Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Public responses to the VEAC recommendations for the Central West Investigation Area are due next week [December 10]. A simple letter is enough, indicating your interest in the area in question, and your reasons for your view.

The recommendations do not concern the Mount Alexander region, but they include two important proposals for our immediate northern and southern neighbours: the proposal for a new national park in the Wombat Forest, and a Nature Reserve in the Wellsford Forest. We believe both should be supported.

VEAC’s draft report can be found here. A method of making submissions is here.

A concerted campaign is now under way to attack the proposals. It contains a number of strange claims. These include the following:

The recommendations would put an end to camping, horse riding, motor bike riding…In fact these activities are explicitly allowed in most of the proposed parks, under conditions broadly accepted by the community. Bizarrely, one objection is to the requirement that vehicles be driven on formed roads. The laws on this are the same in state forests as they are in parks.

Commercial photography in parks costs $80 an hour. Actually the fees are the same for parks and state forests. The $80 fee only applies if a ranger is required to be present.

A strange video circulating on the web shows a man walking with his granddaughter, and informing her that ‘green groups’ have stopped us from picking flowers in national parks. The old gentleman doesn’t seem aware that wildflowers have been protected since the ‘Wildflowers and native plants protection Act’ of 1930, an act reasserted by the Bolte Liberal government in 1958. That government was definitely not a ‘green group.’

The gist of these objections to parks is that any restriction on the activity in question is a violation of our liberty. There’s a big problem here, never satisfactorily resolved in our culture: how much limitation should we be prepared to accept on our favoured activity, for the benefit of the environment and the wider community?

The main effect of the VEAC proposals would be to reduce logging, hunting and prospecting. We believe these are good proposals: you can read a defence of them here.

As a sidelight to FOBIF’s ongoing interest in vegetation clearance on the Pyrenees Highway, we draw readers’ attention to a nice item in the Midland Express [November 20].

Animal shelter managers in Elphinstone lobbied Vicroads to reduce the speed limit on Pollards road to cut the number of animal deaths. Vicroads wouldn’t come to the party, but the Mount Alexander Shire put in 70 kph advisory signs and wildlife crossing signs. Before the signs went up an animal a week would be presented to the shelter. After: there’s been one in 12 months.

Pollards Road: calm down, slow down and reduce animal deaths.

This is a good news story, reinforcing ideas that should by now be commonplace: speed kills, not only people, but animals. As we’ve reported before, you can reduce your chances of hitting an animal by up to 50% by reducing your speed in a known hit area from 100kph to 80kph—and that if you did this over 200 kilometres, you’d be adding only two minutes to the journey!

FOBIF’s submission to Vicroads on the Pyrenees Highway emphasised that significant improvements in safety could be achieved by speed reduction and traffic calming devices like signage and rumble strips. Vicroads, however, is governed by the logic that says that a road like Pollard’s road should have the same speed limit as the Midland Highway…

A Deakin University Phd student has claimed that farm dams are a major contributor to greenhouse gases, according to the Weekly Times [ 21/11 ].

‘This is due to the microbes in dams, which release carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

‘But, according to the scientist behind the work, emissions from dams could be halved with “simple” changes to farming practices.

‘The study’s lead author, Quinn Ollivier, a PhD candidate in Deakin’s Blue Carbon Lab, found Victoria’s 375,000 farm dams produce the equivalent amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 385,000 cars.

‘Mr Ollivier’s study found dam emissions were caused by dissolved nitrate concentrations, and were significantly higher on livestock farms, compared to cropping areas.’

Well, we never knew that. The good news, however, is that the problem can be largely fixed by revegetating dam edges, which would obviously have other environmental benefits.

And while we’re on the subject of dams, the state government has proposed putting a brake on farm dams by instituting a ‘reasonable use limit’ on them from early next year. The proposal is designed to prevent distortions on water accessibility which may happen, for example, if an upstream landholder reduces the amount of water available to downstream users. The proposal has met with plenty of opposition.

