2016-11-10
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — The Greens will support this bill, which makes some minor changes to the governance of the alpine resorts structure that has existed for many years here in Victoria. It basically consists of some amalgamations and legislative tidy-ups.
We believe this bill is a major missed opportunity, and that is to set up a structure that would be willing and able to cope with the impending impacts of global warming on our alpine ecosystem. Victoria's alpine ecosystem is extraordinarily vulnerable to the major impacts of global warming. The alpine areas are small in area, they are not particularly connected to each other and they exist in a narrow ecological range. The nature of their survival depends on a delicate balance between fire regimes, the amount of water available, the amount of snow that occurs and the extent of that snow cover.
All of those historical biogeographical factors are what has led to us having these small and precious areas of alpine ecosystem here in Victoria under the past climate — that is, the climate that has existed for some thousands of years that we are all very familiar with and that until relatively recently most people thought was constant and unchanging. However, when you look at that ecosystem it provides another stark example of how Australian ecosystems in particular are extraordinarily vulnerable to the impacts of small changes in climate — and what we are dealing with right now is not a small change.
We are already getting close to a 1 degree increase in temperature, and that might seem like a small amount — if the temperature went up 1 degree in this chamber, Mr Elasmar would probably just take his coat off. But when the temperature goes up 1 degree in short order across the Australian climate — not to mention the impact that that will have on extreme weather events, with extremes of cold becoming less frequent and extremes of heat occurring rapidly more frequently, and not just in a kind of predictable and gradual warming but in fact with a rapid step change in the way the climate interacts with our native ecosystems — then the government will find itself dealing with changes that almost appear to simply pop up before its very eyes.
Two of the well-known alpine areas, Lake Mountain and Baw Baw, are situated at quite low altitudes. They are quite small and isolated areas. For some reason they have been historically managed as alpine resorts. In our view what this legislation ought to be doing is taking those two areas out of the alpine resorts framework and rolling them back to being the responsibility of Parks Victoria, who in any case manage all of the surrounding land. It is acknowledged there is almost zero potential for development of those resorts for any further recreational activities, and in fact they will be first in the firing line as global warming hits.
This is not something that we are anticipating in the future; this is something that is happening right now. In both those areas, they have been threatened by the extreme bushfires that have licked up to their very edges. As I say, it is not going to be some gradual and predictable linear-type process. We will simply wake up one morning and find that entire ecosystems are going through a step change.
The government ought to be getting ready for that, but this government and it seems most governments around the world look at climate change as just another management issue. They think that with a bit of tinkering and a bit of steady regulatory progress they are going to somehow manage this issue. That is where global warming is throwing so many politicians around the world into a spin, because the rate of change can be rapid and unexpected, and the kind of reshuffling of the deckchairs that we are seeing in this legislation here today simply does not hack it.
The government ought to be coming up with plans to make these particular ecosystems as robust and resilient to these coming changes as it possibly can. That applies to not just the ecosystem as a whole but to individual species within it. I am talking about the mountain pygmy possum, already a very vulnerable animal with limited range and the subject of some conservation efforts. I was part of those efforts as a young university student, crawling over those scree slopes and pulling out little cage traps to see what was inside. Most of the time it would be a rat that would just about bite your finger off. If there was a Burramys parvus, a mountain pygmy possum, in there, you could quite gently coax him out of his little trap and he would just curl up in your hands and warm up a little bit before you managed to weigh him, check him out and then put him back under those boulders.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — Ms Shing has reminded me that also in this area there is of course the antechinus, otherwise known as the marsupial mouse. It is a small, rather unknown marsupial with an incredible sex life. Basically almost the entire population of males wipe themselves out in fairly short order as they attempt to reproduce themselves. Bush rats, antechinus and the odd mountain pygmy possum are coexisting in a tiny little pocket — one of the world's smallest and most narrowly defined habitats for a mammal — and it is our responsibility to look after it. Instead, the government is just doing a bit of minor tinkering here, as it is wont to do.
Likewise, at Mount Baw Baw there is the Baw Baw frog. As we know, the frog has become the global canary in the coalmine for ecosystem change. The frogs are incredibly vulnerable and are living within specialised habitats. The nature of their porous skin and their breeding habits means that any small change to the ecosystem can almost make them disappear overnight. In fact quite literally they have been able to disappear overnight. Unfortunately this government, the past government and the one before that have treated the Baw Baw plateau as basically a woodchip production factory. They have ring-fenced the entire Baw Baw plateau by blitzing it with woodchipping, bulldozing, logging and burning. The Timber Release Plan that the government put out last week basically finishes the job in relation to the Baw Baw mountain range. Right in the middle of this now blitzed ecosystem we have got a tiny little pocket of alpine vegetation — grasslands and snow gum. The Baw Baw frog did actually live in some parts of the forest down the sides of the plateau. In the past the government has had no compunction in basically going in there, bulldozing the habitat and then setting fire to what is left when the loggers have gone.
So the government just simply drifts along in this dream world. It has brought in a bill here that sort of fiddles and fidgets around the edges of the management of a couple of alpine resorts. It does not realise that almost in the blink of an eye the ecosystem could be transformed and that species that depend on it could disappear before our very eyes, certainly in our own lifetimes. I do not want to be part of watching, by neglect or action, the extinction of a mammal or frog species. Having held a little mountain pygmy possum in my hand, I do not want to be around when the last one disappears or its ecosystem is lost and it ends up as part of a captive breeding population in some sort of high-tech Noah's Ark, which is where the government will be going next.
We deserve a lot better than what we are getting from this legislation that is in front of us. We deserve a body for the alpine resorts that has as its primary responsibility the preservation of the ecosystem and that double challenge of in fact dealing with climate change and the climate crisis that is right upon us right now.
To access full speeches and debates please visit http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/hansard where you can search Victorian Hansard publications from 1991 onwards.