LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
AS a regular visitor to Heyfield for my shopping, to this day I have never heard one solitary person associated with the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods timber mill, or from the Heyfield community, criticise the present mill management in any way.
It is rare to find a business of any size anywhere this could be said of.
The Victorian government politics behind the threatened closure of the mill go far deeper than just threatening the long term survival and viability of Heyfield and the surrounding community.
It is not just the timber industry that is threatened by this environmental lunacy.
By far the biggest threat to biodiversity and wildlife is hot wildfires from failed government land management.
The 1939 fire burnt out both sides of the mountains from about 125km from Melbourne from just east of Woods Point and west of Licola, to right up into New South Wales to the other side of Kosciusko in about four hours on Black Friday.
The environment in public land in the catchment of the upper Macalister River and along the mountains has been mismanaged so badly it now has the potential to produce a fire 10 times as intense as the fires of 1939.
Spotting from the massive snow grass build-up from the removal of alpine grazing and fuel reduction burning would now be capable of producing a fire possibly up to 75 times s intense as 1939 under the candle bark zone.
This will likely throw multiple spotting from the national park, onto the Gippsland plains.
This would start fires around towns and on dry land farms right out to the coast.
Every Gippslander should be up in arms.
Harriet Shing MLC, who represents the Gippsland area, has not bothered to responded to a letter regarding these concerns.
Many of us living in the mountains believe that if this environmental management continues, it is unlikely the viability of Lake Glenmaggie will not survive our lifetimes from the silting coming down the Macalister River from the park following hot fires.
Nearly seven per cent of the capacity of the lake has already been lost.
The only place birds, insects and lizards survived around Licola in the High Country from the fire responsible for the flooding was where cattle had accumulated, where clear felling from timber harvesting had not regenerated enough to carry a hot fire and Kevin Higgins’ property on the Bennison High Plains with traditional cool burning and grazing.
The Leadbeater’s Possum has little hope of surviving the present environmental land management, which is what needs to be addressed, not a government closing down another well managed industry.
To claim that more national parks are needed, or the management associated with them, is absurd when tourism to the mountains has dropped off to a fraction of what it was before the Alpine National Park was proclaimed.
