By Dr David Barton
I write in rebuttal to Lindenmayer, Taylor and Rees’ ‘Opinion’ piece “The Great Forest National Park” (GFNP) as published by the Mountain Views Star Mail on 17 December 2024.
It must be said from the outset that their emotive propaganda piece is short on facts and long on fantasy.
Yes, National Parks are “places of stunning natural beauty” and therein lies the first problem. National Parks were originally created to preserve areas of ‘outstanding significance’, not just any and all vast areas of native bushland, as has been the case in Victoria for over three decades.
Elitists Green activists within the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) and the clearly biased Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) processes have led to an over-abundance of restrictive so-called ‘National Parks’ in Victoria. In point of fact, we need fewer national parks, not more of them. Some so-called national parks should be downgraded to other reserves, and indeed, back to their original ‘State Forest’ classification.
The very last thing Victoria needs is any more National Parks, the numerous State Governments repeatedly proving time and again their inability to manage what they already have.
Further, the High Country is not ‘Taungurung country’ as is now often claimed. The State of Victoria is either owned by the Crown (the State) or it is privately owned. Claims that pre-settlement ‘ownership’ of the land was ‘never ceded’ by Aboriginal people are patently false and claims to ‘sovereignty’ must be rejected. What must be prevented is the current socialist Left Labor Government’s gifting of any more public land, and especially National Parks, to people who identify as Aborigines and to their privately owned corporations. This will become a major issue once the currently secretive Yoorrook Justice Commission and ‘Treaty’ findings are eventually made public.
Lindenmayer, Taylor and Rees’ relentless propaganda about the so-called benefits of a GFNP are simply emotive fluff and bubble mixed with misleading claims and straight out lies. Here’s just a few of them:
“with claims that national parks ‘exclude people’ or ‘lock people out’ … conspiracy theories … for government control over people … these parks increase the risk of bushfires … contribute to the spread of weeds and invasive species … these claims lack credible evidence”.
All of the above are clearly factually true. National Parks do ‘exclude people’ and ‘lock people out’ of vast areas by either closing down free camping access or gating once drivable tracks. Hunters, prospectors, dog walkers and horse riders are also excluded and locked out. Funnelling people into small approved camping areas and limiting their access is clearly a means of people control, and weeds and invasive species run rampant through National Parks. All of these factors are perfectly obvious to anyone who has spent time in a National Park or a State Forest, so the attempted Jedi master mindform gaslighting of the public simply does not work. Further, regarding ‘increasing the risk of bushfires’, we need look no further than the December 2024 destruction of almost the entire Grampians National Park as a clear example. As I write there have been another two bushfires, one in heavy country in the Mt Howitt region of the Alpine National Park, the other in the Lake Eildon National Park. National Parks are a prime source of major bushfires. National Parks burn!
“The idea for the GFNP emerged from the local community in the Shires of the Yarra Valley and Murrindindi, particularly from those affected by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires”.
The idea for the GFNP has been pedalled by Greens socialist activists for decades. As one who participated in the ‘new vision’ for the Marysville region after Black Saturday, the idea of a GFNP did not even rate a mention amongst the local community. It is entirely an inner-city Melbourne idea.
“Economic evaluations show that the creation of the GFNP would generate 750 new jobs, attract 379,000 additional visitors, and contribute at least $40 million to the local economy annually”.
These figures, plucked out of the air, are utterly false and unproven. Where will these 750 new jobs be (obviously the authors have no idea about the local economy), there is no way known that there would be “379,000 additional visitors” to this mostly remote and forbidding region, and the $40 million, well, that’s just wishful thinking again. The reality is that in many locations where new National Parks have been proclaimed (the Box Ironbark for example) jobs have been lost, businesses have closed, visitor numbers have dropped (because of all the new restrictions) and the local economy has not benefitted at all. That’s the reality of new National Parks!
National parks offer “globally recognised tourism opportunities that state forests do not”.
