2015-10-22
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — It seems that the Liberal opposition has had a change of heart, and that is a good thing. It was on a hiding to nothing with this set of proposals when it was in government, even before any particular commercial development proposal had hit the ground. It is a good thing to be here today discussing the National Parks Amendment (No 99 Year Leases) Bill 2015, which will limit the length of commercial leases in national parks. The previous government wanted to give itself the power to lease land for up to 99 years. However, this bill will provide for a term of not more than 21 years except in a couple of cases, one of which is the Arthurs Seat State Park, and I will come back to that one in more detail in a moment.
Mr Davis's version of history suggests that it was simply a series of inquiries and measures that led to the proposal of 99-year leases when we know for a fact that certain lobby groups — usually those at the big end of town, the mega-commercial developer types — were the ones who had been pushing this along from the beginning. You need only to read those submissions to the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission (VCEC) to understand that. Interestingly though — and this is a detail that Mr Davis left out — the finding of VCEC was:
In general … the best course is to develop tourism ventures outside the boundaries of a national park …
The Greens would of course concur. In our amazing natural attraction regions there are already a large number of businesses operating outside the parks and taking advantage of their proximity to the parks in order to offer services to those who want to visit. These are typically small businesses. I am talking about bed and breakfasts, restaurants, tourism businesses, nature guides, people who rent out bicycles and so on. If one of these proposed commercial developments were lobbed into the park, it would provide a new level of competition to those who are already helping to attract tourists and providing services and the necessary infrastructure for their visits. Then there would be various environmental problems with large-scale commercial developments in the heart of a national park — the human impact, the necessary infrastructure, the disposal of human waste and so on. That is before you even start thinking about the potential bushfire risks of locating large numbers of tourists, possibly people new to Australia and inexperienced in the bush, in the middle of a natural area.
I would be mighty surprised if any development proposal like that would ever be able to get up or meet the requirements of the existing planning scheme, but the guidelines that Mr Davis referred to and the regulation that his government created were nothing like that. We discussed them in some detail when we first opposed the Liberals 99-year lease bill in this Parliament. These guidelines — these regulations, as Mr Davis rather grandly titled them — were nothing but a kind of checklist of different issues that might be addressed in a commercial development. The government at the time could not say what would and what would not be permitted. Those guidelines were of no more use to us as members of the public with a passion to protect our parks than they would have been to a developer making a particular proposal. That just goes to show this was a half-baked, open-ended, ideologically driven approach where the shallowly buried Thatcherite tendencies of the Liberal Party exposed themselves, as they always do, when it came to national parks and natural protected areas. In other words, if you cannot make a quid out of it, it is not worth anything. That was what was driving this whole campaign for further commercial development in our parks.
Mr Davis talked about protecting cultural assets. That implies that those assets are already there, that we are protecting something that exists — for example, the historic buildings at Point Nepean. But this was not about protecting; this was about new developments that were going to bring a whole new set of impacts into an area. Far from hampering the industry, as he said, this bill provides the certain knowlwdge to those who now operate tourism businesses around the areas of our natural attractions — the Great Ocean Road, Gippsland, the Grampians, the coast, the alpine areas, the Murray River — that they will not be facing up to some competition for a mega-style resort. The previous government was unable to say what it would ever draw a line under and was pretty much on a hiding to nothing. That led to publication of an open letter to the Premier, including an accompanying article from a group of eminent Australians, which said:
National parks have not been set aside for grazing by cattle, logging, prospecting, hunting or commercial development. These activities … are incompatible with the fundamental reasons for creating them — protecting our natural and cultural heritage.
In America, where they have some of the greatest national parks in the world, they learnt this lesson over 100 years ago. The natural attractions within those areas, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite — rivers, gorges, falls, mountains and glaciers — were overexploited very rapidly in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — They became cautionary tales and, as Mr Davis interjected, became the driving force for President Roosevelt to want to protect those areas. Those involved had a very clear vision of what they did not want by way of development, and the movement to protect those natural areas was all about keeping away ugly commercial development that sought to exploit the very values that we hold precious but in the process ate away at those values and destroyed the very thing that attracted people in the first place. That is why we need a strong public focus on parks, not a bias towards commercial development.
The government is very pleased with itself for introducing this bill to reverse the power of 99-year leases and turn them back to 21, but it did not do it before it gave itself one chance to issue a 50-year lease of its own — and that is in relation to the Arthurs Seat chairlift. Many of us will remember how it was when we were kids, but if you have that image in your mind and you think that is what is coming next at Arthurs Seat, you could be in for a real shock.
The annual report of the National Parks Advisory Council, tabled in Parliament this week, notes that:
Pursuant to 32CC of the act, on 2 March 2015, council received a letter from the minister seeking consultation on proposed 50-year lease to Arthurs Seat Skylift Pty Ltd for the redevelopment and operation of a gondola and associated visitor activities at Arthurs Seat State Park.
