NO PROSPECT OF PROSPECTING UNDER ANDREWS
Member for Western Victoria, Bev McArthur used an adjournment debate to ask the Minister for Environment to stop locking up state forests and preventing gold prospecting from taking place.
The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is recommending that another 77 000 hectares of public land be converted to national parks and reserves, which will likely further restrict prospecting.
In the 2013 Investigation into Additional Prospecting Areas in Parks, VEAC said that “Some activities undertaken by prospectors can damage natural values by causing disturbance of soils and damage to vegetation.”
Prospecting does not involve the use of machinery and subsequently the damage inflicted upon the environment is minimal. It involves the use of hand tools to dig holes less than 30cm deep and 50cm wide, which are then filled compulsorily.
The Prospectors and Miners Association of Victoria has over 14,500 members, who provide significant economic benefits to regional towns to which they travel.
Mrs McArthur said “Beholden to ideologues, this Government appears determined to destroy the country pursuits which Victorians have enjoyed for decades.”
“Gold prospecting continues to be under siege by the government’s policy of locking up our state forests. Public spaces belong to all Victorians, not Parks Victoria, not the Government and not the Premier.”
“This Government’s obsession with trying to avoid unearthing a single blade of grass is precisely the attitude that has contributed to the build-up of fuel loads in state forests and the out-of-control vegetation that has become rampant on our roadsides, which has exacerbated fire risk.”
"The Government has to stop this obsession driven from inside the tram track zealots of ‘locking up the forests and throwing away the keys’ and trying to end all interest in legitimate and healthy country pursuits."
5 March 2020