PARK WATCH Article September 2026 |

Matt Ruchel, Executive Director reports on an election year that’s shaping up as make-or-break for Victoria’s nature protection

There’s certainly an election in the air and change is afoot in more ways than one. Polls bouncing around, cost of living, construction and corruption dominating the headlines, and politicians from all sides still scratching around for announce-ables.

The recent changes in premier and environment minister (the fourth in three years!) will hopefully put an end to the string of backward steps we’ve seen on nature protection in the last few years under the leadership of Jacinta Allan.

We’ve called on new Victorian Premier Ben Carroll and Opposition leader Jess Wilson to take a fresh approach to protecting nature in Victoria. We also challenged them to come up with some positive policy, for which we’ve provided some suggestions.

A problematic new panel

We called for the rejection or significant amendments to the Outdoor Recreation Victoria Bill 2026. It was debated and amended in the upper house in June and, unfortunately, passed with amendments in the lower house in early August.

It’s a very poor piece of legislation that reflects badly on both Labor and the Coalition (who also supported it). They seemingly now have an agenda to undermine nature protection, rather than to protect our much-loved national parks and protected areas.

The legislation will create a body with sweeping influence over public land, which could impact nature protection right across Victoria. It was originally flagged as a simple merger of the Game Management Authority and the Victorian Fishing Authority as a cost saving measure. But it went much further.

A new Land Access Panel will be hand-picked by the relevant ministers, with no requirement for nature conservation or ecological expertise, no obligation to publish its advice, and no duty to assess impacts on nature. The panel will act without oversight from the independent Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), which was charged with assessing public land use and recently abolished by the government. This removal of oversight is supposedly a cost-saving measure.

VNPA wrote to all Victorian MPs expressing our concern at the Bill. The Bill was debated long into the night in the upper house, with the session finishing at 4 am on Friday morning. A string of amendments were proposed by the Greens, Animal Justice and National parties.

The government opposed many of the sensible amendments from the progressive crossbench, but supported a range of amendments from the National Party, including expanding the scope of the Land Access Panel to aquatic areas and changing the name of the prosed agency to ‘Fishing, Hunting and Outdoor Victoria’.

The legislation was also criticised by the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations for being silent on the role of Traditional Owners. They had also requested amendments to the bill.

The new premier and environment minister should take fresh look at their approach to nature protection and this legislation, including abandoning the Land Access Panel.

Meanwhile, we were happy to see the stand-alone portfolio of Outdoor Recreation, which has overseen a long list of attacks and backward steps, abolished in the recent cabinet reshuffle.

New parks on track but not yet delivered completely

The newly legislated protected areas – Wombat-Lerderderg, Mt Buangor and Pyrenees national parks, new conservation parks at Hepburn and Cobaws, and Wellsford Regional Park – will come into effect on Monday 5 October as they are officially handed over to Parks Victoria to manage.

What’s missing are a regional park, 30 smaller nature conservation reserves and bushland reserves promised as part of the government’s response to the original VEAC report. These were repeatedly promised for delivery this year as part of new Public Land Act. It would have also overhauled and consolidated how public land is managed, providing an opportunity to close the existing loopholes which still allow logging on public land.

Time before the election has now run out. The new Public Land Act, which has been years in the making, will not reach parliament before the government goes into caretaker mode for November’s election.

The other parks in the central west have been promised since 2021 and now they can’t be created via new legislation this term. Another approach would be to use a path through the Crown Land (Reserves) Act 1978 or similar, which would allow the promise to be delivered rather than deferred. This requires a quick gazettal rather than legislation. It can, however, be just as quickly undone.

A new Public Land Act could always be implemented later, but of course it depends on who wins the election.

The steep slippery slope of by-products 

Largely out of the blue in early May 2026, the Allan Government released a State Forest By-Products Framework. It effectively creates a loophole for a new form of incentivised logging and land clearing, with fewer protections than the industry it replaced, and no public consultation.

It’s now clear that the logging industry had the same idea. The election policy platform of the Victorian Forest Products Association (VFPA, who were also represented on the government’s Forestry Transition Implementation Reference Group), includes a call for a commitment to ‘maintain a formal by-products policy to ensure hardwood from fuel breaks, windthrow and healthy forest maintenance is utilised to its highest and best use.’

This mirrors the language used by the government, or is it the other way round? It’s a steep and slippery slope back on the road to native forest logging, and one which is lacking guard rails.

Victorians were told native logging was over, but the chainsaws and logging machines never really left; they just re-branded. Greater Gliders, Brush-tailed Phascogales and the forest giants they depend on deserve better than having their protection quietly traded away. Currently there’s no independent oversight, no enforceable standards, and no transparency about these ‘fire preparation’ operations such as strategic fuel breaks, clearing trees, and clean up after storms.

We’ve seen the damage caused by these operations across the state, including in the Dandenongs, Wombat-Lerderderg and Yarra Ranges national parks. More is on the cards with up to 6,000 km of planned land clearing through fuel breaks.

The problem is that native habitats don’t make by-products. Logs are part of the ecosystem. Animals like Brush-tailed Phascogales use logs to travel safely across the forest floor. Fungi grow on them. Without them, animals and new seedlings are exposed to invasive species like foxes, cats and deer. The removal of fallen and hollow-bearing trees from forests and woodlands are both formally listed as  ‘potentially threatening processes’ to a range of wildlife under state nature law (Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act), but this is being ignored.

Sticking up for nature

Taken together, these three stories tell us where nature protection really sits on the political agenda heading into November: sidelined, quietly wound back, or left to chance. A parliament that can wave through a Land Access Panel with no nature expertise and no transparency, but can’t find time to finish the job on the central west parks or close logging loopholes, is telling us something about its priorities.

That’s exactly why this election matters. Over the next few months, we’ll be pushing the major parties and every candidate we can reach to commit to real, enforceable protections for parks, habitats and wildlife in Victoria. We’ll need your voice too. Watch this space for how you can get involved as the campaign heats up.