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| Mike Elliott Leader Australian Democrats Member of the Legislative Council |
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Legislative
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| Mike Elliott Leader Australian Democrats Member of the Legislative Council |
Parliament Index |
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Adjourned debate on second reading.
(Continued from 5 December. Page 773.)
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Although this is a CFS matter, it also directly impacts on what happens in national parks. As the party's environment spokesperson, I want to make a few comments in this regard. About the time I came into this place some 15 years ago I recall a fire in the Danggali Conservation Park. The park rangers based there, as part of their fire policy, felt that the fire should continue to burn. The CFS arrived on the edge of the park with bulldozers saying that it wanted to go in and put it out. As I recall, the police had to intervene because of the strong disagreements between the rangers and the CFS. One hopes that some progress has been made since then, although I am told that there has been the odd stand-off in the interim. I suppose one reason for the government wanting the legislation is that it does not want to have stand-off situations.
A point that has to be made is that fire does not necessarily damage a national park. Some people have an attitude that if a fire starts and burns in a park it has destroyed the park. Fires are part of the environment. What has an impact on the park is how frequently we have fires. Different vegetation associations are adapted to different fire frequencies. Grasslands, for example, are adapted to high frequency fires. In fact, it is self perpetuating. Grasslands burn readily and grass grows well in places that have been burnt regularly. Bushland will tend to carry fires less frequently and tree country even less so.
If you get an area with trees in it and burn it regularly, the trees will eventually be lost, the land will go to bush, and eventually to grass. I think everybody accepts that rainfall has an impact on vegetation, and they accept that soil has an impact on vegetation. Fire also has an important impact on vegetation and, therefore, also upon the animals. The reason why I say you cannot just say `we saved the park because we put out the fire' is that, if the park has a particular vegetation association and you keep putting the fires out, the vegetation association will change and the animals that go with it also will change. In fact some areas will, in a biological sense, degrade.
This approach places a park at great risk. In America they had a policy for a very long time of putting fires out. Then they had one really bad summer after several decades of successful firefighting. They had a huge build up of vegetable detritus, and then wildfire of the most unimaginably furious kind really damaged the parks because the vegetation was not adapted to wildfire. Yellowstone, among other parks, suffered significant damage.
The damage is not done just because there is a fire. The damage is done, as I said, because of the frequency and intensity of the fires, and the intensity also relates back to the frequency. That is why it is really important that whoever is involved in firefighting in national parks needs to have an understanding of the relationship between bushfires and the natural environment. The ideal situation is, perhaps, for parks to have a number of fires that burn at different times to create a mosaic effect. I mean that, if you have one area that was burnt five years ago and another fire starts and burns up to it, it then runs out of fuel and goes out, and you end up with a patchwork which keeps reinforcing itself. Eventually, the area that was burnt five years ago has enough vegetation that it will burn better and a fire that enters into the more recently burnt area will then peter out.
If you rush in every time there is a spot fire from lightning and put it out immediately, you will lose your mosaics and end up with a continuous stretch of vegetation that has not been burnt for a long time. You will then get a wildfire totally out of control that will do enormous damage. I think it is fair to say that even the national parks themselves have not got on top of this issue of fire management; nor do I think they have developed an adequate fire policy for their parks. If you acknowledge that, you realise that for the most part fire control now will not be in their hands but in the hands of the CFS. So, there is the potential for mistakes to be made, but not with any mal- intent or because people do not care about the vegetation; in fact, they might care too much. They could be so desperate to get in there and protect it that they end up doing damage.
It is also worth noting that, as I understand it, about 85 per cent of the fires in national parks enter from outside. About 20 per cent of fires in parks leave the parks. Particularly at this time of year farmers are out with their headers. A bit of straw builds up somewhere, a fire starts, and then it rips into the native scrub. Not only are matters of fire frequency important but if you decide to put out a fire you have a choice. If you use water bombers and you have added retardants to the water, they are sometimes phosphorous rich. Australian soils, for the most part, are really poor and low in phosphorous. If you start putting fires out using phosphorous, you then change the nutrient status of the soil and invite an invasion of weeds. Therefore, you again damage the park while trying to help it. Water is fine but, if you throw in high levels of phosphorous or other nutrients, you will damage the park while endeavouring to protect it. Similarly, if you go in with bulldozers to create firebreaks you will disrupt the seed bed and probably remove a lot of the seeds that would have germinated after a fire and, at the same time, that will lead to the introduction of weeds.
I know that rollers can also be used. They are less likely to do damage if you are trying to create a path into a park, in the same way that mining teams in the north, rather than grading seismic tracks, are now rolling the seismic tracks and the vegetation tends to recover quite quickly. The old seismic tracks that were bulldozed are, decades later, still highly prominent.
I thank the minister for providing quite a deal of information to me in terms of incident control systems and the incident response plans for a couple of parks. There is no question that there is an attempt to look at what parts of the park may be sensitive and therefore how to react. I appreciate that we are starting to head in the right direction. Having said that we probably still have insufficient knowledge in relation to fire management itself, even within national parks, I suspect that we also have inadequate knowledge about what in our parks needs protection. I will give one example of this. It was only about a decade ago that a species of pine-the Wollemi pine-was discovered in national park near Sydney that had been thought to be extinct for tens of millions of years. Only this week, the Advertiser -
An honourable member interjecting:
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: No. I think a ranger came across it. The point I make is that the national park is quite close to Sydney and is probably quite heavily used and a very small number of remnant trees of a species presumed to be extinct for tens of millions of years was discovered. If we do not know our parks well-and, unfortunately, due to lack of resources, we do not know our parks well-while we will have systems that seek to identify the areas that need to be treated carefully-such as `Don't send the bulldozers into that valley'-if the Wollemi pine was growing in the South Australian park system, we probably would not know about it. In relative terms, the parks system in New South Wales is much better staffed and I am surprised that the Wollemi pine was only so recently discovered.
When plans are developed, we have to adopt a precautionary principle that, if bulldozers enter national parks, it has to be a last resort and there must be major justification for it. I will be looking for these fire management plans to become increasingly sophisticated with improving knowledge. In his concluding remarks, will the minister advise whether fire management plans for all national parks will be readily accessible to the public? If we want to inspire confidence in this system we are to adopt, having the plans readily accessible will mean that there is the chance of input because of knowledge that is perhaps held by some groups and I think that would be useful.
When I talk about the knowledge of some groups, I stress that, in relation to the consultation process, I am assured by conservation groups that they have not been consulted. The consultation which has occurred has been entirely between the CFS and National Parks and Wildlife. I am informed that National Parks and Wildlife did not then consult with other conservation groups, and that is very unfortunate. When I spoke with the minister responsible for the CFS, it was his opinion that the National Parks and Wildlife Service was not under his direct control and it was not for him to tell it what to do. Nevertheless, I note that the consultation was not particularly wide. It is unfortunate timing that we have a bill before us at the end of the session and at the beginning of the fire season. Plenty of arguments have been put forward as to why it should not be delayed but I think serious questions have to be asked about the quality of the consultation at the public level.
