National Parks Reviewed:
My colleague Jim Hoggett who worked for the Commonwealth Treasury for 16 years and now runs a successful cheese producing goat farm in north-eastern NSW has just written “The Uses and Value of National Parks: Does More Mean Worse?”
The 15 pager is well worth a read. It includes the comment: “Given the sheer size of the real estate involved, we ought to look beyond the idealized views and seek to know more about the function that parks perform and how well they are managed to do this. We need to examine whether there is a mismatch between our expectations of the park system and the resources we are prepared to apply to it. And, if there is a mismatch, what the different approaches to park management are that would allow us to better match the two. These approaches could involve lowering expectations and providing more finance. They could also involve more diverse use of parks than occurs now.”
A Century of Weed Biological Control:
I have just received in the mail “Reclaiming lost provinces: A century of weed biological control in Queensland” (published by Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland, and soon to be on sale for $35 from www.dpi.qld.gov.au).
Written by Craig Walton it mixes an understanding of the science of weed biocontrol with a history of the researchers and their work.
It includes a 1936 quote about the successful control of prickly pear: “The retrieving of 26,000 acres of some of Queensland’s richest territory from a wilderness of prickly pear by the aid of insect colonies when all human agencies had failed is surely one of the wonders of the age.”
I have pondered that no ecologist working today, without a knowledge of the past history, would come to the correct conclusion that the distribution of prickly pear in south west Queensland is limited/determined by the search behaviour and population dynamics of a moth.
My work towards the biocontrol of rubbervine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) is featured in the book as a ‘case study’ and includes a 1986 picture of me on a bullock cart in southwest Madagascar. And it is great to read that there are some monitoring programs in place measuring the impact of the rust on the weed(pg. 60). There has also been an economic review indicating the biocontrol program against rubbervine has returned a benefit-to-cost ratio of $80 for every dollar spent.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jim Hoggett’s “The Uses and Value of National Parks: Does More Mean Worse?”, deserves thorough consideration.
The reservation of national parks has demonstrated a relentlessness with the greatest increase over recent times and Jim Hoggett asks the very important question, when is enough, enough?
So long as ‘lack of representativeness in protected area’ is used to justify acquisition, the end-point will be limited only by the size of the country. Consideration of what lies beyond the borders of NP conveys a covetousness for what is invariably regarded as the rightful asset of the landholder. There are only ever winners and losers.
I would rather hope that the seventy-or-so percent of Australia that is not part of the reserve system would be given priority for protection of its exceptional biodiversity and ecological integrity.
To this end, optimising a genuine ecotourism economy would be assisted considerably by measuring the magnitude of subsidy provided to commercial tourism on protected area against its return.
Conservation management should be incorporated into the jurisdiction of the National and State Competition Councils to ensure competitive neutrality, which simply stated, requires that public sector business activities that are in competition with the private sector should not have competitive advantages or disadvantages simply by virtue of their government ownership or control.
In the circumstances of such substantial under-resourcing, it is hard to understand the motive for the ever-increasing protected area estate, except perhaps for the formula entitlement of bureaucratic growth.
Neil Hewett’ suggestion implies an ever increasing regulatory burden on society.
It is within the realm of possibilities that the relevant acts might become as big as the Tax Act and its thousands of pages.
Neil, I think your interpretation gives more credit than is due to the ability of bureaucracies to influence events.
I am sure a small proportion of the NP estate is the result of the desire for bureaucratic growth. However a government agency proposing increased responsibility for itself in an environment of shrinking budgets must be doing so in exceptional circumstances. We’re talking about state agencies here, not Canberra.
The strongest motivation for more and more NPs is the political desire to appeal to the urban electorate. I suspect the bureaucrats cringe when the pollies break loose at election time, because the promises for more NP’s are made by the (Shadow) Minister, who after his/her election, handballs the problem of how to fund the management of said new parks to the relevant agency. Usually accompanied by a reduction in the budget for the agency as a whole, so other functions of the agency (such as research on plant diseases in forests and NPs) have to be pruned to pay for the interpretive centres, toilet blocks and walk trials. No worries, we all know public servants are a waste of food, don’t we?
One example was a Premier who spent half a million dollars on an advertising campaign, informing the people that they have national parks. Like advertising the existence of the atmosphere. The Premier then sent the account for the campaign to the agency responsible for the management of the parks. The agency was not mentioned anywhere in the adds, not even a logo. Senior management were really pissed off.
It may appear that an agency is initiating the proposal for new NP, but in most cases I suspect it is at the direction of the Minister.
Conservation is a cost to the annual budget and you get what you pay for. The electorate wants funding directed to health, education and law and order. It also wants ‘conservation’, but doesn’t know what that is and will not pay for it. Triple bottom line … give me the profit and you pay for the other bits.
My suggestion … is that public administration of protected area estate be removed of its exclusionary influences to fair trade, by requiring that conservation management is completely self-funded from the natural and cultural resources of the reserve without subsidy or budgetary allocation.
Afterall, many were viable working properties before acquisition under the pretence of conservation and if Australia is serious about conserving its natrual and cultural wealth across all tenures, a conservation economy will need to be cultivated.
