“Bullshit”: The Fight for a National Park

Monday, 23 September 2024.

“Bullshit” is not a scientific term, but it is one that world-renowned Australian ecology Professor David Lindenmayer uses a lot – especially when he hears arguments for native logging and against national parks.

“There’s so much bullshit... When I have to go and talk to these people, I should take a bucket of sand with me so they can stick their heads in it,” Lindenmayer jokes.

The logging debate in Victoria is heating up once again – this time over proposed plans for the Great Forest National Park, east of Melbourne.

The 525,000-hectare propsal is more than half the size of the Melbourne Metropolitan area and lies just 150 kilometres east of Flinders Street Station, yet most Victorians have never heard of it.

If approved, the park will stretch from Kinglake in the west to the eastern side of Mount Baw Baw and would be Victoria’s third largest National Park.

This is a patch of forest characterised by the world’s largest flowering plant and second tallest tree species: The Mountain Ash. Many of these trees were standing long before European colonisation. They are endemic to the wet forests of Victoria and Tasmania.

Only 1% of old growth mountain ash forests remain due to the combined effects of logging and wildfire.

The forest is the last remaining habitat of Victoria’s faunal emblem, the critically endangered Leadbeater’s Possum. Once thought to be extinct, Lindenmayer believes the possums could disappear for good if they aren’t protected by National Park.

The State Member for Narracan, Liberal MP Wayne Farnham, whose electorate overlaps with much of the proposed park, is against the proposal to turn large swathes of his electorate into national park. 

“It will restrict activities. Prospecting will be gone, horse riding will be restricted, fishing will be restricted, camping will be restricted,” Farnham says.

Lindenmayer disagrees. “That’s classic disinformation and misinformation. There’s no intent to lock people out of areas. The intent is to create opportunities for people to be able to do things like four-wheel driving and hunting.

“There are places that you aren’t going to be able to do some of those things because they're closed water catchments conserving the quality of the water for five million people.”

That’s the other thing about the Great Forest National Park. It is home to the reservoir that stores more than 60 per cent of Melbourne’s drinking water, the Thomson Dam. Supporters for the park argue that protecting this area is not just crucial for the environment, but also the health of Australia’s fastest growing city.

Farnham doesn’t buy this argument, or any of Lindenmayer’s other arguments. He has sponsored a petition to the lower house of the Victorian parliament calling on the Allan Government “to not create any new national parks and keep our forest regions and bush open for public access and enjoyment.” It has more than 13,000 signatures.

There is a petition to the State Upper House calling for the same thing. It has garnered nearly 22,000 signatures at the time of writing.

“They're massive numbers, massive numbers. And there's no one in my electorate that has come up to me and said they support National Parks” Farnham says, leaning back on his chair in his Spring Street office, an Australian flag covering the wall behind him.

Craig Sharman is part of an organisation called Community Advocacy Eastern Region and has organised events advocating against the Great Forest National Park.

“We don’t call them rallies or protests, we call them events” he says.

Sharman wants to make clear that he’s not against National Parks in general, and he calls himself a “bush user, not bush abuser.” But he says that there’s already enough National Parks in the state.

“The balance is pretty much right at the moment. The government don't have enough staff to manage the parks that they have, and I see that because I use both national parks and state forests.”

Nationals MP Melina Bath is the sponsor for the anti-national park petition in the Upper House. Bath is the Shadow Assistant Minister for Public Land Use and says we need “more boots and less suits” managing Victorian public land.

On September 8, Bath was at one of Sharman’s events, perhaps his biggest one yet. More than a hundred protesters gathered outside the Woods Point Hotel near Licola, an area that, if approved, would be surrounded by the Great Forest National Park. Brandishing Australian flags and with protest signs cable-tied to their four-wheel drives, they stood on the road to form a human sign that read “NO MORE PARKS”.

“The whole idea of that was to counteract what the environmental groups did at Mount Donna Buang back in 2017, where they created a human sign which said, ‘We Love National Parks’” says Sharman.

