he says is was a voluntary “failing to address matters such as health, [social] divisions and potential for damage by the gas industry to other industries” , saying IPART’s terms of reference included “any other matters we consider relevant”.

“Getting the job done in a reasonable time was obviously a requirement but it is hard to avoid thinking that a degree of censorship was exercised as well,” he said.

He further added that the incentive 'benefit' payment for landholders was akin to bribery, who have no legal right to refuse CSG access on their land (both Santos and AGL have agreed they will not conduct gas drilling operations on a landholder's property in NSW if the landholder does not want them there.)

 “The crown owns all mineral resources and gets royalties from miners who extract them.  For coal or any other resource but CSG the landholder gets none of it. The remedy of giving landholders the legal right to refuse was not considered.  To put it simply, this unique ‘benefit’ payment is the state government trying to bribe landholders into accepting a risky and unpopular new industry.”

He concluded that overall IPART has “improved the lot of landholders in comparison to the free-for-all where it was the individual against the company but an opportunity has been lost to go further.”