The Tasmanian Conservation Trust has been in operation for more than 50 years. Throughout out our fifty years of operation, we have worked and continue to work on many issues relevant to the Committee’s terms of reference. We work in a wide range of ways to achieve conservation of biodiversity and natural places through advocating for changes to government policy and legislation, taking legal challenges and planning appeals, participating in government and other committees and forums, making submissions on strategies, management plans, discussion papers etc and running our own strategically important hands-on projects.
On a personal note, I worked for seventeen years with the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia as the Tasmanian Coordinator of the Threatened Species Network. Since 2008 I have worked for the TCT and since 2009 have been the Director of the TCT.
Conservation of biodiversity essentially involves:
- establishment and active management of a comprehensive reserve system, covering terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments;
- integration of biodiversity conservation into development assessment processes, reserve management and spatial planning systems;
- targeted strategies and conservation programs to retain, manage and restore habitats and species;
- stand alone threatened species and biodiversity legislation that provides for their identification and protection.
In respect of all of these approaches to biodiversity conservation Tasmania has been going backwards. In this submission I have documented the failure of the current and preceding state governments to address biodiversity and threatened species conservation in a strategic, proactive, regulated and integrated way. I have made critical comments on the following:
- Natural Heritage Strategy for Tasmania (2013-2030)
- Threatened Species strategy for Tasmania
- Threatened species recovery plans and programs
- Threatened species numbers over time
- Forest Practices Code
- Tasmanian Permanent Native Forest Estate Policy
- Marine Protected Areas
- Freshwater ecosystems reserves
- Terrestrial reserves
- Tasmanian Planning System
- Destruction of east coast reefs by the long-spined sea urchin
- Development assessment in Parks and Reserves
- Reserve management plans and strategic programs
The current state government has shown almost no interest in biodiversity conservation. In five years of government, their only initiative has been to increase penalties for killing or injuring threatened animals. Our thinking must be much more ambitious, informed and focused of strategic, institutional and regulatory responses.
Only through a combination of these approaches can the key threats to biodiversity be adequately mitigated and new threats avoided. Our goal must be to get to a point where key indicators of biodiversity health are maintained or improved. We must not be satisfied with managing threatened species to avoid extinctions but need to reverse their decline and recover them. We need to implement biodiversity programs so that new species do not become listed as threatened. We need to safeguard against uncertainty by having comprehensive reserve systems and must fill the many gaps in the current system. Native vegetation needs to stop being lost and our focus move to improve the quality and connectivity of remaining vegetation.
I am presenting at the Committee’s hearing on 4 February 2019 and can elaborate on any matter raised and can provide additional written material if requested.
Natural Heritage Strategy for Tasmania 2013-2030
This Natural Heritage Strategy for Tasmania 2013-2030 (Strategy), produced by Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE) in 2013 is perhaps the closest thing that Tasmania has to a statewide biodiversity strategy. The TCT provided detailed input to the Strategy’s development in 2012-13. While it has flaws it sets out a series of strategically important actions for biodiversity conservation. The Strategy commits to the development of an: ‘implementation plan’ which will be developed in 2013 for the first five years of the strategy (2013 – 2018)’ (page 5).
The Strategy further commits to ‘In 2018 a review will consider progress with implementation’ (Page 5).
In 2013 and 2014, after the Strategy’s completion, I made numerous inquiries with DPIPWE regarding the ‘implementation plan’ but no response was ever provided. We have seen no evidence that the ‘implementation plan’ was ever developed and can see no evidence that the Strategy is being implemented in any significant coordinated way. We also have seen no evidence that the review took place.
The Strategy is published on the DPIPWE’s web site along with the following statement:
‘The strategy has been developed in consultation with stakeholders in Tasmania. Successful implementation will require all stakeholders working together.’
The TCT is a key stakeholder that made very substantial input to the development of the Strategy and endeavored to be involved with its implementation. I can say that DPIPWE has never contacted us to work with us on the implementation of the Strategy.
