Bundarrah Days

A public meeting attended by 150 members of the south western Victorian community of Heywood has blasted the Bracks government for engaging their community in a 4 year consultative process about the management of the Cobbobonee State Forest and announcing that the forest would become a national park just prior to the state election.

A spokeswoman Mrs. Kelly Gannon said committee members had time away from their families and businesses wasted by the state government. "It is now plain that they never intended to respect the wishes of the Heywood community. A clear majority was opposed to a national park. The consultation was an expensive sham, she said”

“Now they are starting a new process of consultation about the park boundaries and access. How can we have faith in this process? We will spend more of our time campaigning against the government – we think that will be more effective” said Mrs Gannon.

Citing the wildfires of 2003 and 2006/7 invited speakers at the meeting criticized current forest management practices, particularly the lack of fuel reduction burning. They said that government couldn’t maintain current national parks to protect biodiversity therefore to create more parks was merely adding to the problems.

Kevin Tolhurst, Senior Lecturer on Fire Ecology at Melbourne University described contemporary fire management practices as “like an ambulance waiting at the bottom of a cliff.”

Bob Richardson from Push For The Bush said that in his twenty year experience of Labor governments “there was never an election went by without Labor declaring new national parks. It’s not an environmental issue for them it’s a political issue. Forests are traded for green votes in the city. They have regularly broken agreements, including signed agreements with organizations and communities. It is not a surprise to me that they repudiated their understandings with the Heywood community.”

The meeting decided to join the state-wide rural lobby group Push For The Bush. This group campaigned against labor in the recent state election and is credited with removing the Labor MP for Narracan who chaired the task force which removed mountain cattlemen from Victoria’s High Country.