While Farnham agrees that National Parks in Victoria aren’t well managed, he thinks there’s a hidden agenda behind the proposal.

“If it goes to National Park, you can never, ever bring back logging in Victoria and I think that’s the real reason for this push, they’re not saying that.”

Farnham is referring to native forest logging, or old growth harvesting, an industry that was officially banned by the Victorian Government on January 1 this year after years of environmental controversy and court cases.

The practice was also banned in Western Australia at the start of the year but still occurs in Tasmania and New South Wales.

Sharman says there may be “a little bit of truth” to Farnham’s claim, but he sounds unconvinced. “If the Liberal Party got into power in 2026, they wouldn’t be able to reintroduce logging. The infrastructure’s gone, all the mills are closed.”

Farnham agrees it would be difficult to bring back logging, but he is keen on the idea.

“If I could bring native logging back, I would. It creates billions of dollars into the Victorian economy.” [sic.]

Lindenmayer is infuriated by this.

“That’s absolute bullshit. Native forest logging in Victoria cost the state $269 million in the last two years, not including an $80 million loan that was made to VicForests (the former State Government owned logging company) that will never be paid back.

“It's outrageous that a Liberal politician who is supposed to stand behind the principles of rational economics would say this. That's a fail in terms of economic credentials, in terms of social credentials, and in terms of environmental credentials.”

This isn’t Farnham’s only claim that Lindenmayer takes issue with.

“Victoria had the strictest regulations, not only in Australia, but probably close to the world.” Farnham says.

Lindenmayer disagrees.

“He's got no idea. The State Government's logging agency has breached logging prescriptions over, and over, and over again. The court system in Victoria has caught VicForests out on many occasions for logging on steep slopes, logging in high conservation value areas, logging in areas of special protection zones, and the list goes on.”

Lindenmayer also rejects Farnham’s claim that logging “reduced carbon” as “trees that are about 80 years old don't absorb any more carbon.”

“He's got no idea. Trees keep accumulating carbon throughout their lifetime, including when they're large old trees. The highest amounts of stored carbon are in the oldest forests.”

“The Victorian Government's own data shows that at the time that VicForests closed it was logging 3,000 hectares of forest a year and it was generating the same emissions as 730,000 motor vehicles.”

“Under Vic Forests, the State Government were logging 3,000 hectares per year. Now they are running an expanded firebreak program where 24,000 hectares of forest will be cleared in the next five years. There's actually more native forest logging now than there was a year ago.

 “The Victorian Government has told the public one thing and it's doing the polar opposite.”

In August, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan spoke at the “Bush Summit”, a conference funded by the Murdoch owned NewsCorp, as well as mining magnate Gina Rinehart. She said “As Premier and as a proud country Victorian, I won’t be putting a padlock on our public forests, it’s not who I am, it’s not what I believe in”.

“Regional Victorians don’t want this park, my electorate are dead against it. The consultation process was really flawed. It was actually pathetic. There was no question and answer section. That’s not consultation.” Says Farnham.

“The proposal was made by a panel that doesn’t truly reflect the attitude of regional Victorians, especially in my electorate. If you get a bunch of greenies on a panel, they're all going to say one thing, aren't they? They're all going to say ‘lock up the bush’.”

Sharman agrees with this sentiment, and says the proposal is not supported by regional Victorians, but rather by “environmental groups and academics from the Australian National University.”

Professor Lindenmayer works at the Australian National University. He doesn’t think the major parties’ gamble against National Parks is logical. “Science is easy in comparison to trying to understand the crazy thinking that goes on in parliament houses in Canberra and at Spring Street in Melbourne.”

“The Great Forest National Park needs to happen because it's good for the economy. It's good for the environment. It's good for regional and rural renewal. Everything is in favour of making a smart decision and we've got the most boneheaded politicians that are opposing some of the most important ways to progress things in rural and regional Australia.”

Farnham draws inspiration from Scott Morrison, who told Australians that electric cars would “end the weekend”. Farnham says “If they create this National Park, it will affect hundreds of thousands of people around the state, and, quite frankly, Labor are just taking the fun out of the weekend.”