Tuesday, 30 April 2024

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:44): (839) My adjournment matter is for the attention of the Minister for Environment. After the disgraceful closure of Victoria’s native timber industry, this government is framing a Great Outdoors Taskforce investigation as an opportunity to ‘design the future of the state’s public land estate’. Thousands of Victorians are rightly sceptical that this is nothing more than a sham process where the views of bush users are perfunctorily recorded and promptly dismissed.

The panel includes the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council chair Mellissa Wood, and she has form on recommending the lock-up of our state forests by government. The VEAC central west investigation came back with recommendations for the creation of national parks in the Wombat, Wellsford and Mount Cole–Pyrenees forests. In a nutshell, the recommendation is to change the status of most of the forest area into a combined national park. Despite 66 per cent – two in three – of the public submissions being opposed to the draft recommendations and advocating for continued access to open and free dispersed camping, horse riding, dog walking, prospecting and fossicking, four-wheel driving, trail biking, orienteering and car rallies – all good for Victorians’ mental and physical wellbeing – their views were all ignored, or consul-told, as a result of this government.

With 60 per cent of Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action staff actually living and working in metropolitan Melbourne, it is hardly surprising that our current national parks are inadequately resourced and maintained. Tracks are certainly not being maintained. Locking up and leaving is not conservation, it is neglect. The interim report into the forests of the Central Highlands is also on a pathway to denying public access.

Now Victorians are invited by the Labor government to participate in the Great Outdoors Taskforce consultation and engagement, and it has been extended for another week. Last night in Drouin the public engagement meeting was packed with 250 community members. Bill Schulz put it to Karen Cain, and it was resounding – no further restrictions to public land and public state forests. Not to mention this panel happens to include the former president of the South Gippsland Labor Party and a hardly impartial scientist who attended the book launch of the anti-forestry, anti cool burn and pro national park author of The Forest Wars. We cannot see that this is anything but a predetermined outcome. As a measure of science and credibility, the action I seek is for the minister to expand the panel to include a bushfire expert and a member of Forestry Australia for balance.