Melina BATH: As I rise to speak on the Parks and Public Land Legislation Amendment (Central West and Other Matters) Bill 2025, I do so with our position that the Liberals and Nationals will oppose this bill. This is an omnibus bill. What the government does when it wants to put a little bit from column A and column B together and wedge communities, it provides these omnibus bills and puts them at the end of a sitting week rather than giving them their due deference.
From the other side – across there, from both the Labor Party and the Greens – we are going to hear about protection. In fact if I take a running bet on this, we are going to hear everybody from that side talk about ‘We are protecting the land. This land is so precious that we’re going to reclassify it and we’re going to protect it.’ Well, reclassifying ‘state forest’ to ‘national park’ is putting a name on a piece of paper. It does not protect the forest, it does not protect the land; it is simply a reclassification. Reclassification does not equal conservation – but we are going to hear that from the other side for the whole of their debate.
There are some elements in this bill that we support. There are some very reasonable and actually called-for elements in this bill. I have called for them on behalf of the Liberals and Nationals in the past. I have called for extended deer hunting in national parks. It has been a platform that we have had on behalf of many community members – law-abiding deer hunters, those people who appreciate going out into the forest, out into the bush – and we support the initiatives of the extension of deer hunting in the Errinundra and the Snowy River national parks.
I could say also that there is going to be deer hunting in the three new national parks that are going to be created with this bill, which we oppose, but there has already been deer hunting in those state forests as they exist now. So this is not new territory, even though we will hear that it is. As I have said, we oppose this bill, and we will seek to make some substantial amendments to stop that division that exists in this bill. In doing so I will outline our amendments that I will declare in a little while. There are also some other technical amendments that are either rats and mice or reasonably innocuous. Now, this bill amends various acts. It amends the National Parks Act 1975, it amends the Crown Land (Reserves) Act 1978, the Forests Act 1958, and the Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Act 2020. It also makes consequential amendments to the Carlton (Recreation Ground) Land Act 1966, the Heritage Rivers Act 1992, the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990, the St. Kilda Land Act 1965, and it repeals the National Parks (Amendment) Act 1989.
As I have said, there are some reasonable parts to this, and then there are some quite egregious parts to it. What this government will say – I know the minister now, Minister Dimopoulos, inherited this legacy or historic commitment from Lily D’Ambrosio. Minister D’Ambrosio, who was the then Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, has said that there was a VEAC, Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, inquiry back in 2019, and that provided a compelling case whereby we need to lock up – we need to shut up these state forests into national parks, and the other side will say ‘protection’.
What we also know from that inquiry is that many people in the community, in fact, 66 per cent of the people that wrote in submissions to the Central West investigation – of 3000 submissions that were delivered as part of the consultation process, 66 per cent of those – said that they oppose the establishment of new national parks. However, glowingly and overwhelmingly, Minister D’Ambrosio said ‘We will commit to this’. Well, it has taken them quite some time to get there. Indeed, from our perspective, it could take them to the never-never because this does not need to happen.
The prospectors and miners – and they are a tremendous group of people. In fact 90,000 registered prospectors and miners are out there from diverse backgrounds and right across the state. They at the time, in 2019 – and I am being very transparent about this – asked and employed Dr Alan Moran of Regulation Economics to do a study on this. The VEAC will give you a whole range of things that it did. It said that the reclassification would yield non-use values of $270 million, and that was based on surveys asking respondents what they would hypothetically pay to preserve these forests. This method is known as contingent valuation, and it is widely unreliable and inflated because it is not based on actual market behaviour. Back at the time, VEAC said that the land valuation there per hectare in this Central West investigation would be $4615 per hectare, which was much, much higher than the value of farmland at that time. Now, by contrast, Dr Alan Moran said that the projected net present value loss would be in the magnitude of $2.8 billion and more than a thousand jobs gone, citing mining, forestry, firewood and recreation, and that flows on to all of those towns and communities around there. So there has been a significant disparity between what a government bureaucracy says and what an economic investigator has said. Clearly, there is a disparity. Potentially the reality lies in between those two.
