Parks Victoria to cut 100 staff in new year

Parks Victoria executives say they will delay sacking 100 staff “until the new year, following peak visitation and fire season”.

Illegal activities, such as timber cutting, are on the rise, as Parks Victoria dumps its four key enforcement officers and prepares to cut another 100 staff in the new year.

Parks Victoria has postponed sacking 100 staff until the new year, following recent publicity on the Allan Government’s $95m cut to its 2023-24 finances and loss of 51 services – from feral pest control to its young rangers program.

The 100 redundancies were part of an operational review that was due to be announced this week, but it appears Environment Minister Steve Dimopoulos and Parks Victoria executives have postponed the announcement until after the summer school holidays.

Parks Victoria operations executive director Kylie Trott wrote to staff this week, saying: “We have identified some additional work is required to be undertaken to finalise the proposal, as a result the executive management team have decided to pause the operations review.”

She said the review announcement would be postponed until the new year, “following the peak visitation and fire season”.

The postponement of redundancies coincides with Premier Jacinta Allan’s commitment to introduce legislation this month that will add another 44,000 hectares of the Wombat and Lerderderg state forests to the 4.12 million hectares Parks Victoria is already struggling to manage.

Parks Victoria staff are reporting morale is at an all-time low and the executive team has even sacked four of its six enforcement officers, at a time when illegal firewood harvesting, dumping of rubbish, hunting and homeless people living on its land has soared to 3000 in the 12 months to June 30.

One PV ranger, who wished to remain anonymous, said the enforcement officers played a critical role in advising rangers and preparing briefs as part of the prosecution process.

“Rangers have been left to deal with it (enforcement), but we’re not authorised to,” one ranger said.

He said PV rangers had already flagged refusing to take action against climbers in the Grampians and Arapiles parks.

Documents seen by The Weekly Times show the number of illegal activities parks staff have lodged on the government-run Gumnut intelligence database, has risen from 200 in 2017 to 3000 in 2023-24.

Yet rangers report Parks Victoria executives had planned to cut their access to the database after refusing to pay an access fee to the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.

The executive has since backed down, but has only committed to paying the access fee for another 12 months.

A Parks Victoria executive responded to questions on the cutbacks by stating: “Our focus is on ensuring we have the right resources in the right place, this includes continuing to deliver our on-ground enforcement responsibilities.”

“We have more than 250 authorised officers that focus on enforcement activities across the state. This includes more than 40 advanced officers that deal with more complex offences like firewood theft.”

But rangers said PV’s response was “bullshit”, given none of these officers could prepare briefs as part of any enforcement.

“It’s not in their PDs (position descriptions) to do this work and they’re refusing to do it.”