We are involved with numerous state government committees and forums and make submissions on a range of strategies related to biodiversity conservation. The Strategy is not sited in these processes and seems to play little or no role in directing them.
After more than five years it seems clear that the state government simply does not want this Strategy implemented but retains it on the DPIPWE web site as a token sign that it does not ignore natural heritage.
Threatened Species strategy for Tasmania
As with the Natural Heritage Strategy the ’Threatened Species Strategy for Tasmania’ seems to have not been effectively implemented and the recommended implementation plan and review process did not occur. The strategy seems to have long since lost any relevance and has not been replaced.
Threatened species recovery plans and programs
In the 1990s and into the twentieth century DPIPWE and other agencies received large amounts of funding mainly from the Australian government for a wide range of threatened species recovery plans, threat abatement plans, research projects and active programs to implement the plans.
Over the last decade or so DPIPWE has succeeded in obtaining funding for only a few mainly high profile threatened species management programs: Tasmanian devil, the fox eradication program and a few selected birds species e.g. Albatross.
Vital research and management actions for the endangered swift parrot and masked owl, to name just two, have in recent years been led by scientists from the Australian National University and run in collaboration with the Forest Practices Authority. These scientists have been responsible for obtaining Australian government funding and recently have obtained additional funding for management actions through on-line crowdfunding. Similar crown funding campaigns have been undertaken recently by the CSIRO to assist with handfish conservation. These endangered species should be a priority for the state government. DPIPWE should at least be driving the projects and leading efforts to seek funding and not leaving it to dedicated scientists in research organisations
The Threatened Species Unit of DPIPWE has always been limited to 2-3 full-time positions. The few dedicated staff does what they can to maintain the threatened species lists, provide advice on development assessments and provide information to the public. But there is little time or additional resources for them to run active management programs for threatened species or undertake research to improve knowledge of them. Now they don’t even coordinate the projects, this is outsourced.
The current state government’s only threatened species policy initiative in five years of the government has been to pass new laws to increase penalties for deliberately injuring or killing the threatened animals. This was in response to number of instances where wedge-tailed eagles were killed in recent years. They have provided no additional resources for enforcing these new laws nor have they committed to addressing the more significant impacts on eagles and other birds of prey e.g. electrocution, collisions, and habitat destruction.
Threatened species numbers over time
The numbers of threatened species listed on the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act have slowly but consistently risen since the act was created in 1995. There has been a corresponding increase in the number of species listed in the higher statuses. The lists have grown over the same time that many other species have been delisted due to improved knowledge and taxonomic changes.
Comparison of species listed Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act
Forest Practices Code
The Forest Practices Code is the main planning tool for planning forest practices in Tasmania and sets down processes that aim to ensure forestry operations are undertaken in a sustainable manner. The Code has only been reviewed and revised three times in its more than 30 years of existence and a forth review is currently underway.
A review of the biodiversity provisions of the Code was commenced in 2007 and a key scientific report was published in April 2019 titled ‘Review of the biodiversity provisions of the Forest Practices Code’. The Code was not amended until July 2015 and none of the significant recommendations from the 2009 scientific review were acted upon. The only significant change was the inclusion of a landowner’s duty of care statement which arguably makes no positive contribution to biodiversity conservation.
There have been no significant changes to the Code this century. The 2009 scientific review found the Code was greatly inadequate and recommended a wide range of changes to give greater protection to biodiversity. What has occurred is that many recommendations have resulted in further research and development of advisory guides and planning tools, most notably the threatened fauna advisor. But because the Code has not been changed the recommendations from these planning tools are not required to be implemented. This is the nub of the swift parrot problem, where breeding habitat is continuing to be approved for logging even where the advice is that it should not.
The current Code review commenced in 2018 and the TCT has been a member of the Biodiversity Working Group. At the first meeting of the working group, I asked the Chief Forest Practices Officer why the Code was being reviewed and whether it would result in a recommendation to the state government to amend legislation and policies to address critical weaknesses in the Code. I specifically raised the need to amend the Code to stop the destruction of swift parrot breeding habitat. I was told that the review was not to consider policy issues and we were just to rewrite the Code. This was because the state government had not indicated any interest in changing legislation or policy in regard to forest practices.