What we also know is that people have pushed back on this whole national parks agenda. I will speak to this in a moment, but I will put on record: the Liberals and Nationals value national parks. We care about them. We want to see them actively managed. We want to see them better managed. But what this government has done over the decade – I will tell you what it has done. Analysis of the Parks Victoria annual reports over the past decade shows Victoria has increased its public land estate, its national parks estate, by 20 per cent, while operational funding for Parks Victoria has plummeted by 35 per cent. Even ranger numbers – the government is talking about this new initiative that is coming out: ‘We are going to fund more rangers.’ Well, it has cut the ranger population – those people out in the field with their boots on, doing the work, looking after the land, the forests, pulling out weeds, doing maintenance – by 28 per cent in the last year. When we hear the government say, ‘We’ve got a new initiative. We’re going to fund more rangers,’ they have cut them. They have successively cut them over time, and what we know is that Parks Victoria is top-heavy with suits in Melbourne and sincerely insufficient with boots-on-the-ground rangers. Of Parks Victoria’s employment funding costs to pay wages, 73 per cent goes to executives and managers. Isn’t that the wrong way around? This government has got it upside down.
Now let me go back to what I was speaking about in relation to petitions. I was very proud to support a petition that was, until only this week, the largest petition in the history of this place, an e-petition with over 40,000 signatures from Victorians saying no to new national parks and that we should better manage the ones that we have got. If we add that up between the lower house and the upper house, it is up to 80,000 people who have said no to new national parks, and that is what we are saying here: it is better to manage the ones that we have got; do not create more.
This is the thing about national parks. We hear this again and again from the minister and in their media releases, that you can continue to do all the things that you have done in the past. Well, that is just not the case. State parks and national parks differ very sharply in their purpose, in their access and in their management. State forests are under the Forests Act, are managed by the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) and operate as multi-use public land, balancing conservation, community access, recreation and local economic activity. In state forests you can hunt and you can go dispersed camping. We will hear from over there that you can camp in the national parks. Well, you can, but you cannot take your dog, you cannot go off the main track, you cannot set a fire safely – you cannot light that fire – and you cannot camp in a dispersed fashion with your family in a national park. That is a taboo, and it is not allowed. It will not be allowed in these new national parks. I will get to this very important point in a moment, but you are not allowed to go prospecting and mining. You can in some national parks, but this government has failed to introduce that piece into this legislation. You cannot ride your horse unless it is on the main track; I think they will say that. You cannot go off-road four-wheel driving or off-road trail bike riding – many of the things that so many Victorians do to celebrate the outdoors, experience it, feel better about themselves physically, mentally and emotionally and spend time with their family.
National parks are governed by the National Parks Act 1975, are managed by Parks Victoria, prioritise environmental preservation – apparently – and restrict public use. You cannot collect firewood; you cannot go off road; you cannot prospect and mine unless you have got the exemption, which this bill does not include; you cannot go horseriding; you are not allowed to fish unless you are in a designated area; you cannot walk your dog; you cannot, as I have said, use drone extraction; and you cannot use resource extraction.
There are some parts in this bill that are reasonably, I will say, innocuous. Some of them are about amendments to existing land acts. Princes Park land is made leasable. Wandong Regional Park is created. Bendigo Regional Park is updated. But get this: in Bendigo park this government is about to, in making these national parks, stop firewood, period. Stop firewood, period, unless that park happens to be in the Premier’s seat, and then it is going to continue firewood collection up until 2029. Firewood, as I am about to allude to, is such an important aspect of heating people’s homes. There is an amendment to the Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Act. There are the heritage and mineral resources amendments. It is going to expand the Wimmera heritage area. It is going to declare a Wandong park. It is going to make other smaller conservation parks at Cobaw, at Hepburn and at Mirboo North totalling 5600 hectares. The Yellingbo conservation area is going to be renamed and expanded into there. It is also going to amend the St. Kilda Land Act to allow long-term leases, which we do not feel is a problem; this is reasonable. And it is going to sunset by 2027. One of the things that this bill certainly does is keep dam licenses going, but only for a very short time. As I have said, it extends hunting, and the Nationals and the Liberals very much support recreational hunting. It changes to some gender-neutral language, which of course is now appropriate – ‘he’ just becomes ‘minister’ and the like. These things are all reasonable.
I had a good conversation with my colleague the member for Polwarth, and I will be asking, certainly, some important questions in committee of the whole on this. The bill introduces amendments to the Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Act, addressing several concerns raised by the Liberals and Nationals when it actually came in in 2020. At the time we opposed the creation of the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority, warning it would duplicate the responsibilities of Parks Victoria and local governments and create confusion over land boundaries. Indeed some of the amendments that we have in this bill now actually tidy up some of our concerns. It expands the definition of a scenic landscape area. It provides strategic framework improvements. The land management authority must prepare a long-term strategy, and it must be approved by the minister and published in the gazette. It incorporates planning and oversight and annual plans, and the minister has the power to approve or amend or reject these plans. One of my concerns is – and I do want to flesh this out in committee of the whole – that from 1 November, Parks Victoria formally transferred the management responsibilities, the assets and the funding of the area to GORCAPA. We raised those concerns in the bill briefing, and we still did not get any clarity around how the operational costs will be managed post the transfer. I put on record that it is really important that we delve into that to get some straight answers.
