“It’s going to be great if we can keep that, those really expensive fertilisers and pesticides on the paddock where they can grow a crop, not on the reef turning it into rubble.”
However, tourism operators say tougher laws to protect the Great Barrier Reef from farm run-off will need to be monitored and enforced.
Farm groups claim it is unnecessary Government interference in agricultural practice.
But Col McKenzie from the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators says farmers who ignore the new rules should be punished.
“Everything is coming together, it needed to be both federal and state government response and now we need to make sure we encourage the farmers to invest in the right practices,” he said.
“Failing that, if we can’t get them to pick up and do the right thing and be compensated for it then certainly we need a big stick to follow up.”
Mr McKenzie says the legislation should have been introduced years ago.
“The legislative changes I might add are changes that we felt and expressed out views on more than five years ago,” he said.
“When the reef rescue plan was first put out we said then that asking people to make voluntary change would not be enough that they would have to follow it up with legislation.”
Meanwhile, the Proserpine Milling Co-operative, north of Mackay in north Queensland, says the sugar industry is already implementing environmentally friendly practices.
Secretary Ian McBean says the government is over-regulating.
“We really seem to be heading down a nanny state path here,” he said.
“The sugar industry has made a very concerted effort to improve it’s environmental performance and yet it seems to me that the State Government is claiming that those very practices that the industry has implemented will only work if they’re under Government control.”