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Australia needs to reassess the role and management of its national parks

By Brendan O'Reilly - posted Friday, 24 January 2020


Americans have been grappling with wilderness management since 1964. Their Act (drafted by environmentalist Howard Clinton Zahniser) requires wilderness to remain "untrammelled by man". While the NSW Wilderness Act(for example) does allow areas to be managed and restored, emphasis is on protecting "the unmodified state of the area", and "preserving the capacity of the area to evolve in the absence of significant human interference". Over 2 million hectares are "protected" under the NSW Wilderness Act, 1987.

There are two opposite attitudes to management of national parks and wilderness.

The green lobby (even though it concedes that some intervention may be necessary) has broadly supported the notion that such areas are best largely left alone by man. This "do nothing" philosophy is blamed for the reluctance of authorities to adequately deal with fire prevention, and control noxious animals and weeds.

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An opposite view is largely espoused by farmers, loggers, agricultural scientists and Indigenous Australians. They emphasise that land needs to be managed, though there is recognition that land being misused or over-used can degrade.

Those responsible for national parks "swear blind" that they manage their parks to prevent major fires, and to control noxious animals and weeds. The State of the Parks 2004 report, however, said that, in more than 90 per cent of NSW national parks, attempts to manage weeds and pest animals were non-existent, non-effective, or producing only a slow change, so that they create major problems for neighbours. Management of national parks is influenced by activists and other "stakeholders", who oppose the killing of any animals and often have a negative attitude to any burning or using chemicals to control weeds.

My own experience with national parks has not been positive. One of my rural properties is close to a state park, which is infested with almost every noxious weed you can think of (especially serrated tussock, St John's wort, and blackberry), as well as hosting populations of feral goats and pigs. Controlling weeds originating from the park has cost me many thousands. Private landholders with equivalent infestations would be prosecuted but no action is ever taken against state authorities. The usual excuses for lack of action include lack of staff and inadequate budgets, while an additional common excuse for inadequate prescribed burning is that "conditions weren't right".

The bushfires along Australia's eastern coast are said to have already pumped around 400 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxideinto the atmosphere. This amount of emissions is said to be more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries, and nine times the amount produced during California's record-setting 2018 fire season. It is also equivalent to about three-quarters of Australia's recent and otherwise flattening greenhouse-gas emissions.

For believers in man-made global warming, emissions of such scale are seen as fuelling further climate change and ought in themselves to be cause for drastic action. The problem is that fire prevention in national parks has been a low priority.

Another example of inaction by national park authorities is their relative inaction concerning koala over-population on Kangaroo Island, which was threatening the long term sustainability of their habitat. Authorities were reluctant to cull koala numbers because "some community stakeholders find the concept of culling an abhorrent approach in managing overabundant species". Instead they embarked on an expensive (BS) sterilisation programme that had had little success.

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The mass incineration of koalas on Kangaroo Island has unintentionally solved the over-population problem. Similarly the problem with brumbies in Kosciusko National park is no longer in the "too-hard basket" because up to half the park's population of brumbies may have succumbed to bushfire or drought-caused starvation.

The survival of Leadbeater's possum in Victoria was used as a pretext for banning logging in mountain ash forest. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires burnt 45 per cent of their high quality mountain ash and snow gum woodland habitat and reduced the wild population to an estimated 1,500.

The cost of the recent bushfires has been put at $100 billion. Common sense therefore suggests that we should be prepared to devote a much more substantial budget (certainly many millions) towards avoiding such losses.

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About the Author

Brendan O’Reilly is a retired commonwealth public servant with a background in economics and accounting. He is currently pursuing private business interests.

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