Tasmanian Permanent Native Forest Estate Policy
One piece of good news among all of the gloom about biodiversity conservation in Tasmania is that in recent years there has been a relatively small area of native vegetation cleared under permit for conversion to farm land or for plantation forestry. In the year to June 2018 there was just 565 hectares cleared statewide and in the years prior to this the area was about 700 hectares. There has even been some conversion of plantations back to native forest as some land managers correct past management mistakes.
However, the current approach to controlling forest clearing is far from acceptable. The Tasmanian Permanent Native Forest Estate Policy sets clearing limits and provides guidance to the Forest Practices Authority in regulating clearing. While the current policy includes some sensible constraints on clearing, it can be changed by the state government minister at any time and without the need for public comment. While the government claims that large scale land clearing is no longer allowed this is not true as the policy allows for exemptions for larger areas to be cleared. And landowners can clear up to forty hectares per year each year without limits.
The clearing policy needs to be incorporated into legislation to give certainty for the retention of a statewide permanent native forest estate. Legislation needs to incorporate a process to rapidly phase out any clearing beyond where it needs to retain preexisting cleared areas along fences, tracks and around infrastructure.
Marine Protected Areas
Excluding the large Marine Protected Areas (MPA) around Macquarie Island there is only 2.66% of Tasmania’s marine waters in MPSs and only 1.1% is ‘no-take’. Tasmania has eight marine bioregions but four of these have zero MPAs. There are no reserves on the west coast north of Bathurst Harbour and the entire north coast and Bass Strait Islands. The Freycinet Bioregion has only two reserves and one is very small. The Bruny Bioregion only has two small no-take reserves and all the other reserves allow fishing.
Tasmania’s Marine Protected Areas system is pitifully inadequate but it has been more than ten years since any MPA’s were proclaimed in Tasmania. With the growing impact of global climate change on our coastal waters and other threats (such as the destruction of rocky reefs on Tasmania’s east coast due to proliferation of the Centrostephanus sea urchin) there is a greater need than ever to have a comprehensive system of MPAs.
Freshwater ecosystems reserves
During the early stages of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement (TRFA) funding was allocated to develop the Conservation of Freshwater Ecosystem Values (CFEV) system - which is a database that identifies and prioritizes conservation values for all freshwater ecosystem types including identifying unique and threatened species. Freshwater ecosystems are varied and include streams and rivers, lakes (or water bodies), wetlands, salt marshes, estuaries, and karst. Each ecosystem type has diversity within it and priorities are attributed according to naturalness, representativeness, land tenure and distinctiveness.
The development of the CFEV database was intended to be the first stage and that a second stage was to assess the reserve status of freshwater ecosystems and make recommendations for reserves to add the National Reserve System. This was never progressed and there remain gaps in our reserves system and numerous important freshwater ecosystems in insecure reserves.
Terrestrial reserves
The report ‘Implementation of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement 2007-2012 (Prepared by the Tasmanian and Australian Governments for the third Five-Yearly Review of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement’ (Implementation Report)) found that the reservation target on private land had not been met. However, it is not explicitly stated as a shortfall. Predictably, neither the Implementation Report nor the ‘Joint Government Response to the Review of Implementation of the TRFA’ made a recommendation that more forests should be reserved on private land to meet this shortfall.
The State of the Forests Tasmania 2012 prepared by the Tasmanian Forest Practices Authority makes it perfectly clear that many forest communities are poorly reserved at a statewide level and that many of these can only really have their level of reservation increased by securing areas on private land. In relation to Indicator 1.1.c Extent of Area By Forest Type and Reservation Status, the SOFR finds that:
- ‘Three forest communities have less than 15% of their current extent in reserves: all of which are dry eucalypt communities. For all these communities, the majority of the remaining extent is on unreserved private land.’