The thing about national parks – we will hear it is going to protect. The greatest threats to public land, to forests, are out-of-control bushfires and pests and weeds, and out-of-control bushfires and pests and weeds do not recognise a reclassified piece of land. What this government has done over time has really endangered regional Victorians – but not only regional Victorians; it is actually nipping at the heels of suburbia as well. During its time this government has introduced Safer Together, and if you go out into the regions and talk to people about the Safer Together policy, they throw their hands up in frustration. In fact I even spoke recently to a fantastic fellow who worked for DEECA. He is now retired and onto other things, but he was a facilitator who implemented, who sorted out, this Safer Together, and he said it is still hard to manage and hard to define. And it is clearly, with this government, hard to bring to fruition. Over the last decade this government has only provided a reduction in burns – and by that I mean fuel reduction and mechanical burns – of 1.5 per cent. This is an indictment, because the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission said that the appropriate target, the rolling target per annum, should be 5 per cent. In fact I think they actually were up to 8 per cent, but they brought it down – for, we will say, the rationale of actually making it happen – to 5 per cent. And what does that mean? It actually protects people if you do cool burns, if you take the fuel load out. You cannot know where lightning is going to strike or if there is a fire bug. You cannot stop the wind blowing and the conditions being dangerous. But you can – this government can and should – manage fuel load. And it has not for a decade, and regional Victorians are paying the price.
In terms of invasive weeds, go out there; go and talk to some of these people. Walk into our state forests and national parks, and you will see blackberries in vast quantities choking out our naturally beautiful areas, our iconic areas and landscapes that all Victorians treasure. You see serrated tussock and other noxious weeds, and you see them competing for and overtaking natural flora. Of course it degrades the habitat. Also, you get foxes, wild dogs – they are wild dogs, not dingoes; there is a difference – pigs and rabbits. Feral cats kill thousands and thousands of native birds every year. But what happens with these bushfires – and we saw it in 2019–20 and we saw it this year in the Grampians area – is they incinerate everything. Unless this government is going to take this seriously and turn around its mode, we are going to see, again, more serious impact on life, on property, on stock and on native flora and fauna. And what have we got now? We have got a government that is not fire-ready, and it will not be fire-ready in these new national parks either. We have 350 either G-Wagons or Unimogs offline. I had a former forester who lives in East Gippsland contact me. He is working hard, and he rang me today and said, ‘I just have to tell you, Melina, those Unimogs, they overheat. When they go out in the bush up into the tracks, their engines overheat and they won’t work.’ So you are putting these people in these vehicles and putting them in front of out-of-control bushfires. Now the government has taken them offline, and what has it done? It is borrowing other vehicles from interstate and it is calling on the CFA to backfill. It has known about this problem for best part of eight years. This is dangerous.
And what did we have? We also had the Premier talk – and I must just go back to that. The Premier said, hand on her heart in Bendigo a year and a half ago:
I want to be very clear as premier and … a proud … Victorian, I won’t be putting a padlock on our public forests. It’s not who I am. It’s not what I believe in.
Well, I have said this before, and we will say it again, the Liberals and the Nationals: this is being cute with the truth, because whilst you are not putting a fence around it with a padlock, you are restricting access – and not only that; you are restricting access for traditional owners too. I know that at the time in the Wombat forest when there was a shocking windstorm and there was a lot of windrow and there were trees falling over, VicForests was engaged to take that windrow timber off and use it. The people that threw their hands up in outrage were the Greens, and I find that the most amazing thing. You have got, on one hand, ‘Protect and facilitate and bring about better outcomes for traditional owners’, but if you are doing something that they do not want you to do, like actually taking the timber off the ground and making the best use of it, they have got an amendment coming through to say that you cannot do that. We will wait for them to bring that amendment on. But indeed it works as long as you suit their ideology – well, certainly we do not subscribe to that.
