Page 1531 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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Of great concern to the Greens when the plan was released was the issue of large scale recreational events in Namadgi, and, while the government did not follow the recommendations in the committee’s report to reinstate the table giving guidance about the size of large events that were suitable, I recall that the government did give a commitment to undertake a full review within 12 months of the capacity of the major sites in Namadgi that could be used for large scale events. We look forward to seeing the outcome of this review, and hopefully there will be opportunity for public consultation on this so that we can determine what is a suitable event for each site and provide guidelines to those who wish to hold events.
I would quickly like to touch on a few other recommendations in the report and perhaps areas where we are unsure where things are up to. Recommendations 15 to 17 talk about commercial operators, and again we are unsure what is happening here and whether or not commercial operators are being accredited. Again this might be an issue on which the minister will provide us with an update during this debate, and if not we would certainly hope to see it soon.
Recommendations 9 to 15 cover horse trails. The report made a number of recommendations about the use of horse trails and facilities, and the monitoring of that use. It would be useful to see how this is progressing, because again I am sure that the horse riding community would appreciate being involved in discussions about progressing this, as well as the NPA—and that brings me back to the point I was just making. We need to not let these discussions descend into one side against the other, but rather work towards getting the best outcomes for our parks whilst ensuring that those who seek to use them can do so where it is appropriate and do so in a responsible way. I would be interested to see how the park services and the user groups feel the monitoring of the use of parks by horse riders is progressing, as part of that understanding. I am sure they all have the values of the park at heart.
Recommendation 19 covers fire management. Sub-regional fire plans appear to be going according to the environmental protections required. At this point we do not have any concerns, although we have had reports of ad hoc burning of roadside verges along Boboyan Road from time to time outside of the approved strategic bushfire management plan, and perhaps that is another area that the government could give us an update on, because there may be useful information that we are not aware of that relates to those reported ad hoc burns.
In concluding, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this issue today. As I said, despite my earlier comments about the somewhat odd timing of it, we have seen reports recently, and there continue to be question marks, about the resourcing of our parks and about the ranger numbers that are available and the ability they have to deal with ongoing issues such as weeds. Certainly in the recent discussion about weeds I was concerned, for example, to see that in the government’s operational weeds program some areas that have been previously treated are not being followed up.
This goes to an issue of efficiency because if the money has already been spent—and most of the money for controlling weeds is in the upfront initial assault on an area of weeds or a species of weeds in an area—it is far less expensive, but nonetheless very
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