Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Production of documents

National parks

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (09:55): I move:

That this house:

(1) notes that:

(a) the government has described the Great Outdoors Taskforce process as a landmark opportunity to open up 1.8 million hectares of native forests that were formerly used for logging, potentially making the largest additions to Victoria’s parks estate;

(b) statements from chairperson Lisa Neville indicated a shift in direction with no recommendations to be made regarding changes to land tenure or the creation of new national parks;

(c) despite significant community and public consultation in forest protection, no public report or detailed rationale for this change being in scope has been released and that it is in the public interest in these high-value forests;

(2) requires the Leader of the Government, in accordance with standing order 10.01, to table in the Council within six weeks of the house agreeing to this resolution, all documents relating to the Great Outdoors Taskforce and its consultation, including but not limited to:

(a) detailed responses, reports and submissions from the Engage Victoria survey on the ‘The future of Victoria’s state forests’ undertaken by the Great Outdoors Taskforce and the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action;

(b) correspondence, advice, instructions, meeting minutes or recommendations relating to the decision to not make recommendations on changes to land tenure or the creation of new national parks;

(c) all correspondence between the Minister for Environment and/or the Minister for Outdoor Recreation’s offices and the Great Outdoors Taskforce relating to the finalisation of the report and its scope; and

(d) any other related materials.

We know that our forests are unique. They carry great ecological and climate diversity. They have significant cultural, social and economic values. Importantly, they are homes and habitat for threatened plants and animals, hundreds of them in fact, including greater gliders, powerful owls and long-footed potoroos. But our forests have also been disrupted. Whether it be native logging, climate events and emergencies, poor fire management or introduced animals, it has all created a threat to our unique forests, which, once we lose them, we can never get back. That is why when former Premier Daniel Andrews brought forward the end of native forest logging he announced that the government would establish an advisory panel to consider and make recommendations to government on the areas of our forests that qualify for protection as national parks, and so the Great Outdoors Taskforce was born.

Chaired by former Labor minister Lisa Neville, the Great Outdoors Taskforce undertook public consultation on the future use of approximately 1.8 million hectares of public land. Its task was identifying priority areas for reservation change, including state forest areas that could be declared as national parks or another park category. But in October 2024 the taskforce announced that they would not be making any recommendation for large-scale changes to land tenure, including not creating any new national parks. Then in May 2020, five stakeholders were sent correspondence saying that the breadth of feedback received made it clear that more impact could be achieved by making recommendations to improve state forest management systems instead of focusing on changes to land tenure. Beyond this, very little detail justifying this decision was ever released.

The taskforce engaged 185 stakeholder groups and received 4149 submissions to its Engage Victoria survey. No results have been publicly released, nor was any detailed consultation report. This document motion seeks to remedy that today. Stakeholders and individuals who made the effort to engage in this process in good faith have a right to know why and how this decision was made. They have a right to know if the government is once again caving to loud recreational interest groups. We saw it when they refused to listen to their own parliamentary inquiry into recreational duck shooting, caving to the disingenuous ‘Save Our Outdoors’ campaign, and now we are seeing it when it comes to the protection of our forests.

We cannot blame parks organisations, volunteers and Victorians for losing faith when it comes to this government on environmental legislation and protection. The back-away from large-scale land tenures such as new national parks following the end of native forest logging is not the government’s first backdown. They have failed to introduce the long-overdue amended Wildlife Act, announced in 2020. They refused to release the expert panel report, which cost taxpayers $3 million, on that. They have failed to introduce legislation to create central west national parks, announced in 2021 with a promise to be legislated last year. They have failed to respond to the parliamentary inquiry into ecosystem decline in Victoria, handed down in the last Parliament, in 2021. It is the only parliamentary inquiry that they are yet to respond to. This is a real shame because, while it certainly has not gone far enough, our state does have a history of evidence-based and nature-positive policy. In the past we have led and other states have followed, but now it appears we are going backwards.

Ending native forest logging presented us as a state with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect our forests. It gave us the opportunity to expand our national park system, to protect habitat and to protect animals. We had a chance to safeguard unique and rich biodiversity, and it has been turned down. Despite this government’s hesitation, support for our parks is stronger than ever before. If they are going to backflip or try and slowly move away from protecting them, Victorians at least deserve to know why. I commend the motion to the house.

Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (10:00): We have got millions and millions of hectares of bush in Victoria, and it should absolutely be open to all Victorians to enjoy, to appreciate and to get amongst. Whether it is hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, mountain bike riding, birdwatching, walking – whatever it might be – there are so many activities and there is so much public land for all Victorians to be amongst, to enjoy, to appreciate and to value. It is something that we should all strive for. Our bush is the lungs of our state. We are very fortunate in Victoria to have such a beautiful natural environment. It is the Labor Party that historically has made those wins and those gains to protect our natural spaces and keep them as the beautiful places they are. It is these places that also feed the water that we all drink. The beautiful water that we have here in Melbourne, some of the best in the world and around our state, comes from these places that we have kept clean and pristine.

So it is a shame that we see political scaremongering and division come into these subjects, whether it is the Greens who say not one tree in the whole of Victoria can be cut down or whether it is the Nationals who want to take bulldozers out and level everything in sight – or the scaremongering that goes on between the two. It is Labor that sits in the sensible centre. We have hunters that have some of the most incredible knowledge of caring for natural places. We have environmentalists that can be some of our best firefighters in the bush. And I think we have been seeing, particularly in recent elections, that Victorians and Australians want us to come together in the sensible centre to meet and have logical, rational discussions on a whole range of issues, and how we care for and use our public places and spaces is another one of those. To think that we should go in and absolutely pillage a place over a couple of generations and the idea that we should lock something up so that current generations cannot use it are both misguided and, as I said, unfortunately divisive.

Given that my time was a bit stop-start, I will leave my contribution there. But I would just implore everyone in this debate to think about ways that we can bring people together, not divide them and not separate them, and ways that we can get the best outcomes to manage biodiversity and the best outcomes to have people use, value, appreciate and love our open spaces.

Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (10:04): I rise today on behalf of the Nationals and Liberals to support this motion 949 standing in Ms Purcell’s name, and I do so because it is the habit of the house to ensure that the short-form document motions providing information sail through and call for some transparency from the Allan government. In particular I am interested in the Great Outdoors Taskforce and to see some of the detailed responses, reports and submissions to the Engage Victoria survey and to read the correspondence, advice, instructions and meeting minutes. I very much am. What I also might like to suggest to Mr McIntosh, who we have just heard from, is for him to go and get some ear candles and give his ears a bit of a flush and also to go to the optometrist to see that his sight is okay, because if he listened to the things that the Liberals and Nationals are saying and if he read Hansard he would see that what he just said is completely untrue in relation to our position.

What I always find very interesting with the likes of the Animal Justice Party is that they lament and cry in a certain small space and have no vision or breadth of the landscape-wide management of our public land. Indeed this outdoors taskforce was set up in April last year, and the statement that the minister put out was about looking at the entire land that had been under logging and under forest harvesting – 1.8 million hectares. Then as time evolved, with the workings that some of these documents might show, the government on its website put up the location that is the area of the Great Outdoors Taskforce’s focus, and that only included areas of East Gippsland and north-east Victoria in the eastern part of the state. It did not actually include what the statement said originally, which was that area that also covers areas like Toolangi forest, Healesville, Warburton and Yarra Junction. I put that on record because I approve of the Great Outdoors Taskforce, and overwhelmingly the Liberals and Nationals do as well, for its response back and its recommendation to create no new national parks. We endorse that. But my concern is that that taskforce did not look at that region in the Central Highlands, which is the footprint around which some would seek to establish the great forest national park. So I still have those concerns. The government is giving me no encouragement or confidence that that will not happen in the future.

But let me go to the Great Outdoors Taskforce now. The eminent panel, a similar body, had consultations, as did the Great Outdoors Taskforce. They brought sticky notes for consultation. They were overwhelmed with people saying, ‘You do not understand the realities of the need to have better land management and the need to still have people in the forest and to have bush user groups’, and we could list them all in that forest situation. The Great Outdoors Taskforce also said – I am looking at their website:

We know that the greatest threats to the sustainability of our forests and the environment are … bushfires … as well as … pest plants and animals.

These threats don’t obey lines on a map and occur across all land tenures. The Taskforce understands that good conservation management to mitigate these threats must be a core function of all public land managers …

This government has been atrocious in doing that. In 2019–20 there was a 1.8 million-hectare bushfire. No, the government did not strike lightning, but their policies over the last decade have not been about supporting the mitigation of massive out-of-control bushfires. What did that do for flora and fauna? Threatened species were annihilated. They were annihilated – 3 billion critters. Flora and fauna were wiped out because of those out-of-control bushfires.

We on this side know that there needs to be sensible reform. We would like to see some of these documents, but we also do not support Animal Justice’s narrow focus on, ‘Let’s shut everything down and lock people out. That will then automatically create a better environment.’ Having active management, people in the environment conducting their recreational activities, conservation and no more new national parks will help better management of our current public land.