The presumption that a budgetary allocation is prerequisite to conservation implies an equivalent expectation for private landholders. As this will never happen, the most feasible alternative is ecotourism – ethical travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and sustains the well-being of local people.
Such an altruistic objective requires relief from the nationally accredited mass-market misrepresentation that commercial operators that pay only $1.20 per head to capitalise from multi-million-dollar public infrastructure on protected areas, are not practicing ecotourism, as the taxpayer conserves the environment and public administrators eclipse the well-being of local people.
I think it is an interesting idea that protected area estate (National Parks) should be expected to pay its way and be exposed to the principles of fair trade to ensure this takes place. This would, as you suggest, also reduce the distinction between well-managed private freehold land and the ‘islands’ of preservation estate.
I think the principle of a conservation economy is admirable, and there are state agencies and private companies (such as the Oil Mallee Company of Australia) that are working to try to make this happen in various ways.
The fly in the ointment is politics.
Example. Over a decade ago, our state department was formed as a combination primarily of the old Forests Department and old National Parks. The principle was to use the commercial activity of forestry to fund the improved management of NPs. It worked quite well up to a point. There were benefits in reducing the distinction between the ‘preservation’ estate and the commercial native forest estate. The hybrid agency was an improvement on both the old agencies.
But. This became increasingly unpopular with the electorate because the electorate was persuaded by the greens that foresters are, without exception, habitual rapists and pillagers. They must not be placed anywhere in the vicinity of the sacred NPs. Consequently, with a change in government, the commercial foresters were again separated from the rest of the department and we now have a more polarised model once more, with state forests and NPs once again dependent on government coffers.
So it’s been tried. Dr Syd Shea (the CEO of the hybrid department), whose vision it was to combine the two arms of public land management, and make conservation pay its way, lost his job as the new broom swept through.
The message is that the public don’t understand conservation and I persist that they won’t pay for it. They don’t like paying for access to NPs now, even though those fees don’t cover the cost of operating the parks. In some instances where long standing and traditionally free parks have been gated and fees introduced to help pay for the management of the parks, public outcry has forced a backdown. I bet London to a brick that some of those who protest that the price of coal does not include the environmental costs of burning coal would be also arguing that NPs are too expensive to access, and like the beach, they should be open to all comers at tax payer expense.
So I agree with you Neil, but my cynicism about the electorate comes from watching Syd Shea try to do more or less what you propose, and lose his job and I suspect many years off his life expectancy. He’s now Professor of Something Relevant to This Topic at the Uni of Notre Dame in Fremantle, WA.
Rick, your post argues utterly to Jennifer’s 15th May post, ‘Redfining Environmentalism’.
Against a waking torrent of metropolitan impact, the masses are appeased by the mere thought that cute, furry, big-eyed mammals are protected in distant wilds. Never mind the contradictions of mere evidence.
Landholders are being evicted from their heritage and robbed of their dignity, through the dishonesty of contemporary environmentalism and contrary to the very reason for their displacement.
The entrenchment of a popular environmental ideology into the very culture of conservation bureaucracy, establishes an ominous vanguard to the achievement of official displacement. Membership of the very same bureaucrats within lobby groups funded purportedly for environmentalism, further cements the ideology into their broader spheres of influence.
Quite recently, the district manager of QPWS emailed a call-to-arms within the convoluted national ‘enviro-network’, in response to the Douglas Shire Council’s draft planning scheme:
“get those submissions in and get as many people as possible to submit. need loud greenecks to compete with loud rednecks! advise also from recent experience, is that if you can get different community groups to agree to one particular submission and get many signators, then DSC & Dept. Local Govt. Planning will have to look at it pretty seriously. Are there groups out there willing submit an agreed response? gets looked at favourably. Suggest also some preliminary contact with DLGP on this matter and raise concerns with them also”
Never has a local draft planning scheme received so many submissions from outside the local government jurisdiction, the broader region, state and country.
Your cynicism, Rick, is well-founded, but it is also a point of deliberation between apathy or the redefintion of environmentalism.
The Australian Environment Foundation offers the opportunity to choose the latter. Its purposes, objectives and values provide scope for Australian’s to pursue environmental objectives that are balanced by rigorous scientific objectivity and the needs and aspirations of the people affected.
Perhaps the QPWS would benefit from having to share an office complex with other land managers. The old WA hybrid department of Conservation and Land Management was regarded with some scepticism by many of us when we were initially ‘repackaged’. I’m resistant to change too.
But after a number of years, I was fascinated by the influence that wildlife officers and the foresters could have on one another, simply by having to meet each other a few times week walking down the corridor, or speaking at informal seminars.
Large government bureaucracies may be anathema to free marketeers, but managing the public estate, no matter what the nature or function of all the different parcels of land, should be under one umbrella. It would also seem rational to roll all land management and similar agencies, including agriculture, forestry and NPs into one. Healthy rivalry between the divisions within such an organisation would be more constructive than the moronic tribalism that prevails under existing models.
Call me a romantic naive idealist, but once groups are set up in opposition to one another, there is virtually no progress because the objective becomes the defence of one’s own ego. I advocate the “lock’em” up in a cage with automatic weapons model. If mutually assured destruction is averted, this should produce a constructive collective effort.
I need to do some homework on the AEF.