Veteran wildlife campaigner Bob Irwin believes his late famous son would have been proud of his arrest at a coal seam gas (CSG) protest in Queensland.
Mr Irwin has been charged with ignoring police orders to remove himself from a road blockade aimed at stopping the construction of a 16km gas pipeline in the state's south.
The father of the late "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin, along with Greens spokeswoman Libby Connors, joined the protest at the Tara Estate, south of Chinchilla, on Tuesday but within hours were in police custody and charged.
Protesters have been manning the blockade since last month trying to frustrate construction of the pipeline, which will take CSG from five wells on the estate to the nearby Kenya gas processing plant.
Opponents fear the expanding CSG industry will contaminate groundwater, present risks to human health and devalue land.
Mr Irwin accused QGC of breaching permits to clear vegetation along the pipeline route, and the state government of doing nothing about it.
"They are allowed to clear 10 metres of remnant vegetation to be able to put the pipeline in but in many, many areas - and I'm talking about kilometres - they have cleared 40 metres," he told AAP after being released from the Chinchilla police station.
"If any ordinary Australian had done that, against the tree clearing laws, we'd be in jail."
He said the government must explain why it was doing nothing about the alleged breaches.
Chinchilla police said Mr Irwin and Ms Connors were charged with contravening a direction and are due to appear in the Chinchilla Magistrates Court on May 18.
They have been released from custody.
Mr Irwin said he'd been charged "with making a bloody nuisance of myself" and would plead guilty.
"Steve's probably laughing right now that his old man is in a little bit of bother, he was pretty mischievous fellow. But I think he'd be proud of what's being done here," he said.
"He'd know as well as I do that we must fight for our land."
Queensland Party leader Aidan McLindon, who joined the protesters' blockade on Tuesday, told AAP the high-profile arrests would help people realise CSG projects were being rubber-stamped in Queensland.
In late March, Friends of the Earth campaigner Drew Hutton, who is Ms Connors' husband, was arrested and charged after participating in the long-running protest.
A QGC spokesman said the company was "entirely confident" the company had not breached its environmental conditions.
He said nearly half of the proposed work would be done on land it owns and the 14 landholders directly affected had agreed to compensation packages for disturbance to their land.
"If landholders have problems with the amount of land we're clearing, the measurements thereof, we've always said to them that we are more than happy to talk to them about that and to deal with it," he told AAP.
Late last month, QGC had to suspend work on a unrelated pipeline near Dalby, west of Brisbane, after a six-kilometre-long, 40-metre-wide route of land was cleared without appropriate approvals.
The Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) told AAP any allegations that operations breached regulations are taken very seriously and will be fully investigated.
"DERM is currently investigating an official complaint about their operations at Lot 19, Robbo's Road, Tara, to determine if a breach has occurred," a spokesman said.
It said its investigation into the Dalby incident is ongoing.
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