Further support for establishing Paparoa Range park

Press, 22 May 1982, Page 12

Further support for establishing Paparoa Range park

Another look at establishing a national park in the Paparoa Range has received further support.

The National Parks and Reserves Authority proposed asking the Lands and Survey Department to investigate the suitability of 28,000 ha in the Punakaiki area for a national park. Its decision follows a recent inspection tour of the West Coast when authority members talked with the West Coast United Council and other interested parties. The Forest Service ruled out a national park in the Paparoas as unnecessary earlier this year when releasing its draft management plan for a State forest in Buller, but the Parks Authority has used changed criteria in the National Parks Act to call for further investigation. The authority chairman, Mr D. A. Thom, said that it

now believed there was a “concentration of conservation values” in the area. Authority members last considered the idea two years ago.

Much of the unalienated publicly-owned land between the coast and summit of the Paparoas from the Tiropahi to the Punakaiki rivers, which the authority suggests for a national park, is State forest destined for multiple use in the Buller management plan. The Westland Conservator of Forests, Mr P. Fitzgerald, said that a large portion of the area would be managed similarly under reservations and zones in the Buller management plan.

“I thought that they (the authority) might have had something better to do,” he said.

Production forestry was the main point of difference between the two proposals. Logging was not allowed in a national park but the Buller plan catered only for a continuation of present smallscale logging in the area. A national park investigation need not interfere with

consideration of the Buller plan, said Mr Fitzgerald. Conservancy staff would probably take several months to sort more than 2000 submissions which had been received on the Forest Service draft proposals.

Environmentalists have already welcomed the announcement. The president of the native Forests Action Council, Miss Gwenny Davis, said that she was pleased about the investigation but regretted that the authority had ignored the interior and northern wilderness areas.

“It will just be a question of Waiting to see what Lands and Survey. Department come up with,” she said. The secretary of the Westland Timberworkers’ Union, Mr R. F. Beadle, said that the union opposed further large-scale reserves although it did not object to protecting areas of special merit, such as the Aranui caves.

“We consider there is enough of New Zealand tied up in national parks at the moment,” he said. Park designation not only locked up supplies of indigenoustimber, but minerals and other resources.