![Ashley Hermes Ashley Hermes](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/rG8fTaJSn3KqLFJaeg5yPn/9e7f0d8b-e8a9-4f83-8402-99607b8a57d3.jpg/r0_0_4016_4854_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
A Bethungra farmer was "gobsmacked" last week to receive an invitation from the State government to apply for a grant to plant large isolated trees across his paddocks.
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Ashley Hermes contacted the Herald to point out the irony of being offered money to plant trees only three months after the State government had allowed massive destruction of trees on a neighbouring property.
Mr Hermes said the Macquarie banking group had knocked over, uprooted and burned hundreds of old growth gum trees and cyprus pines from the 7,500-acre property next door, "Englefield Downs", which it had bought with the assistance of $100 million in funding from the Commonwealth government's Clean Energy Fund.
The State government's Riverina Local Land Services had stood by and watched the destruction without raising a single objection.
"It's the weirdest thing," Mr Hermes said, "to give someone a permit to knock trees over and then offer a grant to replant them.
"The left had doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
"I got three grant applications - for a paddock shade and shelter project, for saving squirrel gliders and for saving swift parrots - on the same day.
"When they hit my inbox I thought how can this same area of government be sending this out after giving Macquarie Bank a permit to push them over?
"You sort of wonder whether government operates at all, when things like this happen, it's confusing.
"We can laugh at the absurdity of it, but it really does stress me that things can go so pear-shaped in the same area of government."
Mr Hermes said he was raising the alarm in the hope that the Macquarie banking group's destruction of native trees could be prevented in its future land acquisitions.
"Macquarie has just bought 49% of Cubby Station, the biggest irrigation property in the southern hemisphere, from its Chinese owners, becoming the fifth-largest landholder in Australia and look set to become the biggest landholder in Australia.
"With an ethos of knocking over native vegetation they'll become Australia's biggest-ever clearer of native vegetation - that's the record they''ll have.
"The thing that worries me about applying for these grants is that planting the 30 or so trees they're allowing and spending the energy and the couple of thousand they provide, then when I retire in ten years they buy the property and push them over.
"Is there anything the government is doing to protect the trees that they're now paying to be planted?
"I don't think there is, because they can't enforce anything they can't prevent them being knocked over five years later after taxpayers have paid to plant them.
"They're not asking for some agreement on my title protecting those trees - that's what they could do, say if you're going to take on these grants you've got to protect them ad infinitum."
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