Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to support this motion and I commend the member for making it a part of this day's business in this parliament. The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in the small town of Ramsar near a significant wetland in Iran on 2 February 1971. Since then the convention on wetlands has taken its name. The Ramsar convention holds the unique distinction of being the first modern treaty between nations aimed at conserving natural resources. The original Ramsar convention's intention was to protect migratory waterbirds and their habitats. Clearly, this was a unique idea at the time given most people had no real concern about habitats beyond their own borders. The convention has now been broadened in its scope to include the protection of all wetland biodiversity and the wise use of all wetlands, and that includes an understanding of human use of those wetlands.

Australia was one of the first countries to become a contracting partner to the convention and it designated one of the world's first Ramsar sites, on Cobourg Peninsula, in 1974. Australia's 64 Ramsar sites now cover around 8.1 million hectares including freshwater, marine, permanent and ephemeral wetlands in every climatic zone.

Eleven of Victoria's wetlands are listed as Ramsar sites. They include the Barmah forest and the Gunbower forest in my electorate of Murray. The Barmah-Millewa forest is the largest river redgum forest in Australia, covering 66,000 hectares of floodplain and is of special value for maintaining the genetic and ecological diversity of the region because of its size and variety of communities. The Barmah forest also has the most extensive areas of the now-rare Moira grasslands in Australia.

Providing environmental flows to Ramsar and other sites in Australia has always been a priority for both the New South Wales and Victorian governments. The first environmental flow into the Ramsar listed wetlands from the Murray and into the Barmah-Millewa forest was in 1979. In 1993 the Murray-Darling Ministerial Council allocated an annual 100 gigalitres to the Barmah-Millewa forest and its Ramsar listed wetlands. This environmental flow has been released from the Murray into the forest since then in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005-06 and 2010. The environmental flows are not new therefore to modern thinking, but what is now realised is that environmental flows are often best managed with regulators and other works and measures. It is not a case of flooding over the banks of a river and hoping for the best. The tragedy is that over the years local Barmah-Millewa forest experts—and they have indeed been local people—have been sacked and replaced by inexperienced and often poor managers of the environment drawn from the public service of New South Wales and Victoria. The community fora once guaranteed that there was a decent outcome. Now we are seeing some terrible outcomes. The tragedy is that, despite the commitment of significant environmental flows to the Barmah-Millewa forest and the Ramsar-listed wetlands, which include nearly 27,000 hectares of freshwater wetlands, they have been experiencing the worst blackwater events ever recorded. This has been a consequence of poor forest and wetland management in the area. The biggest blackwater events on record are a consequence of a lack of any cold burns for at least 40 years and a lack of any grazing when it was noticed that the vegetation loads were the largest on record and would be a danger if there were hot, shallow waters flooding into the forests. When that did occur we had enormous deaths of a whole range of biota including crayfish and endangered species, Murray cod and other fish. Indeed, even the vegetation has been killed.

This has not been the only tragic event in the Barmah-Millewa forest as a result of the incorrect or the misunderstood management of the environmental flows. In February in the summer of 2009 there was in fact a theft of environmental water. It occurred when a number of regulators were broken open by some misguided individuals who thought that not enough water had been released at that time into the forest. Regulators were smashed and locks were smashed, resulting in a flood of about 850 megalitres into the forest. It was a misguided and tragic attempt. Unfortunately, some 30 kilometres by five kilometres, or 60 square kilometres in all, of forest and wetlands were affected. Waterbirds attempted to breed but with no hope of fledging their offspring, given the short, sharp nature of this flow and, of course, the blackwater event that followed. There was also a tragedy in 2006, with 10 per cent of the birds in the major bird-breeding event killed when environmental flows were cut off too soon and delivered too late into the forest. (Time expired)

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