Page 1534 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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the draft management plan, another two years to respond to the committee’s inquiry. All of these things show that they have no concern whatsoever. You, Mr Speaker, when you made remarks on this, raised a range of concerns about management, about resources for management, about staff for management, about cooperation between user groups. What happens in Namadgi is emblematic of what happens in parks and reserves all the way across the ACT. You, Mr Speaker, and I have spoken on a number of occasions about our concern about the running down of the parks and reserves and their perhaps inappropriate use.
I welcome some of the discussion from the Commissioner for the Environment around the issues of the management of the parks and how we might deal with it. It is time we started to look at how we might be more innovative with the management of our parks. We accept that land management is a very expensive practice and that there are some areas which are of higher value than others and that perhaps the real thrust of our money should be going into maintaining the areas that are more pristine.
We have to look at the history of what is now Namadgi national park and it is not all pristine wilderness. For many years it was grazed. For many years it had freehold properties on it. In the time that I have been in this Assembly as a staffer and as a member, we have gone through a process of removing a pine plantation from the middle of Namadgi national park and letting it return to native bush. That is not pristine land.
The removal of the boboyan pines which commenced in, I think, 1998 indicates that not all of the areas in Namadgi national park are pristine and that we need to be much more innovative in the way that we manage this vast area of land to ensure the conservation values of the high integrity areas and appropriate management of those which are of lesser value in terms of their biodiversity and their natural history. And these things need to be done in concert with a whole range of people who want to use the park, and are entitled to use the park because they pay for its management, for a range of uses.
Mr Speaker, the government’s putting this matter on today has been extraordinarily cynical. You are correct: if they wanted to do something they should be reporting upon the management plan as it is currently promulgated and what they are going to do to improve the management, the weed control, the vermin control, in Namadgi national park and how Namadgi national park interfaces with its neighbours both here in the ACT and across the border in New South Wales. These are the things that we should be dealing with. We should be dealing with what the government’s vision is for the alpine national parks and how we ensure that the strings of high quality alpine areas are preserved and protected from bushfires and the like, vermin and the infestation of weeds and how we maintain our water catchments. These are all the issues that we should be dealing with, not things which are essentially dead and buried, because even the government after five years has moved on from there.
As I have said before, this proposed motion today is insulting and I would really rather hear from the minister about what he proposes to do for the future management of Namadgi national park than his casting over decisions which have already been made and implemented.
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