Rock Magazine

Words by Phil Ingamells and photos by Glenn van der Knijff

Parks Victoria’s (PV) latest ‘plan’ for managing the Victorian Alps has seriously let down many people who love the place, and confused the rest.
In a move confounding accountability in conservation management, they have set about the most exhaustive consultation process imaginable for a management plan and, so far, come up with very little.
In what is almost an orgy of public consultation, PV have set up a scientific advisory panel, an Indigenous working group, an expert advisory committee, a series of community workshops around the state, and an ‘innovative’ weplan.parks Wiki-based website so everyone and their dog can have a say. But that might be something of a charade.

Instead of a serious and sophisticated management plan that clearly identifies the many threats to the park’s natural values – a plan that deals realistically with climate change impacts on the park, one that tells PV staff (and us) in detail how those issues are to be successfully managed over the years ahead – it seems that PV has predetermined that the final plan will be vaguely worded, thin and full of pictures. They want ‘a document the public can easily understand’, rather than a clear statement of what PV actually plan to do to look after this most vulnerable of Victoria’s natural areas.
And there’s another problem here. The plan is PV’s first ‘landscape scale’ national park plan. It covers not just the Alpine National Park also but Mount Buffalo, Baw Baw, Snowy River and Errinundra National Parks, the Avon Wilderness Park and a series of historic reserves. That totals over 900 000 hectares in all – around one third of Victoria’s park estate in one slim management plan.
PV is right to engage in a landscape-scale approach to management. This is critical for treating pest plant and animal invasions, and it gives recognition to the fact that ecological processes don’t always match park borders. 

But each of these parks has its own particular management issues. Indeed, Errinundra National Park, which protects a remarkable sassafras and oliveberry canopied cool-temperate rainforest on a misty lost-world plateau, doesn’t even have an alpine species to its name.

PV assures us that this overarching ‘management plan’ sets strategic objectives for the next 15 years, while a series of underlying ‘implementation plans’ will detail management actions every five years.
But because Victoria’s national park legislation only requires them to produce management plans for the parks, PV are under no obligation to actually produce the detailed implementation plans.
There’s the rub. We (the community, the scientists, and anyone else who wants to see our natural areas well looked after) have no legal right to have input to what our managers will actually be doing. PV seem to think they are only accountable for establishing vague ‘strategic directions’ every 15 years.
Some things are very vague indeed.

During the time PV has held the park management reigns, the feral horse population in the Alps has exploded. Now, after more than a decade of mismanagement and a year and a half of handwringing, their new draft management plan recommends – you guessed it – development of a feral horse strategy.