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Australia needs to reassess the role and management of its national parks

By Brendan O'Reilly - posted Friday, 24 January 2020


Recent bushfires have brought national parks into the limelight. Based on satellite imagery, more than 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of Australia has burnt. Of this, 3.2 million hectares (nearly 8 million acres) was national park and other conservation zones. The bushfires mostly originated in national parks, and spread into logging forests, farmland, and adjacent urban areas. The smoke haze was clearly visible as far away as New Zealand.

Notable recent fires include the 500,000-hectare Gosper's Mountain fire, which reportedly is the largest forest fire in recorded Australian history. It started from a lightning strike in the Wollemi National Park, and (within the Blue Mountains) ecologists fear more than 80 per cent of the world heritage-listed region may have been burnt.

Another fire mainly involving national park involved two giant fires merging into a "megafire" straddling New South Wales and Victoria, covering some 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres). (An estimated 42,000 hectares of plantation pine near Tumut has been damaged by this fire, as well as large areas of state forest.)

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Fire also burned almost half of Kangaroo Island (mainly the eastern end, which again is mostly national park).

Not long ago, Australia as well as other developed countries, had been tut-tutting Brazil (in relation to fires in the Amazon). Similar criticism had been levelled at Indonesia in relation to fires in Borneo and Sumatra. Compared with our recent burn, the devastating 2019 Amazon fires were a lot less (about 7 million hectares). Even the shocking Indonesian forest fires of 2015 only managed to destroy 2.6 million hectares of rainforest, while California's 2018 wildfires affected less than a million hectares.

The only conclusion we can reach is that, in terms of destructive burning of the natural environment, Australia clearly takes the dubious prize. While the fires in Brazil and Indonesia were often planned (as a way of clearing land), the extent of our own fires largely reflects failure (mainly in respect of publicly owned land) to control fuel loads (ie neglect), and the nature of our vegetation and climate.

Australia is the most fire-prone continent on earth, and our native vegetation is highly combustible. While prolonged drought combined with lightning often is the trigger for fires, if we don't control the fuel load with regular cool fires about every five years, we end up with hot mega-fires every ten to twenty years. So saidpast royal commissions into bushfires.

A common view of national parks sees them as relatively large land areas administered by government, that are to be preserved in their natural condition. National park concepts introduced non-economic criteria into land management, and also implied the prohibition or reduction of some economic activities (such as grazing, mining and logging). In NSW alone there are now over 870 parks and reserves covering over 7 million hectares. Many of them are little visited and have virtually no resources devoted to their management.

Some national parks have unique qualities or are areas of outstanding beauty (e.g. Kakadu and Kosciusko in Australia, Yellowstone in the US) but the majority do not have these attributes. In Australia most national parks are infertile leftover areas of land unsuitable for agriculture. Ditto for many US parks, while in the UK the first ten designated national parks again were mostly poor-quality agricultural (especially upland) areas. Common sense would suggest that such areas actually are of less conservation merit, and less deserving of preservation from mining and logging.

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The wilderness concept (an extension of the idea of national parks) is also pertinent.

Wilderness areas are defined as natural areas largely untouched by modern human activity. Historically, human intervention in their ecosystems was regarded as anathema. Furthermore, wilderness has come to be defined not only by the extent of relatively undisturbed ecosystems but also by remoteness. A convention has arisen that a foot-journey of at least one day is needed to reach the centre of a "true" wilderness area.

The extreme conservation wing of the bush-walking fraternity has been an influential advocate of both national parks and wilderness. Some even seek to minimise access by road, so that national parks become the sole plaything of a few fit and hardy bush-walkers.

Americans have been grappling with wilderness management since 1964. Their Act (drafted by environmentalist Howard Clinton Zahniser) requires wilderness to remain "untrammelled by man". While the NSW Wilderness Act(for example) does allow areas to be managed and restored, emphasis is on protecting "the unmodified state of the area", and "preserving the capacity of the area to evolve in the absence of significant human interference". Over 2 million hectares are "protected" under the NSW Wilderness Act, 1987.

There are two opposite attitudes to management of national parks and wilderness.

The green lobby (even though it concedes that some intervention may be necessary) has broadly supported the notion that such areas are best largely left alone by man. This "do nothing" philosophy is blamed for the reluctance of authorities to adequately deal with fire prevention, and control noxious animals and weeds.

An opposite view is largely espoused by farmers, loggers, agricultural scientists and Indigenous Australians. They emphasise that land needs to be managed, though there is recognition that land being misused or over-used can degrade.

Those responsible for national parks "swear blind" that they manage their parks to prevent major fires, and to control noxious animals and weeds. The State of the Parks 2004 report, however, said that, in more than 90 per cent of NSW national parks, attempts to manage weeds and pest animals were non-existent, non-effective, or producing only a slow change, so that they create major problems for neighbours. Management of national parks is influenced by activists and other "stakeholders", who oppose the killing of any animals and often have a negative attitude to any burning or using chemicals to control weeds.

