Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Members will have seen local press reports on a proposal to develop land at Tarran Valley in the Sandy Creek area, 2 kilometres from Maldon, on the north side of the Maldon-Castlemaine road.

The development proposal, first put up in 2006, involves rezoning the 125 hectare lot from Farming to Rural Living zone and the building of 42 houses.

FOBIF objected to the original proposal before a planning panel on the grounds that the area is fire prone: radical fuel reduction measures in the adjacent Maldon Historic Reserve would be required to ensure safety of the new residents–and these would have damaging ecological effects.

The panel report, completed just before the catastrophe of Black Saturday 2009, did not list bushfire safety as an issue, and approved the rezoning. The Mount Alexander Shire adopted the rezoning in March 2009, but—newly conscious of the bushfire threat— added the important proviso that ‘Council expects the Minister may modify the Amendment [to the planning scheme] in light of recommendations of the Royal Commission into the recent bushfires.’ The proposal has been in limbo since then.

In July last year the Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, referred the matter to the state’s Bushfire Management Overlay Standing Committee. The committee will hold a hearing on May 7 on the matter, and will hear from Council, the proponent, the CFA, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries and Parks Victoria. FOBIF will attend the hearing, and submit a statement, but cannot speak. The focus of the panel is the fire risk: other matters [like whether the development is a good idea generally] are not under discussion.

Details of the panel and submissions to it can be found here.

Would the development require that woodland in the reserve be severely altered in order to protect residents from fire?

The CFA submission to the panel states that ‘the broader surrounding bushland having interface with the subject land has the potential to generate severe bushfire behaviour, including crown fires, extreme ember attack and significant radiant heat.’ The CFA handpasses the management of this problem to the land manager, the Department of the Environment.

Mount Alexander Shire planners, who support the proposal, do likewise, saying blandly that ‘determining whether the proposal will change the way surrounding bushland needs to be managed in the long term is the responsibility of other authorities.’

The submission by the ‘other authority’, the Department of Environment, is quite clear on the matter: the location of houses close to the Reserve would immediately create pressure for it to be rezoned to Zone 1 [Asset Protection] for the purposes of fire protection.  Here’s the DEPI submission:

‘A change in adjacent use is likely to cause a change of the surrounding fire management zone to FMZ1 Asset Protection Zone. In order to provide additional protection for the subdivision fuel reduction of an area of approximately 270 hectares would need to occur … To achieve the fuel hazard requirements of an APZ, the fuels in the area would be maintained at a ‘moderate’ level over approximately 90% of the 270 ha. This will result in a burning regime of fuel reduction burns being conducted on a five-year rotation.

‘An increased rate of burning will result in a significantly changed landscape. Regular burning to meet FMZ1 objectives results in the eventual loss of coarse woody debris on the ground, which removes key habitat for invertebrates and small mammal and reptile species. Over time, this will diminish the abundance and complexity of faunal species within the historic area.

‘An increased burning regime is expected to result in the loss of trees containing hollows used by native fauna. This loss of habitat is likely to impact on the abundance of fauna over time. More regular burning will also alter flora species composition, as a five-year rotation is below the average tolerable fire interval for many box-ironbark species and so we could expect to see a move to a simpler structure in the forest most likely containing larger grassland areas and fewer mid-storey species.’

In the Maldon Historic Reserve: DEPI says that proposed development nearby would require severe fuel reduction in the reserve, with inevitable damage to forest structure. The Department adds that ‘it is not appropriate to manage risk created on private land using Crown land for defendable space.’