Staffing levels at many of Australia’s national parks, including iconic ones such as Kakadu, are being slashed as budget cuts bite.
The ABC reports that rangers are among the 13 staff at Kakadu who have been offered voluntary redundancies. The Kakadu redundancies are among 480 being offered to Department of Environment staff Australia-wide, over 36 months.
The Federal Government says it expects to cut 16,500 jobs from the public service in total.
“Parks Australia is taking the opportunity to modernise its operations, with a particular focus for Kakadu on new positions in threatened species, science and marketing,” Parks Australia told the ABC.
However, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) says some of the Kakadu rangers affected are from remote districts of the park and there are concerns about the workload of the remaining rangers.
‘Their only security now is radio contact with a buddy in another district, but obviously if they get hurt or injured while on patrol in that district in a remote area they may not be able to get to the radio,” CPSU deputy secretary Beth Vincent-Pietsch told the ABC.
There are also concerns that fewer rangers will mean fewer hands to work with its indigenous park ranger programs, clearing invasive weeds like salvinia and mimosa and maintaining the waterways.
Ms Vincent-Pietsch said the eight job losses, to Kakadu’s total staff of 63, represented the most prominent of Australia’s national parks, but other states and territories are also experiencing staff cuts.
Perhaps they are gearing up for work for the dole participants or volunteers among the grey nomads.
They should offer free camping in return for an agreement to delitter a designated camping zone, or cleaning the toilet shower area etc etc, ie mutual obligation for campers who may not have big dollars to pay.
Our experience of NPs over the last 6 months isnt great. Qlds book and pay online is just not working for nomads. You either find out at the campground you need to book and have no phone service or internet and have driven 50kms out. Or you do book and pay only to find your allocated site already taken and you are left out on the roadside with two options..fight the occupiers or take another and risk it being booked by someone else. Then you might get to the camp to find it full of noisy messy yahoos and you dont want to stay. Reducing the rangers wont help sort these problems..but some parks could be less policed like Kakadu.
every where you go there are more and more locked gates ,road and track
closures . less areas of access.less facilites.it appears national parks try to keep people out of the parks, and they are winning(as others have stated ,like booking camp sites ect) so they dont need staff.
if there is a bad accident in a park will they be open to legal action if they cant respond eg no supervision no maintainence.think about it.