Tasmania’s World Heritage Area extension all about politics

As both the Tasmanian and Australian minority Labor Governments are expected to have been voted out of office within the next nine months, only a ‘minor modification’ had the potential to be listed before new Governments opposed to expanding the TWWHA  are expected to take office.

Tasmanian community groups and other stakeholders concerned about the nomination who would have formally alerted UNESCO that it was not a ‘minor modification’ were stymied by being unable to access detailed information about what was being nominated. Minister Burke’s Environment Department did not post the nomination to its website until after UNESCO’s submission deadline had passed in late February.  

Labor’s determination to avoid any meaningful analysis of its TWWHA nomination smacks of consummating deals with Greens political allies and meeting their supporters’ ideological demands for more public lands to be preserved. With a Federal election looming within the next few months, it also presumably helps to improve the Government’s standing in the eyes of environmentally-conscious voters.

Federal Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry, Senator Richard Colbeck, has noted with some justification that Environment Minister Burke “put this up as a minor extension, which we know it is not (because) he was trying to avoid any meaningful analysis of the nominated area....” and that this was “symptomatic of the way Mr Burke operates – a sham process littered with broken promises to industry and favours to green groups”

Tasmanians have every right to feel disenfranchised by an undemocratic process that would probably not enjoy majority support given that so much of their state’s land area was already World Heritage listed. That the State forest component of the TWHHA extension was earmarked for national park status anyway as a condition of the TFA, offers little comfort because this was also conceived behind closed doors with most stakeholders excluded, and was overtly influenced by groups pushing a ‘green’ agenda that also enjoy only minority support.

However, it is UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee that should feel most aggrieved as they have been unwittingly manipulated by political opportunists and, in the absence of any meaningful scientific evaluation, have rather embarrassingly added substantial areas to the World Heritage List that have an extensive history of recent human disturbance, including timber production, regrowth and plantations; and are regularly traversed by roads (including highways, local roads, and forestry roads) and power transmission lines. 

As well as a substantial proportion of the TWWHA extension lacking significant physical values, any cultural values have yet to be determined. Unfortunately, this outcome, and particularly the highly politicised nomination process that has led to it, devalues the science-based World Heritage concept.