Members of the council all received a copy of the minister's letter, a written submission by Parks Victoria and a joint presentation by Parks Victoria and DELWP representatives at its meeting on 11 March 2015 …
and so on and so forth. The report continues:
Council supports the proposal and it should proceed subject to the following considerations:
vegetation removal is minimised and suitable net-gain offsets are identified;
development of appropriate emergency and bushfire plans within designated time frame;
encourage consideration of full Sunday trading; and
traffic management (particularly car parking) is carefully monitored and managed if usage increases above estimate.
On that basis, with all those assurances, pretty pictures and warm fuzzy feelings from the proposed developer, the council did in fact sign off on the Arthurs Seat proposal. What we are seeing rolling out now is something that is perhaps somewhat different from the pictures the government may have had in mind.
By way of a bit of context, this development did not pop up overnight. Parks Victoria and the government have in many ways been facilitating this major proposal that we see — and not always in the best way for the protection of that natural and cultural heritage. I am advised by locals in the area that about four or five years ago the historic stone stairway beneath the chairlift, at what used to be the top station, was demolished. Shortly after that signs were erected prohibiting pedestrian access under the chairlift area. This forces pedestrians to ascend or descend via the seat if they do not want to walk extra kilometres to Arthurs Seat Road — a road which has no footpaths or shoulders in most sections.
About two years ago the historic lookout tower was destroyed. Significant extra clearing has occurred under the chairlift route and alongside several road access tracks to the route. In the last 12 months there has been some massive roadside clearing of trees and bushes alongside Arthurs Seat Road in the chairlift vicinity. The local residents say they have noticed that the tree and vegetation removal has been more significant than ever before in the last 20-plus years.
The shire council also had a role in this — it was required to issue a planning permit. Now that it is seeing what is rolling out, it is also starting to express concerns. In fact Mornington Peninsula Shire Council signed off on a permit with various conditions to the satisfaction of the responsible authority — that is, the council itself. Councillors are now proposing a motion whereby those sign-offs — the latest sign-offs — will actually come back to council for a decision, because it turns out that the matters to the 'satisfaction of the responsible authority' one might surmise have perhaps not been delivered to the satisfaction of the councillors. They are now hoping to have the ability to pull back that delegation so that they themselves will have a say in it. At least that is what I have surmised from reading the notice of motion that appeared before the shire council.
There are some other details that people may not be aware of. There is the capacity for a later stage 2 development with additional tourist facilities, including a lookout tower high enough to take in views over long distances. Vegetation management works, whether they relate to fuel reduction, road safety or the project itself, are certainly of concern to locals. In fact all works in that area must by necessity be part of the gondola project. The proposed gondola generally follows the route of the old chairlift until it reaches the summit, but after that everything changes. Eight-seater gondolas will cross Arthur Seat Road to the summit on large pylons — 10 to 15 metres tall — and will occupy a large footprint within the public parkland currently enjoyed by visitors. That building will be 8 metres tall, possibly with a 100-seat cafe. The hours of operation could be seven days a week between 8.00 a.m. and midnight all year round, except of course on days of high winds or code red bushfire days. All this scaling up of the proposal increases the cost of construction and thereby requires more and more revenue, hence we must maximise revenue from ticket sales, food and drink sales, functions, merchandise and events — it goes on and on.
So it is not just a matter of a few crusty old environmentalists who might think that parks should be left sacrosanct. There is an inevitable commercial incentive that gets built into these types of proposals, and before you know it, whether you be a park lover, a local councillor or a person who might just want to visit a few times in your lifetime, decisions start getting made pretty quickly that are about maximising revenue. The very values themselves — often understated and subtle but certainly there in the minds and hearts of Victorians — pretty soon start getting pushed to one side. As I said, Labor was very keen to push this particular lease through before it brought in this bill. It was only on 20 July this year that the government announced that it had signed the lease, and now suddenly we get the bill. It is a case of, 'Give me chastity and sobriety, but not quite yet'. Having done its deal, the government is now putting this bill forward for the Parliament to consider.
The Greens will support the bill. We oppose the measures that were brought in by the previous government for many of the reasons I have outlined today and a few more on top of that. Our position on this has been quite consistent from the beginning, and we hope these measures mean that where visitor facilities are provided in our national parks, those visitor facilities are ones that match the expectation of visitors and are provided through public funds. When private leasing operations are attached to those facilities, which may in itself be a good model — certainly those facilities exist, such as the Cape Otway lighthouse, where we have those arrangements in place now — it should not be a matter for the profit motive to determine which of our natural areas are showcased and protected. That should be a decision purely in the public interest, and we hope the passage of this bill ensures that that continues to be the case all the way into the future for all the future generations we can imagine enjoying our parks.
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