In the cross-hairs of Queensland Government Acquisition?
“The Queensland Government will channel more than $10 million a year into a new ‘Eco Fund' to expand the state's National Parks.”
So said the Hon. Premier, Anna Bligh and Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation, the Hon. Andrew McNamara, in a joint statement last Friday.
“… we’re going to expand our National Parks by 50% … reaching a target of 12 million hectares by 2020 …”
Developers and other entities will pay for this doubling of protected area, by offsetting their environmental impacts and greenhouse emissions. The Eco Fund will provide a facility for these offset payments to be retained within Queensland and re-invested into conservation land acquisition, giving the illusion of ecological neutrality or better.
However, there are some glaring problems with the concept. First of all, protected area management is very inefficient and a major contributor to emissions in its own right, particularly when burning.
In 1999, it was revealed that in the six years preceding the ‘LGAQ Public inquiry into the Management of National Parks’ Queensland’s protected area estate had doubled whilst its budgetary allocation had increased by only 9% . The inquiry found that QPWS was neither staffed nor resourced to manage its reserves, which were being increasingly overrun with feral weeds and animals. Doubling the estate, yet again, would surely double these identified inefficiencies.
The LGAQ Inquiry also revealed the convention that lands acquired for addition to protected area estate, invariably had existing conservation values. In effect, the only real change was the name on the land title. Whilst there was usually an acquisition cost, it could hardly be described as a carbon offset, when nothing had been done to change the ecological nature of the environment.
By contrast, if productive land were to be acquired and re-vegetated for inclusion into the protected area, then the public would be able to see the ecological gain and know that it had paid for the change of land-use, including compensation and loss of income-earning capacity.
Then there are the recreational and tourism entitlements of the public-at-large, with all known and associated impacts and emissions. The Queensland government currently opposes cost-recovery through user-fees on National Parks, so all costs associated with management and impact mitigation are met by the taxpayer. This further disadvantages conservation management on private lands, through the exclusionary provisions of subsidisation on a tenure-exclusive basis.
You forgot subsidised water tanks, Rog. Farmers get a few hundred bucks while the urbanites get up to $2500 worth at no actual cost to themselves.
You deliver equal services to farmers SJT and farmers will stop paying for their own and start bludging - just like the city people.
Transport, health, roads, education, communication - these are things farmers pay for but dont receive.
Ian
it is clearly a problem of too many subsidised farmers not paying their taxes and bludging off us city people.
The first parks survived through a time when the social contract was still intact, Luke. There was a time when all of us regarded them as "our parks".
But those days were gone from the moment the greens started exercising the politics of fraud and exclusion. When the parks were first mooted they were supposed to ensure the survival of species but as the habitat quality degraded that survival could only be possible with a larger and larger area.
And when first mooted, the parks were supposed to represent the entire community's contribution to maintaining ecological values so we could all go about our economic business with a clear conscience. But the moment this need became accepted it was used to demand a discriminatory, unbalanced and entirely disproportionate contribution from individual landowners.
The parks are now nothing more than occupied enemy territory, a minority controlled portfolio of the the proceeds of fraud. They are now a black hole into which precious regional hospital, education and community funding is diverted for the sole benefit of visiting urban elites. And it is classified as the region's share of the funding cake.
Parks are also the most precious asset of the predatory green enemy and, as Sun Tzu would conclude, are the most attractive target for retribution. They are the most valued target, the most easily destroyed, the most expensive to defend and the hardest to replace.
So you had better hope not too many shafted landowners are reading Sun Tzu.
So if it that's bad - why do our existing national parks still exist? Does it make sense with reality?
And have not many of them been around for some time?
Shouldn't they have disappeared by now in a sea of flames, and be overrun with weeds and ferals?
And how did they get on before bulldozers turned up?
When you think about it it's amazing that anything could have evolved with human assistance. It's just incredible.
And why do visitors keep turning up? (except at Baradine)