An area of outstanding significance will be visited whether it is a National Park or not. The existing State Forests within the proposed GFNP area are already heavily visited and utilised by the people of Victoria, interstate and internationally. To proclaim the area a National Park will immediately exclude many of those existing visitors and user groups.
The GFNP will provide “accessible nature experiences for families, hikers, and adventure seekers, with facilities designed to accommodate people of all ages and abilities including those with disabilities.”
The GFNP will immediately include track closures, no horse riding, no prospecting, limited hunting, limited fishing, no dog walking, etc. Campers in State Forests go there because there are no facilities – that’s the point! And ‘people with disabilities’ are amongst the very first people excluded from National Parks because of the widespread vehicle track closures.
Lindenmayer, Taylor and Rees’ claim that because Victoria’s population is increasing, therefore Victoria needs more National Parks, is a non-sequitur, as are most of their ‘arguments’. One does not simply follow the other. They claim that statistics prove that park attendances are increasing, and perhaps they are in accordance with the increasing population. But the lie is in their statistics in that only some park numbers are increasing, usually the popular parks close to or within Melbourne itself. Other more remote and distant parks have seen no increase at all, if not a decrease, and most of the proposed GFNP is just such a remote area.
In yet another sham so-called ‘statistical survey’, demographics identified as favourable to their cause were sampled and concluded that:
The support for new parks was largely evenly spread among different areas of Victoria with 79 per cent from rural and regional areas, 81 per cent from the inner and middle suburbs of Melbourne and 82 per cent from the outer suburbs. 85 per cent of young people surveyed (aged 18 to 34) supported the creation of new national parks. (Mountain Views Star Mail 3 December 2024)
To quote Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
It can be guaranteed that the results of an identical survey of the demographic that actually uses the State Forests in the proposed GFNP High Country region would be the exact opposite – no support for new parks at all. To be clear, the pro-GFNP advocates are elitist activists with an agenda, and that agenda is not in the best interests of the wider community or the forests themselves.
Lindenmayer, Taylor and Rees also do not mention in their article their other agenda, which can be clearly seen in their book The Great Forest (2021) by Lindenmayer, Taylor, Rees and Kuiter, and that is the handing over of the GFNP region to the Taungurung, Wurundjeri and Gunaikurnai Aboriginal corporations. They clearly believe that the High Country should be returned to its ‘rightful owners’. In other words, that it will no longer be ‘public land’, but will be owned by private Aboriginal corporations, thereby removing the long-standing public land tradition of ‘presumptive use’ and replacing it with ‘permissive use’. This is really about socialist Left ideology and Aboriginal ‘sovereignty’, not about looking after the bush at all. Neither do Lindenmayer, Taylor and Rees mention the impact on gold mining. Their proposed GFNP area includes the extraordinarily wealthy Jamieson to Walhalla gold belt – one of the richest and largest gold seams in the world. Yet under the GFNP proposal, prospecting and mining within the new National Park would be banned. Billions of dollars in gold wealth, equally shared between all Victorians, would be locked away forever. This is economic vandalism at its worst.
If people wanted to go to these forests, they would already be going there, but many don’t because it is too harsh. The reality is that the High Country is extremely hot in the summer and cold and wet in winter; in those extremes it can be a very forbidding place. So simply changing the name to a ‘National Park’ will not make any more people go there who do not already do so.
State forests are great forests. They provide for widespread access, a wide range of activities and most of all, a sense of freedom and the ability to ‘get away from it all’ without being over-regulated and being told what you can and can’t do, or where you can and can’t drive or can and can’t camp.
What the High Country really needs is proper management, which is guaranteed not to happen if it becomes yet another neglected overgrown ‘lock it up and leave it’ National Park. Proper management includes better roads (fully sealing the road to Woods Point for example), road and track maintenance (keeping all tracks open), weed control of Blackberries, English Broom, Scotch Thistles and Dandelions to name but a few, and active control of feral animals: cats, dogs and foxes.
The real fact is that the establishment of a Great Forest National Park would be a disaster for the High Country and for the local communities surrounding it.
