By TONY MOBILFONITIS
ENVIRONMENTALISTS who have killed Victoria’s native timber industry have now launched a massive new land grab in the form of the proposed Great Forest National Park covering a vast swathe of Victoria’s alpine and high country that is more than double the area of present parks.
A rally at the town of Mansfield on July 13th aims to stop the park being legislated into place, a move that threatens to further restrict everyday Australians’ access to and use of land for natural resources and recreation.
The national park plan is backed by some leading global environmentalists such as Sir David Attenborough and Dr Jane Goodall, a so-called UN Messenger for Peace, and the Australian National University, and further threatens what is left of the real Victorian High Country economy, particularly cattle farming, that goes back to the early 1830s. The native timber industry has been banned in Victoria by the Green-Socialist Left Labor government.
A slick advertising campaign for the national park is pitched at the urban environmentalists of Melbourne but sidesteps other Victorians who also pursue outdoor recreational activities such as the farmers, campers, horse riders, prospectors, mountain bike riders, fishermen and many others who are a part of the Australian way of life.
The well-heeled and well connected park backers have recruited some business operators to back the park plan, but they have recently received unsolicited correspondence suggesting they withdraw support, prompting the backers to seek legal advice.
Those pushing the park have diabolically used the green and government-driven extinction of the Victorian native timber industry to make the claim that the small economic size of the remaining native timber industry is outstripped by other so-called industries such as “ecosystem services for agriculture”, “water provisioning” and so-called carbon storage.
The latter, also called carbon sequestration, has an estimated “value” of $49m, based on the recent national carbon price. In other words, it’s the fake value of timber left standing while international financial derivatives traders buy and sell the carbon certificates for their own profit.
Come another big fire season and that standing forest could well turn into real carbon and go up in smoke, as vast areas did in the last big Victorian fire season. There are millions of large native trees in Victoria that could provide valuable, high quality timber. Now they will be left to grow and either burn or rot.
The differences in land use philosophy between the Johnny-come-lately environmentalists and the original European settlers of the High Country was illustrated by High Country cattlemen Graeme Stoney and Charlie Lovick, interviewed in 2018 on the 4×4 Australia YouTube channel.
Lovick said the recent major changes brought to the high country (by governments) were “purely from the absolute lack of management”. “People are in charge that don’t live, understand or love the bush,” he said.
Stoney, referring to the ban on cool burning, said much of the country was now described by local Aboriginals as “sick” and both they and the cattlemen wanted it reinstated.
As the maps indicate, Victoria already has an extensive network of national parks and state forests, but in typical manner, the powerful interests that lurk behind the global environmental movement only want more land and more control over population and resources.
Ultimately, under the Agenda 2030 plan, humans would be digitally locked in to urban centres like Melbourne while rural areas are depopulated for the cause of “climate sustainability” or some equally Orwellian reason. Already, Europe’s cultish environmentalists are pushing “non human zones” for the cause of breeding insects.
Victoria, like most Australian states, already has an excess of national parks that too often end up as charred landscapes due to the misguided “lock-it-up-and-leave-it” environmentalist dogma applied as government land management policy.
Organised by the Libertarian Party of Victoria, the message of the Mansfield meeting is “Public Land is Your Land”. Organisers are inviting people from across the state to join them at the Mansfield Botanic Gardens as they take a stand against the park and get the message out to the politicians in Spring Street.
Guest speakers will include Topher Field, an outspoken voice against the Andrews government’s Covid lockdowns, Carly Murphy from Victorians Against the Great Forest National Park, Bill Schulz of Bush User Groups United, Craig Sharmen, an Eastern Region community advocate, David Limbrick MP, and Tim Quilty and Jordan Dittloff from the Libertarian Party.
