For the people Schulz represents, this means shooting, fishing, gathering firewood, four-wheel driving, taking their dogs camping, and prospecting.
“We’re trying to look after future generations of our kids so they can enjoy the bush, like what we’ve done, and our forefathers wanted us to do,” he says.
Incensed at a renewed push to ban duck hunting in Victoria, the Electrical Trades Union (Victorian branch) in 2023 brought together hunters, bush-user groups, rock climbers and prospectors to form the Outdoor Recreation Advocacy Group.
The group took out full-page newspaper advertisements accusing opponents of trying “to ban people from eating salami!” and adopted a logo that includes a stag, a fish, a motorcyclist and a 4WD vehicle – activities its members accuse activists and the government of trying to take away.
Since then, the movement has built momentum.
Is the government locking up parks?
What you can and can’t do in a national park in Victoria depends on the park. Hunting, for example, is permitted in some areas of the Alpine National Park, but not at Wilsons Prom. Driving a 4WD is permitted on most national park roads, and in several national parks off-road.
Central to the campaigners’ argument is the claim national parks are “locked up” from public use, unlike state forests.
“Locking up public forests increases the risk of bushfires, placing communities and the environment in greater peril,” the petition to Victoria’s parliament states.
“Neglecting public land leads to overgrown tracks, the proliferation of invasive weeds and feral pests, which degrade the environment and pose a threat to native flora and fauna.”
Veteran forest campaigner Sarah Rees, however, smells a rat. Rees believes the campaign against new national parks is a vote-mining exercise, rather than a genuine groundswell of support.
Environmentalist Sarah Rees.Credit: Liam Neal
“That petition is founded on rubbish, on a lack of evidence, and, in my view, is designed to stir the ire of community and to stimulate fear. And ultimately, it’s delivering a fairly strong misinformation campaign.”
Misinformation was certainly afoot during the recent backlash against Great Northern Beer over its “Outdoors for a Cause” campaign. The promotion aimed to match donations to buy private land holdings and turn them into national park for public use.
An online campaign by detractors, however, accused the brewer of “going woke” and trying to “lock up” state forests as national parks. Carlton & United Breweries CEO Danny Celoni subsequently left the company, although a spokesperson for Asahi told Ad News his departure was unrelated to the online storm.
A similar story has played out in NSW, where the Minns government promised before the last election to establish a Great Koala National Park in state forests currently logged by the state-owned Forestry Corporation of NSW.
Clarence MP Richie Williamson argued in December this would kill off the hardwood timber industry and, with it, the state’s very capacity to build homes and make paper.
“No timber means no paper, no power poles and no construction materials to build the homes we are desperate for in the middle of a housing shortage crisis,” he declared.
For a time, it seemed Victoria might escape the culture wars.
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In May 2023, the then-Andrews government announced the phase-out of native logging (by January 1, 2024), and a $875 million package to support timber workers and the transition to plantation timbers.
Soon after, it established a Great Outdoors Taskforce to examine the future use and management of the state forests. The taskforce’s terms of reference included a requirement to identify “priority areas for reservation change, including state forest areas that could be declared as national park or another park category”.
Within months, however, the Great Outdoors Taskforce page was updated to assure the public: “The Taskforce will not be making any recommendation for large-scale changes to land tenure, including not creating any new national parks.”
Nationals MP Melina Bath, who sponsored the Victorian petition, says this offers little comfort to anyone opposed to an expansion of the state’s national park networks.
“The whole premise of this petition is not that some people dislike national parks. Indeed, I think it’s quite the opposite,” she says.
Upper house Nationals MP Melina Bath.
Rather, Bath says, the state’s existing national park networks are not being adequately maintained.
Rees has campaigned for years for the creation of the Great Forest National Park, which would span 350,000 hectares – from Kinglake to Lake Eildon, and Healesville to Mt Baw Baw – connecting a patchwork of existing national parks and state forests.
Rather than being a vast land grab, proponents say, a Great Forest National Park would provide crucial protections for endangered and imperilled wildlife.
Backed by Sir David Attenborough and Dame Jane Goodall, the park would offer protection against logging for Victoria’s Central Highlands forests of mountain ash – the world’s tallest flowering plants. An interim report by the VEAC found Victoria’s mountain ash forests are among the highest-density carbon sinks in the world.
“The Great Forest National Park is not just about conservation,” Rees says. “It is about securing Victoria’s future.”
Both sides of this fractious debate claim to have the majority on their sides.
By Friday morning, Schulz’s petition had almost 34,000 online signatures (and thousands more written on hard copies floating around regional Victoria). The petition, which closes on Saturday, dwarfs the previous record-holder for a Victorian parliamentary petition, when almost 30,000 people signed to support women’s suffrage.
Polling, however, tells a different story.
In November and December, Monash University’s BehaviourWorks Australia surveyed 3500 people for the Biodiversity Council of Australia.
According to the survey, 72 per cent of people supported establishing new national parks to protect natural and cultural values, while just 5 per cent were opposed.
People’s support for new national parks was tied to their politics, with 82 per cent of Greens voters, 78 per cent of Labor voters, 68 per cent of Liberal voters, and 61 per cent of Nationals voters in favour.
What now for new national parks?
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Conservationists, including the Victorian National Parks Association, were angered last year when the Victorian government broke a promise to legislate the first two promised new national parks at Wombat-Lerderderg and Mount Buangor/Mount Cole by the end of 2024.
However, a government spokeswoman maintained that legislation to create the two national parks would be introduced to parliament this year.
“The great outdoors are to be experienced and admired, not locked away,” she said, echoing the sentiments of bush users’ groups.
“Our focus is to bring more families to the bush and more jobs to the regions – while still protecting our environment.
“Victorians will continue to enjoy a range of recreational activities in the new national parks including deer hunting, bush walking, camping, horse riding, four-wheel driving, dog walking, fishing and more.”
Some conservationists, like forest ecologist Professor David Lindenmayer from Australian National University, suspect the aim of national park opponents is to eventually reverse Victoria’s ban on native forest logging.
“The economics shows quite clearly the huge opportunities and benefits that will come from expanding national parks,” he says.
“I don’t understand what’s going on, other than the grubby politics of Labor and the unions in Victoria, basically getting into bed with one another, trying to find ways to bring native timber logging back again by opposing national parks.”
For its part, the Victorian taskforce maintains the process of “consulting the community about the future of over 1.5 million hectares of public land across Gippsland and North-East Victoria previously allocated to timber harvesting, as well as relevant adjacent state forests,” continues.
It would not make any recommendation for large-scale changes to land tenure, including future national parks.
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