As we’ve explained before, FOBIF’s position on this matter starts with a distinction between genuine farm dams, useful for agricultural production, and ornamental dams, put in by some rural users just to have a nice water view. The latter have exploded in number in recent decades, and have a significant effect on our waterways. As the Dja Dja Wurrung joint management plan puts it:

‘Dams fragment the watercourse they’re built on, preventing movement of aquatic animals between parts of the stream on either side of the dam. Dams and channels can decrease gatjin [water] flows downstream, particularly in low rainfall periods, reducing streams to disconnected pools, or causing problems associated with low flows, such as algal outbreaks.’

Vicroads’ proposed tree removal works on the Pyrenees Highway between Green Gully and Newstead have been put on hold pending advice from the Federal Department of the Environment [DEH] on the impact these removals might have on the health of migrating Swift Parrot populations.

Readers will remember that FOBIF has argued that removal of these trees, some of significant size, is both harmful for the amenity of the road and unnecessary for safety. We have argued that a reduction in speed limits and other measures would be a more effective policy, given that this is a winding stretch of road, probably unsuitable for significant speeds.

Vicroads’ response to this has been to point out that a car crashing into a tree at 80 is as fatal as a crash at 90 or 100—which seems to be ignoring that fact that the lower speed would most likely remove the probability of a crash in the first place. Vicroads’ Annual Report for 2016-7, noting a 15% increase in road fatalities in that year,  points out that ‘The most common crash types were run-offroad on high-speed country roads and intersection crashes in metropolitan Melbourne.’ In spite of numerous TAC campaigns like ‘speed kills’, and ‘wipe off 5’, it seems to us that Vicroads is more concerned to improve traffic flow than to influence drivers to drive to conditions. In a weird way, Vicroads and the Transport Accident Commission seem to be at odds…

Vicroads will be holding more consultations in the local area before the works begin.

This meeting will give people an opportunity to learn about the Wombat Forest and write a submission on the VEAC report on the night. Download the flyer here.

FOBIF has made a submission to the state government’s Draft Deer Management Strategy [see last week’s post]. Deer have not made a major impact in our region yet, but sightings are becoming more frequent, with recent reports from the Fryers Forest, Spring Gully, Muckleford and Chewton. Given the serious damage being done to the environment elsewhere, we have reason for concern. Feral deer pose an increasing threat to agriculture, the environment and traffic safety; the population is exploding, and that is a problem which needs to be confronted now.

We gave the draft a very low assessment, concluding that it was more concerned to gratify the hunting lobby than to respond to an increasingly evident environmental mess. It is puzzling and depressing that the state government should be concerned to pander to this lobby, whose allies are actively campaigning against it in the state election.

The essentials of our submission are set out below. The headings are the ones provided in the online survey form:

1. General comment: This is not a deer management strategy: it is a hunting strategy, clearly devised to expand the amount of public land available to recreational hunters. This is plain from the first, when we read that the strategy is a key action of the Sustainable Hunting Action Plan. This latter Plan is entirely devoted to expanding hunting, and the word ‘sustainable’ in its title has no reference to natural values whatever. It is clear from this document, and other material easily available on the subject, that recreational hunting is completely ineffective as a form of control of deer populations: expanding it, therefore, is not a response to the increasingly dire effects of an exploding deer population. It is simply a sop to the hunting lobby. It is significant that the draft gives an impressive figure valuing deer hunting on page 10, but does not match it with a figure indicating the many costs to agriculture, the environment and public safety on pages 10 and 11. Such a figure, we believe, would far outweigh the supposed value to rural communities.

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The inaugural Annual General Meeting of the BirdLife Castlemaine District Branch will be held on 27 October. This historic occasion includes a presentation by local bird expert and photographer, Geoff Park, and a short guided bird walk.

BirdLife Castlemaine AGM and Geoff Park presentation
Saturday 27 October, 2018 at 2.00 pm
Campbells Creek Community Centre, 45 Elizabeth St, Campbells Creek VIC

Interested people can nominate for the committee. Positions vacant are Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and three general committee members. Nomination forms and proxy voting forms can be obtained by emailing castlemaine@birdlife.org.au or by phoning Judy Hopley (Acting Secretary) on 5472 1156. Nominations will be accepted at the meeting.