The decision to open Victoria’s national parks to commercial development has been slammed by a leading bushfire expert. Dr Kevin Tolhurst, who has been mapping this country’s fire threat for 25 years, says the lessons of Black Saturday and the 1939 bushfires are not to allow commercial and tourist development in our ‘flammable’ national parks.
It is one thing, he believes, to allow Australia’s grey nomads and others to camp in national parks, but quite another to allow commercial developments.
“With temporary accommodation, like camping or whatever, you can move people out,” he told the ABC. “But if you have commercial enterprises in that national park there are major vested interests from outside parties invested in that area – so it’s very hard to move them out.”
He said that putting facilities and accommodation inside parks which are highly flammable would make life much more difficult, and would be counter to the recommendations of the 2009 Royal Commission.
“Campers, walkers, you can close the park – but if you’ve got facilities in there worth millions of dollars, it’s a much harder decision for governments, agencies to evacuate the area,” he said. “The facilities will still be there and that will put a lot of pressure on the fire authorities to protect them – and that’s what we saw in the 2003 and 2007 fires.”
The Baillieu Government recently said it was considering opening up some of Victoria’s national parks to commercial tourist development … including those at Wilson’s Prom, Snowy River, Kinglake, Lower Goulburn, Greater Bendigo, the Grampians and the Otways.
“The issue we have with people going to national parks is that these people are often from out of town, from other countries, and they aren’t really well prepared for bushfires,” Dr Tolhurst said. “And so a lot of onus then goes back onto the park management to protect and defend them.”
He said it was paradoxical situation when, on one hand, the Victorian Government was offering to buy back properties in fire-prone areas while, on the other, it was encouraging people to build multi-million dollar developments inside heavily forested areas.
“We need to come to a clear picture as to why we have national parks, and how much we expect to be able to develop those areas to improve our economic return from those areas,” Dr Tolhurst told the ABC. “Primarily they are there to protect the natural values of the areas.”
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