Tuesday, 4 February 2025

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (18:12): (1355) My adjournment is for the Minister for Environment, and the action I am seeking is for the minister to commit to a major increase in funding for Parks Victoria in the upcoming state budget. It has been a trying summer for people in western Victoria. In the past two weeks fire has ripped through 70,000 hectares of the Little Desert National Park, and over Christmas, bushfires decimated an additional 70,000 hectares of national park and agricultural land.

Parks Victoria has the challenging mission of rehabilitating devastated ecosystems, home to a range of unique flora and fauna, including critically endangered species such as the southern brush-tailed rock-wallaby. Parks Victoria is also expected to manage significant and often highly charged community consultation processes. This is work that requires significant investment in lengthy on-the-ground community engagement, yet they simply are not resourced to do this. The consequence of this is growing community hostility towards Parks Victoria, division in communities and often difficulty building broad support for their work and the government’s own agenda.

Rather than recognising their huge and growing workload by increasing funding, this government has chosen to hamstring Parks Victoria by cutting their funding by $95 million last year, leaving them with just $338 million to manage 3000 land and maritime parks. How can a government agency be expected to operate effectively, especially in the face of devastating bushfires and worsening climate change, when it does not receive the funding that it needs? How can they be expected to undertake often complex and sensitive community engagement in any kind of meaningful way? It is in everyone’s interest that the Labor government address the chronic underfunding of Parks Victoria and give this essential government agency a chance to do their job well.