GOVERNMENT PROMISES - SO WHAT DID LABOR DO?

ANNA HITCHCOCK Gladstone Conservation Council

Labor has opened national parks to exclusive long term business leases that, as LNP and Labor had previously agreed, ‘’amounts to selling off the farm’’.  THEIR OWN WORDS. (See 'Leased Assets - Good as Sold')

These leases give exclusive rights to business interests on land that was dedicated and preserved as a public good for the long term public benefit. 

‘Ordinary’ people without technical expertise, older people who grew up proud of Queensland’s national parks, know the difference: ‘but that wouldn’t be a national park any more’. But Labor did not seek their input. There was NO consultation about this proposal. Only, after the event,  bureaucrats flew up and down the state in an attempt to placate the most affected persons – and only AFTER these persons had complained.​

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Most shocking of all, key people, now employed in the Department of Environment to bulldoze a path for specific private businesses, have neither qualifications nor interest in protecting natural areas. These Labor Government  employees are serving private interests, while we pay their public servant salaries.

• The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Department has disrespected the history of national parks and the public-spirited men and women who founded the national parks movement and worked through their lives to establish individual national parks. 
• The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Department acts as if the world began five years ago - with the Newman amendments to the NCA - dismissing 110 years of successive Queensland governments holding in trust these most precious of landscapes and special places of richest biodiversity.
• In November an Executive Director of QPWS dismissed the 110 year-old national park concept (and the Cardinal Principle of national park management) as ‘just ideology’ (November 2018).

Environment Minister Enoch has been strangely silent in the context of her staff exhibiting disrespect for national parks and those who would defend them; leaving DITID Minister Kate Jones and billionaire Brett Godfrey to run the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Department and ruin the peoples’ national parks.  ​

Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch

DITID Minister Kate Jones

Billionaire Tourism and Events Queensland chair Brett Godfrey