Prospecting in Wonderland VEAC is being instructed to recommend allowing prospecting in more of Victoria’s parks, reports Phil Ingamells. Among the many strange people Alice met in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts was particularly troubling. Her cry of ‘sentence first – verdict afterwards’ was capricious and frighteningly absurd. But it matches, to a degree, the terms the Baillieu Government has set for the latest Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) inquiry.
It has simply asked VEAC to look at which additional parks it should be introduced to, offering nine (Yarra Ranges, Baw Baw, Croajingolong, Errinundra, Lake Eildon, Lind, Mitchell River and the Alpine National Park, and Lerderderg State Park) as the government’s chosen contenders. This group of parks, revealingly, matches the preferred options of the Mining and Prospectors Association in its newsletter earlier this year. And VEAC has been asked to come up with its final ‘recommendations’ by April next year, making it the fastest VEAC inquiry ever. This might be a difficult task, because the Council will have little ready information to go on. Park management plans, for those goldfields box-ironbark parks where prospecting already takes place, called for the monitoring of the impacts of recreational fossicking. But that monitoring hasn’t happened, so VEAC will be short of the evidence necessary for it to make well-informed recommendations.
Photo: David Tatnall
Rather than asking VEAC to look at whether prospecting and fossicking for gold and minerals has a place in national parks at all, the government has already decided that there should be more of it.
Mitchell River National Park contains many pockets of rainforest, such as this dry rainforest at Billy Goat Bend, and other sensitive areas. It would be impossible to monitor or supervise fossicking in such a park, and damage would be inevitable.
VEAC and its predecessors (the Land Conservation Council and the Environmental Assessment Council) have been internationally respected as independent assessors of public land values and management in Victoria since the 1970s.
But in setting the terms of reference for this hasty investigation, the government is taking advantage of that reputation but not respecting the expertise, integrity and independence that earned it. VEAC, the Victorian people and our parks deserve better. • pw
Key to proposed prospecting areas in parks Prospecting 1 Lerderderg State Park 2 Yarra Ranges National Park 3 Lake Eildon National Park 4 Baw Baw National Park 5 Alpine National Park 6 Mitchell River National Park 7 Errinundra National Park 8 Lind National Park 9 Croajingolong National Park Gemstone collecting 10 Kooyoora State Park 11 Great Otway National Park 12 Mornington Peninsula National Park 13 Cape Liptrap Coastal Park
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