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Time for government to abandon Native vegetation framework: Ingram

The independent member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram, has called on the State Government to abandon its current policy on native vegetation ‘Victoria’s Native Vegetation Management – A Framework for Action’.

By Craig Ingram - 5th September 2005 - Back to News

Mr Ingram said all Victorians recognise the importance of protecting native vegetation, but the current policy is failing both in delivering environmental outcomes and in equity of responsibility.

"The current framework for action and state planning controls will not achieve good long-term environmental outcomes and at the same time the framework is overly prescriptive on law abiding land owners," Mr Ingram said.

"The government’s challenge is to make ‘native vegetation’ a benefit to the landholder, thereby ensuring delivery of meaningful conservation outcomes in the long-term.

"Governments since 1989 have consistently failed to deliver on or to recognise that imperative.

"Instead of rewarding landholders with native vegetation, the Government’s policy in fact delivers the opposite.

"It confers a financial liability on the landholder with ‘native vegetation’ and a continual management cost.

"It punishes landholders in direct proportion to the value of the native vegetation. The Habitat-Hectare assessment measure quantifies the extent of the burden: the better condition and the more endangered the vegetation type, the greater the liability.

"It’s time for the government to take a step back and review its current native vegetation policy and make the necessary changes to the framework so that the native vegetation outcomes can actually be implemented with the support of the landholders.

"The current native vegetation policy is not delivering either the incentives or the reasons for private landholders to protect and manage important areas of native vegetation on private land.

"Net gain is laudable principle, but is confusing and difficult to enforce, and is overly restrictive on private landholders.

"The current policy rewards those farmers who have not protected or choose to deliberately mismanage important areas of remnant native vegetation, which undermines the entire purpose of the policy. It also undermines the basic principles of freehold title.

"As a matter of principle landholders should be compensated if they are required to protect assets like native vegetation when that action requires the landholder to remove that land from productive use."

Mr Ingram said the government’s policy is not only impacting on private landowners, but is also having a significant cost impediment on public land: for example with vegetation clearing for roadworks.

"In recent new roadworks through the forests of East Gippsland, the native vegetation framework has required VicRoads’ contractors to plant trees along the roadside as offsets to trees cut down. These plantings directly conflict with road safety," he said.

"In the middle of vast areas of protected native forests, this practice is absurd and highlights the unpracticality and lack of commonsense of the policy.

"This policy is costing the government millions of dollars, which means hard-earned taxpayers dollars that should be spent on roadworks are being wasted in planting hazards along roadsides and under roadside power lines," Mr Ingram concluded.

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: news@gippsland.com

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