Talking Point: It’s an assault on the wilderness

BOB BROWN warns of a rapacious fire sale of Tasmania’s most precious, rare places

FRAGILE: Lake Malbena looking towards Halls Island. Picture: LYNDSEY EVANS

MOST Tasmanians know wilderness is a big winner for modern Tasmania.

Fewer realise that one of the wildest, most beautiful places on Tasmania’s World Heritage Central Plateau is about to be hit by a noisy private installation “aimed at the very top end of the market”.

National Parks Minister Will Hodgman is on trajectory to effectively privatise Tasmania’s previously protected national parks.

So the plan for three “lean luxury” cabins plus communal kitchen and toilets on tiny Halls Island in picturesque Lake Malbena, serviced by helicopters, has moved quietly forward to the point that only the federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg’s agreement is needed.

This is the thin edge of the wedge for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

The Lake Malbena luxury tourism plan comes with helicopter pad, generator and “second stage” boardwalk to nearby Mt Oana and a track to an Aboriginal secret site with high-paying guests getting privileged access.

The burgeoning tourism industry these days supports more than a dozen times the jobs in the logging. However, it is now being dragged into a phase of high contention, including international contention, simply because those who have the ear of this premier put wilderness — and its core values of remoteness, naturalness, and the absence of industrial (particularly motorised) impact — a poor second to profiteering from the public commons.

Premier Will Hodgman has not twinned the portfolios of national parks and tourism and allocated them to himself to protect the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Quite the reverse, he has put out the welcome mat for exploiters and they are queued up.

Will Hodgman did not lift a finger to join the thousands of other Tasmanians who gave years of their lives to protect Tasmania’s world famous wilderness. But he did lead prime minister Tony Abbott’s failed effort to strip 74,000ha of our island’s World Heritage forests of their status in 2014 so they could be logged and firebombed. And, knowing he cannot win a debate over eroding Tasmania’s treasured wild and scenic heritage, Hodgman is committed instead to imposing draconian penalties on his fellow Tasmanians who protest.

Like his Franklin-damming predecessor Robin Gray, Hodgman is a man of now, with little regard for the long-term future. He has never spoken about the premium for wilderness in the increasingly overpopulated world of 2050 or 2100 — the years of the next 500,000 Tasmanians.

Hodgman is designing huge impacts on Tasmania’s wilderness in the next four years. He is shepherding the green-shoe brigade to pick the eyes out of the wilds with private enterprise “resorts”, “standing camps”, “dry-shoe tracks”, “luxury cabins” and, of course, helicopters, helicopters, helicopters.

This is not about giving the public access. It is about servicing the richest people in the market, many of whom are FIFOs, for monetary gain. And why not? Why compete to buy grand scenic places available on the private Tasmanian market when Premier Hodgman will give you a monopoly at Federation Peak, Frenchmans Cap, the Walls of Jerusalem or beside any desirable tarn on the flanks of Cradle Mountain?

Why not, through Liberal gifting, get $3 million in taxpayers’ funding to put up six private two-storey cabins, public locked out, on the world famous South Coast Track, if Hodgman is minister and willing to scrap the area’s management plan to help you?

Hodgman has gazumped public consultation to hand the private sector perhaps the most high-profile wilderness gateway of all, the proposed new visitors’ centre at Cradle Mountain. This centre will be the compulsory entry point to Cradle Valley for an estimated half million visitors per annum in the 2020s. Hodgman’s cable car to Dove Lake, which will cost the public purse tens of millions, will channel everyone through this gold mine of lost public property to line private investors’ pockets.

Back in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, the Launceston-based proponents of the resort at Lake Malbena, 1027m above sea-level, say the plan is for 30 groups of six visitors, with staff, arriving by helicopter from Derwent Bridge per annum.

There is a small hut with metal roof on the island in the lake. It was built by Launcestonian Reg Hall, who obtained a lease, in 1956 for vacations and has been open to bushwalkers. It is in the remotest region of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, which has been part of the World Heritage Area since 1982. There was a wooden dinghy to paddle from the lake shore to the island but that has long since disintegrated. If this application was to preserve that Hall legacy there would be little contention.

Halls Island has not been burnt. It is a safety zone for king billy pine rainforest and sphagnum peatland which have suffered widespread depletion through grazing, fire and drought since European occupation. It is a refuge for alpine Mawson pines, listed as vulnerable to extinction, which hug its southern shore. It is a fastness for fragile low alpine rainforest.

The remoteness and fragile ecosystem of the Lake Malbena environs should not be lost or put at risk for a project to accommodate one in 20,000 visitors to Tasmania, even if, as the proponent claims, it results in “improved on-island conditions protecting peatlands and waterways through the installation and availability of sewage containment systems on-island”.

I have a list of 12 places affording great eco-tourism experiences in Tasmania if any private entrepreneur wants to get going by buying land on the free market. I have personally put the list to Premier Hodgman.

Wild mountain scenery, waterfalls, pristine coasts, rainforests, wildlife galore and road access for the helicopter-shy. None of these would rob the public commons to featherbed the rich at the expense of everyone else. These options entail true private enterprise.

Federal Minister Frydenberg is accepting submissions until April 17. As national guardian of World Heritage, he should give this corrosive project at Lake Malbena the thumbs-down.

Dr Bob Brown is the former leader of the Australian Greens.