Let me get to the point on firewood, because this is a really significant issue for regional people. One of the most damaging and short-sighted aspects of this bill is its treatment of firewood. This government has stubbornly refused to understand that once the bill has declared a national park, national reserve or heritage area, firewood collection is permanently banned – as I said, unless you are in the Premier’s seat, where until June 2029, after the next election, you can collect firewood in Bendigo Regional Park. It is saying no to firewood. For thousands of regional families, particularly older residents, low-income householders and communities without access to natural gas, firewood is not a luxury, it is a basic necessity. Once the government shut down the sustainable native timber industry it also made it excruciatingly difficult for people to access firewood, and my colleague Tim Bull has raised this on many occasions. Sometimes you are looking at the difference between people actually heating their homes and not. It is absurdly breathtaking in its ridiculous nature. Of course collection of firewood also helps to reduce that fuel load build-up.
What I would like to do now is just speak to some of our amendments, and I am happy to circulate them now. There are a couple of amendments. One: we will stick to our guns in terms of our opposition to creating three new national parks – 65,000 hectares – and that will be by moving a reasoned amendment to call on the government to basically withdraw the bill and then redraft it into two separate bills. That is taking into account more stakeholder consultation, and this is about the establishment of Mount Buangor, Pyrenees and Wombat-Lerderderg national parks. We want to make sure that people are able to communicate in terms of traditional recreational activities, invasive species management, fire management and the rural economy and then retain the other parts of the bill. As I said, some we support – deer hunting – and others we are more ambivalent about. The other amendment in relation to this would be: should that fail, and I hope that it does not, we will then move amendments subsequently in each of the associated clauses to remove them – to pick the national parks out of this bill. So that is the second one that I would seek support on.
The third one – and I appreciate the fantastic people, prospectors and miners, who helped me to understand; indeed, I sent a letter off to the department, and I thank them for their response – is that in the 1975 parks act there is a section that facilitates the minister to issue mineral search authorities for national parks. It is consistent in that National Parks Act. Now, what the government has not done in this bill is actually include these new national parks and incorporate that particular section – it is 32D of the National Parks Act – which allows the minister to authorise, by notice in the Government Gazette, prospecting and recreational fossicking in limited areas listed in certain schedules of the act. It is about saying you actually can do this – you can go out – and the minister can then facilitate and enable this to happen. It is not in this bill at the moment, so right now it does not exist, and we would seek to put that in. It is still the minister, the power is with the minister, but certainly it is an important one, and we thank the prospecting and mining fraternity, those people that love to get out there.
What we know with so many of the people, four-wheel drivers et cetera, is they actually leave the bush in a better state than when they started. They look to improve it; they look to take the rubbish out. I was talking to somebody from that area as well who said that they actually got sick. They would take all the junk and rubbish and old tins and whatever, because that area out there is not pristine. It has actually been used for forestry over the years. It is not pristine Wilsons Promontory forested area. It is great scrub, a great location, there is no doubt about it, but please do not think that it is this pristine forest. But those prospectors and miners take that rubbish out.
In conclusion, the Premier said she would never put a padlock on public land, but Labor has systematically, over time, underfunded Parks Victoria and DEECA. They have cut rangers and field officers. They have created more suits in Melbourne – pen-pushers that are not supporting our native flora and fauna. This government has also not released a state of the forests report. The last one was in 2018. That is the report on its own homework. How is it actually looking after all of the important values in the forests, in our national parks and state forests? It is not doing landscape assessments, it is not doing monitoring and it is not doing reporting. That is not good enough. The government has stopped fuel reduction burning, drilled it down to a minimum. They have allowed pests and weeds to explode. They have ended the native timber industry. They have removed legal firewood supply in these areas specifically. They have ignored recreational groups and ignored farming groups. They have ignored beekeepers, and they are shutting them out of Wilsons Promontory. They have ignored local councils, they have ignored the science and they have ignored common sense. The Liberals and Nationals will stand up for regional Victorians. They will stand up for city people who want to enjoy life and get out there, be with their family and experience the very best. They will stand up for traditional users. We will, and we will stand up for common sense.
We will move these amendments. We will oppose the locking up of land provisions, and we will continue to fight for public access to public land and better management, active management, of our public land. I move:
That all the words after ‘That’ be omitted and replaced with ‘the bill be withdrawn and redrafted as two separate bills to:
1. take into account stakeholder consultation on the impact of the establishment of the Mount Buangor, Pyrenees and Wombat-Lerderderg national parks on traditional recreational activities, invasive species management, fire management and the rural economy; and
2. retain the remaining provisions of the bill.’.
