Banned Grampians Climbers: Between A Rock And Rogue Rules
Parks Victoria has been caught out by the Victorian Auditor General for a conflict of interest that led to rock climbers being banned from some of Australia’s best rock climbing sites.
In 2019 Parks Victoria announced it was banning rock climbers from locations in the Grampians it had designated as Special Protection Areas due to their cultural sensitivity and Aboriginal rock art.
The ban shocked the climbing community which has always claimed to respect the sites for their environmental and cultural credentials, avoiding damage.
But Member for Western Victoria and Shadow Assistant Minister for Scrutiny of Government, Bev McArthur, said it is now very clear why the vetoes were made.
“The Auditor General has answered a lot of the questions that just didn’t make sense.
“But now they do,” Mrs McArthur said,
“The Auditor General has rightly put a spotlight on a conflict of interest, and a decision by Parks Victoria to avoid procurement and scrutiny rules.
“It split a contract and misleadingly designated a consultant as a contractor. The AG also reported that Parks failed to follow its own procurement procedures designed to avoid conflicts of interest.
“Its contract manager awarded a series of projects to a surveyor with whom he had recently co-authored two papers without declaring this conflict,” Mrs McArthur told the Victorian Parliament.
The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO) also noted the competitive process for was not followed for four of the most recent contracts for the surveyor because “…cataloguing of rock art is a highly specialised role with [name redacted] being the only qualified person to complete this task in the state”.
“The proprietary process failed completely,” Mrs McArthur said.
“In three of the four cases, certificates to exempt the contracts from due process were approved only after the surveyor had been approached, and in two of these, the work had already begun.
“It is quite a stunning way to go about public contracts with public money,” she said.
The VAGO report shared the sentiment.
It said: “At no point did the contract manager declare their relationship with the surveyor as a potential, perceived or actual conflict.”
Mrs McArthur has asked the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Lily D’Ambrosio, to order a peer review of the work done by the inappropriately engaged consultant.
“This has to change, and it has to start somewhere.
“Only now does the repressive and excessive banning of rock climbing make sense.
“The climbers have been unfairly banned from some of best routes in the epicentre of Australian rock climbing – and tarnished with an image of recklessness.
“Now they know rules were broken to achieve the bizarre overreach.”
8 November 2021