My own experience with national parks has not been positive. One of my rural properties is close to a state park, which is infested with almost every noxious weed you can think of (especially serrated tussock, St John's wort, and blackberry), as well as hosting populations of feral goats and pigs. Controlling weeds originating from the park has cost me many thousands. Private landholders with equivalent infestations would be prosecuted but no action is ever taken against state authorities. The usual excuses for lack of action include lack of staff and inadequate budgets, while an additional common excuse for inadequate prescribed burning is that "conditions weren't right".

The bushfires along Australia's eastern coast are said to have already pumped around 400 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxideinto the atmosphere. This amount of emissions is said to be more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries, and nine times the amount produced during California's record-setting 2018 fire season. It is also equivalent to about three-quarters of Australia's recent and otherwise flattening greenhouse-gas emissions.

For believers in man-made global warming, emissions of such scale are seen as fuelling further climate change and ought in themselves to be cause for drastic action. The problem is that fire prevention in national parks has been a low priority.

Another example of inaction by national park authorities is their relative inaction concerning koala over-population on Kangaroo Island, which was threatening the long term sustainability of their habitat. Authorities were reluctant to cull koala numbers because "some community stakeholders find the concept of culling an abhorrent approach in managing overabundant species". Instead they embarked on an expensive (BS) sterilisation programme that had had little success.

The mass incineration of koalas on Kangaroo Island has unintentionally solved the over-population problem. Similarly the problem with brumbies in Kosciusko National park is no longer in the "too-hard basket" because up to half the park's population of brumbies may have succumbed to bushfire or drought-caused starvation.

The survival of Leadbeater's possum in Victoria was used as a pretext for banning logging in mountain ash forest. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires burnt 45 per cent of their high quality mountain ash and snow gum woodland habitat and reduced the wild population to an estimated 1,500.

The cost of the recent bushfires has been put at $100 billion. Common sense therefore suggests that we should be prepared to devote a much more substantial budget (certainly many millions) towards avoiding such losses.

So what measures would mitigate the risk of future mega-bushfires and reform national parks? Below is my prescription:

  • First of all some sense needs to be knocked into the national parks system.
  • The area designated as national park needs to be reduced (especially in NSW) to areas that get reasonable patronage from the public or are of special value. State authorities in NSW (for example) simply do not have the resources to properly manage the current 7 million hectares of national park.
  • In reality much of this area is "Clayton's" national park that should be recognised for what it is (or, more pertinently, for what it is not). Most should officially be recognised as merely vacant crown land, and be primarily managed to control fire, noxious animals and weeds.
  • Many former agricultural holdings (e.g. the 80,000-hectare former Yanga Station near Hay - the largest freehold farm in NSW in its previous life, the 91,000 hectare former irrigation and grazing property Toorale Station at Bourke) should never have been made national parks. Turning them into (little visited) national parks took millions out of local communities. Many of these lands should be sold and returned to agricultural production.
  • Logging at sustainable levels has a role to play in both increasing the availability of native hardwoods, and in establishing defendable firebreaks in preparation for future fires. The timber industry has a much better record than national parks in using prescribed burning to protect its timber assets. Some national parks should be converted back to state forest.
  • Grazing has a role to play in reducing fuel loads. Grazing leases/permits are used in many state forests to control fuel. Excluding cattle from most national parks was a retrograde step in terms of fire prevention.
  • The highest priority is to ensure that prescribed burning takes place in national parks and other timbered areas every five years or so. This has not happened under the stewardship of the Andrews government in Victoria, the ("moderate") Berejiklian-led coalition in NSW or recent SA governments. Since it is not in the DNA of such governments (or national park authorities for that matter) to adhere to prescribed burning regimes, the best hope is a Commonwealth regulator of such burns, if this can be agreed. Adequate funding to pay for prescribed burning must be set aside in state budgets.

Emissions reduction aimed at reducing climate change is a total diversion, as far as bushfire prevention is concerned. CO2 emissions do not cause drought or bushfires. (If Australian energy usage was already 100% from renewable sources, would this have prevented the bushfires? I think not.) Moves to reduce net emissions across the world to zero is an exercise in futility. Such reductions will never happen outside a few "lefty" democratic countries in the west, basically because it is too expensive, and most countries never meet their modest greenhouse targets.

56 inquiries have been held through the years into bushfire causes, and key recommendations from royal commissions into the major 1939 and 2009 Black Saturday fires were never implemented. The latter royal commission was estimated to have cost $90 million. PM Morrison's proposal for yet another royal commission will cost well over $100 million but probably will recommend little that is new.

The Commonwealth government itself is not directly responsible for bushfire management. It is a state responsibility. While Morrison's initial absence on holiday perhaps was not a good look, the main blame for mega-bushfires developing resides with state governments (and the weather). Prevention efforts (especially in respect of public land) were entirely inadequate, and the NSW Minister for Emergency Services, who went on holiday during an unprecedented emergency, should have been sacked.

State environment ministers and some of their mandarins may also deserve the sack because it was on their watch that the fatal build-up of fuel was allowed on public land.

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About the Author

Brendan O’Reilly is a retired commonwealth public servant with a background in economics and accounting. He is currently pursuing private business interests.

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