Jeff BOURMAN (Eastern Victoria) (10:09): I will make a quick contribution here. I, as the Liberals and Nationals and the government do, will support this. There is nothing to be afraid of from my point of view. The great forest national park was originally dreamed up by non-government people to protect the environment – these are their thoughts, not mine – from the native timber industry. The native timber industry is gone. It was killed. Daniel Andrews did that. Right now one must wonder why this keeps on happening. Why does this whole thing about the great forest national park keep on happening? What is the point?

The problem I see now is creating a national park will stop a lot of the people that can go to a state forest from doing what they want to do. There are a lot of people that tend to forget that it is not just about us looking for shooting and hunting. There was this statement made about shooting lobby groups and all that. You cannot take a dog into a national park, but you can into a state forest. If you just want to go for a walk with your dog, if it is a state forest, you can; if it is a national park, no. It is as simple as that. This is about locking people out from somewhere that is being used. Public land is for the public. It is not for shutting up. I would love to see what the Great Outdoors Taskforce got to see. It was set up to look into this, and there seems to be this perception that it was set up just to rubberstamp a national park and that there would be no other outcome. Now there is another outcome there is all this hysteria and carry-on like it is a great big conspiracy. We will find out. but I am quite confident that we will see that the right decision was made.

I am going to finish up on one last thing: the duck-hunting inquiry. It keeps coming up time and time again. The government did not ignore the duck-hunting inquiry recommendations. It ignored one; the other seven were taken into account and/or are being implemented. I need to correct that. They did not do number 1. They did do numbers 2 to 8.

Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:11): I also rise to make some remarks on Ms Purcell’s motion today, with the added benefit that the chamber will be able to see Ms Purcell’s reactions to my speech in real time – perhaps not all that positive; we will see. In line with the standing orders and the conventions already outlined by other speakers, the government will not be opposing this motion today, noting Ms Purcell’s significant interest in advancement of the environmental cause has seen her bring forward this motion before us. We know that Victoria’s forests are the heart of our state. They are spaces for families to experience their favourite activities, whether it be camping, fishing, hunting or walking. In fact I was speaking with Mr Bourman just this morning about all the ways in which people can go camping in our great outdoors in Victoria.

We do need to see a future where these spaces are preserved for environmental protection as well as for the enjoyment and benefit of all Victorians. They are places to be experienced and admired, not merely locked away, so our focus is bringing more families to the bush and more jobs to the regions whilst making sure that we protect Victorians and protect what Victorians most love about those bush environments. On local projects that I have been able to work on recently I have had some similar and very productive conversations about ensuring that local assets in and around my region are able to be used as much as reasonably possible for the public to enjoy whilst preserving what makes them so special, as have many other colleagues on this side.

We know that it is an important thing for us to get right. There has been a taskforce, and the chair of that taskforce has made it clear that accessing our forests for recreation and tourism and improving our biodiversity and conservation efforts can go hand in hand and that planning for these shared objectives can usher in a new era of state forest management. They have noted that they will not be making any recommendations in relation to large-scale changes to land tenure, and we will always ensure that Victorians can access and enjoy our beautiful natural environments. I note as well that a significant piece of consultation went into this work. We had more than a thousand people attending nine different open community drop-in sessions, which took place across towns as diverse as Noojee, Healesville, Warburton, Yarra Junction, Gembrook, Wandong, Marysville, Drouin and Alexandra. Again, important work that is being done.

As other speakers have referred to, we know that when it comes to our state’s visitor economy the regions play a very important part. The fact that we have the lowest payroll tax in the nation in regional Victoria is another thing that helps to drive investment in the regions and to keep unemployment down. It is one of a range of factors that come into the work in this space that the government is doing, and this is a government that is committed to continuing that work and to continuing to work with stakeholders to make sure that balance, which sometimes can be trickier to land than others, is always striven for. As a member of that government I very much look forward to continuing to do my bit when it comes to issues that may come up from time to time in my local region and working with stakeholders to get the best possible outcome. As I said, the government will not be opposing this motion today, and I acknowledge Ms Purcell’s keen interest in the environment.

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (10:15): You have not given me much time to talk about this, but that is all right. I thank the chamber for that. I will be supporting this motion, but, similar to Ms Bath, I restate our commitment that there be no new great forest national park. I want to particularly use this opportunity to acknowledge Paul Gaynor, a resident of Wallan who has done a lot of work organisationally for the ‘Hands Off Our Forests’ campaign, and the advocacy that he does.

Motion agreed to.