Today’s Weekly Times includes opinion pieces from SSAA Victoria and the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) about a proposed large new National Park on Melbourne’s doorstep.
Opinion pieces from the Weekly Times
The so-called “Great Forest National Park” proposal would see around 300,000ha of forest in the Victorian Central Highlands locked up in a National Park. The proposal received a boost just before Christmas with the release of an interim report from the Victorian Environment Assessment Council (VEAC).
SSAA Victoria is a 43,000-member strong, independent grassroots organisation with members and facilities throughout Metropolitan Melbourne and Regional Victoria. The VNPA is a small organisation of around 1,500 members that shares an inner urban office building with the Greens and other radical, fringe activist groups.
VEAC is a government body established under legislation with a stated objective to
(p)rovide independent and strategic advice to the Government of Victoria on matters relating to the protection and ecologically sustainable management of the environment and natural resources of public land.
In reality, VEAC’s sole, unofficial ‘KPI’ is to provide Governments with the justification to create more National Parks. There is an old saying that when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. VEAC’s ‘nail’ is public land that is not (yet) locked up in the National Park estate. On its website, VEAC brags that (at the time of its and its predecessor’s inception),
Just over one per cent of Victoria was protected in national parks and wildlife reserves…Fifty years later, around 16 per cent of land in Victoria is protected in national parks and other parks and conservation reserves.
In March last year when, the (then) Environment Minister ordered VEAC to conduct a rushed ‘desktop’ investigation into the very area that Greens-aligned activists have been agitating for ten years to have turned into the so-called ‘Great Forest National Park’, and for that investigation to be delivered before the shutdown of public land logging came into effect, you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what that report would say.
The ‘Great Forest National Park’ proposal kicked off around a decade ago and was driven by anti-logging activists in the Central Highlands. Native Timber Harvesting in Victoria officially ceased on January 31 last year. The key protagonist for the Great Forest National Park wrote in a celebratory post on X (formerly Twitter) on New Year’s Day.
From today, trees like these will no longer be sites of battle, they’ll become places of sanctuary. Logging has ended in the Mountain Ash forests.
To the extent that there ever was a rationale for the Great Forest National Park, it has been removed, and its protagonists have claimed victory.
There has to be a limit to the extent of National Parks in Victoria. Arguably, we are at or close to that limit now. There has been half a century of the rapid creation of new National Parks and the removal of two significant industrial uses of crown land: logging and agriculture. For the most part, public land management in Victoria over the next Century will revolve around balancing recreational uses with conservation and amenity considerations.
With a significant review of Crown Land over the next couple of years, the Government needs to seriously consider whether there is a role for VEAC in the future or whether it, like public land logging, has run its race.
For over a decade now, SSAA Victoria has actively advocated against the creation of a massive new National Park in the Victorian Central Highlands that would lock out hundreds of thousands of active recreational users. The campaign will continue as long as these threats are present.