Heritage listing upsets Queensland Govt

Press, 9 December 1988, Page 8

Heritage listing upsets Queensland Govt

NZPA Sydney The Australian Government and environmentalists yesterday claimed a major victory over the World Heritage listing for North Queensland rainforests.

Australia’s Minister for the Environment, Senator Graham Richardson, said the World Heritage Committee’s decision yesterday in Brasilia to inscribe the area on the World Heritage list marked the end of a 12-month battle.

The Queensland Government, however, said it would continue its fight to have the inscribed area of nearly 9000 sq km of rainforest reduced by 40 per cent to save logging jobs in the north of the state. The State Premier, Mr Mike Ahern, said his Government’s High Court challenge against the inscription would continue and north Queensland timber workers would be disappointed with the Federal Labour Government.

“It is quite ridiculous to demand that areas that

have been logged twice before are of such pristine value that they must be preserved for future posterity is to me quite outrageous in terms of common sense,” Mr Ahern said in a radio interview.

“But now we have got one last opportunity and that is to argue before the High Court that those areas that have been listed are not consistent with the values that are laid down in terms of World Heritage criteria.”

Senator Richardson told A.B.C. radio from Brasilia that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (1.U.C.N.) which examined the Queensland rainforest nomination described it as one of the best five ever put forward. “Given all of that, it was obvious that this property was always going to be inscribed on the list,” he said. "In fact I have been saying it was obvious for the last 12 months, which I guess adds more weight

to my amazement and that of most people in Australia that the Queensland Government should have continued to carry on about this nomination and indeed have spent very large sums of public money and sent it down the drain trying to oppose it.”

Senator Richardson said the World Heritage Committee’s decision meant there would be no more commercial logging in the area and was a recognition that the rainforests had to be preserved.

The Queensland rainforests are the seventh area to gain World Heritage listings. Others include the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park, forests in south-west Tasmania and the Uluru National Park around Ayers Rock. In each area a management regime is set up by Federal and state Governments to safeguard environmental qualities — preventing commercial activities such as logging and mining.

The I.U.C.N. had been concerned that the Queensland Government, as landowner, would not co-operate with the Federal Government in managing the northern rainforests. But the I.U.C.N. said that if agreement could not be reached a federal management structure could be set up.

The Australian Conservation Foundation congratulated the Federal Government on the successful World Heritage listing of Australia’s wet tropical forests.

The foundation’s Queensland campaigns officer, Ms Denise Bond, said it was rare to find two areas qualifying for world heritage listing side by side and the protection of North Queensland’s rainforest to reef continuum was cause for celebration. “These ancient and diverse forests are now safe from commercial logging, just as the reef is safe from mining for oil,” Ms Bond said.