- ‘Seven communities, mainly from dry eucalypt group, have less than 7.5% of their estimated pre-1750 extent protected in reserves’.
The SOFR does not assess the reservation status of forest communities at a bioregional level but if this was done then some of the communities referred to above would have reservation levels in some bioregions far lower than the statewide levels. Also, other communities that are well reserved at a statewide level would be poorly reserved in some bioregions.
The Implementation Report found that when the Forest Conservation Fund Program was completed 28,023 hectares was covenanted, which was 17,577 hectares less than the target. The Implementation Report states that the ongoing revolving fund achieved only 2603 hectares ‘conserved’ (which may include some areas not formally reserved). This leaves 14,974 ha (and potentially more) still to be protected on private land to achieve the TRFA targets.
The TCT unsuccessfully recommended that the target of 14,974 ha on private land should be reflected in the Extended RFA as a default forest reservation target until the reservation targets are reviewed, too take account of changes in conservation status, scientific knowledge, land use and condition and reserve status.
The Tasmanian government currently provides very few resources or assistance to the more than 2000 people who own the 840 properties with covenants and other private reserves which total more than 160,000 hectares of land. These Tasmanians have generously contributed to the National Reserve System by protecting their property and managing it on an ongoing basis. Most properties have habitat for threatened species including many that are poorly represented in the public reserve system. These people deserve far more assistance and support with management. Without it some reserves may with loose conservation values and some owners may want to remove the covenant.
There is no financial assistance available to encourage property owned to enter covenants. The only incentives are the exemption from land tax and rate rebates in some municipalities.
We are hearing of a growing number of landowners wanting to remove or amend their covenants, sometimes out of frustration with not getting assistance with management. One owner of a highly important covenanted property was so frustrated with the lack of assistance from DPIPWE with deer control that they decided to not extend their fixed-term covenant. We have heard of other examples where landowners want to amend the covenant boundary, sometimes for legitimate reasons but have not gone about this process in a well informed and planned way. Even in these cases there is little resistance from the state government to requests from landowners to amend or revoke covenants.
Tasmanian Planning System
The Tasmanian Resource Management and Planning System(the Tasmanian Planning System) has been in existence since 1993 but there has never been any policy established to identify the priorities and mechanisms for biodiversity and threatened species conservation. The existing local municipal planning schemes are highly inadequate as they focus only on threatened species and threatened vegetation communities and not biodiversity more broadly. Biodiversity is principally addressed through a code that crudely designates areas as priorities based mainly on vegetation mapping that is highly inaccurate and largely omits fauna habitat. These are static documents that are not regularly updated and therefore are always out of date and omit many important areas. Impacts on fauna other than vegetation removal are not addressed. Impacts on fauna habitat are assessed by proponents that routinely deliver highly compromised outcomes even for threatened species.
The Tasmanian Statewide Planning Scheme is soon to come into force but no attempt has been made to improve on the current approach to biodiversity conservation. At the outset of the process to develop the scheme the state government made a commitment to provide a more accurate and rigorous data base to inform the development of the natural area code and help councils with zoning but this never eventuated. There has been no policy direction or guidance to councils in how to apply zones to minimize impacts on threatened species.
The proposed statewide Natural Assets Code is so strewn with exemptions, gaps, loopholes and vagaries of key terms that it is hard to imagine that even the most endangered species would be properly protected through planning approvals unless an enlightened proponent insists upon it.
The approach taken with the code is a recipe for continued fragmentation and degradation of vegetation that will increase the risk of endangered species going extinct and add more species to the endangered list.
Destruction of east coast reefs by the long-spined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii)
Tasmania’s fisheries management legislation is quite impressive and many Tasmanian fisheries are comparatively well managed. The rock lobster fishery is one extraordinary exception. Overfishing is causing an environmental and economic disaster on the east coast. For more than a decade fisheries managers have refused to admit the problem and consider that fundamental changes are needed to how the fishery is managed.
The Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) released a report in December 2018 that shows that the long-spined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii) has exploded in numbers and had destroyed 15% of all east coast reefs and in some places, 50% of reefs have been destroyed. IMAS has produced modeling that predicts that 32% of east coast reefs will be destroyed by 2021 and if nothing is done that an average of 50% of east coast reefs may be lost to urchin barrens in the future.
The long-spined sea urchins eat the critical kelp and seaweeds leaving ‘barrens’ which are largely devoid of other species. The creation of barrens causes a permanent loss to the marine biodiversity and eliminates recreational and commercial rock lobster and abalone fisheries. This problem has arisen as a result of overfishing leaving insufficient numbers of rock lobsters of sufficient size to predate on the sea urchin - lobsters must be significantly larger than the legal catch size to be able to break open the urchin’s shell.
After years of lobbying by the TCT, the state government has finally acted by instigating a stakeholder’s workshop in December 2018 to look at possible solutions. There has already been an enormous loss of reef habitat and without drastic action up to half of all east coast reefs are under threat. The state government needs to take urgent and decisive action to address the overfishing of lobsters that is the root course of this problem.
Development assessment in Parks and Reserves
The Parks and Wildlife Service’s Reserve Activity Assessment system is used to assess and approve all developments and major works and activities in reserved land. The RAA is not prescribed by legislation but it set out in a series of policy documents developed by the PWS. While the process described in those documents is generally appropriate, there is no guarantee that it will be implemented. There is no guarantee of public input on assessments of developments and no opportunity to challenge approval. The process can also be changed without any public or parliamentary oversight.
The RAA process provides for public participation in respect of Level 4 developments and activities, the most impacting. However, PWS has total discretion in the designation of the assessment level of a project and there is nothing dictating what form any public participation should take.
Given the current government’s great enthusiasm for facilitating development in national parks and reserves, and with scores of them on the books, the informal and non-transparent RAA process is highly likely to deliver highly compromised decisions, including for threatened species.
The controversial Lake Malbena tourist development (proposed for Halls Island in Lake Malbena in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area) is a perfect example of the RAA’s flaws. The development, in the heart of the world heritage wilderness, was approved by the PWS without an opportunity for the public to comment on the project in its entirety. The referral to the Australian government only needed to address certain matters of national significance, and the decision was that these did not need separate assessment by the Australian government. The assessment by the Central Highlands Council only assesses the project against narrow criteria in the planning scheme.
Other recent examples of RAA assessments resulting in compromised outcomes for threatened species are two mountain bike tracks recently approved for reserved land in the northeast of Tasmania. Tracks have been approved for construction through vegetation that is highly vulnerable to Phytophthora. Over the life span of the track is guaranteed that this destructive pathogen is introduced.
The PWS undertakes large scale strategic fuel reduction burns and we have received advice from PWS staff that insufficient planning and precautions are taken to minimize negative impacts of these burns on biodiversity values. The RAA’s for these are not released for public comment.
Reserve management plans and strategic programs
Other than the controversial revised Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Management Plan 2016, there have been no new or revised formal reserve management plans for more than a decade in Tasmania. It seems to be an unofficial policy of recent state governments that reserve planning is not important and may make it difficult to facilitate certain develops.
Management planning has great potential to zone areas and recommends rules that avoid or minimize potential impacts on threatened species from developments, infrastructure and human use.
We note that the PWS only received funding in the last state budget to develop a fire management plan for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. It is extraordinary that no whole of the TWWHA fire plan has ever been produced even though it has been called for many years. Delaying this funding and the plan may well have meant that the PWS were less prepared for this fire season and this contributed to the recent fires escaping in the TWWHA.
A draft World Heritage Area Invasive Species Strategy was produced in 2005 but has never to my knowledge been finalized. There has been virtually no funding for invasive species management at a strategic level for the TWWHA. This is despite Greg Hunt and Matthew Groom announcing in 2015 several millions of dollars for managing invasive species and roads in the TWWHA extension areas.
Yours sincerely,
Peter McGlone
Director
Tasmanian Conservation Trust
0406 380 545