National parks: protected from what?

Local communities adjacent to parks, along with hunters, fishers, campers, fossickers, trail-bikers, horse-riders, kayakers, four-wheel drivers, bushwalkers and many more are prepared to volunteer time and effort for better managed and more inclusive national parks. Instead, they are largely ignored.

Long-time former CEO of Parks Victoria Mark Stone used to say that parks could not be managed successfully without the support of local communities and stakeholders. He was right; governments will never have sufficient funds to do all that is required and certainly do not have the expertise or local knowledge necessary to manage parks via central planning.

Recruiting volunteers on a large scale to address specific problems such as track clearing, pest animal and weed control, or species monitoring, could save taxpayers millions and deliver vastly superior environmental outcomes. As it stands, biodiversity and environmental values in Australia's national parks are in decline.

Using the skills and enthusiasm of volunteers in local communities and park users to address basic management tasks could be the first step to arrest this decline. As Tim Flannery said, "The truth is that things are now so dire that we cannot afford to persist with business as usual: a change of direction is essential."

If we are to have so many national parks, they at least require the kind of stewardship the Aborigines provided before we got here.