PARK WATCH Article December 2025 |

Victorian Protected Areas Council’s Felicity Brooke & Charlie Pascoe on why Victoria’s parks need our help

As park managers, we’ve spent our combined 70+ year careers protecting Victoria’s national parks and conservation reserves. We’ve tracked threatened animals through remote forests, developed management plans with communities, and helped damaged landscapes recover once logging and grazing have ceased.

We thought we had seen it all. So we were stunned in 2024 when budget cuts led to a Parks Victoria restructure that increased the communications and marketing team while reducing environmental and science staff.

Parks Victoria staff in the regions, long under-resourced, were instructed to list all work undertaken, amounting to a list of 111 items in a ‘schedule of services’, and make cuts. In order to meet further reduced staff capacities and budgets, they had to choose which must be done, do only if funded externally, or halted. Consequently, 51 services were deferred, many of them conservation programs not resourced through external funding, including Junior ranger programs.

In this 50th anniversary year of the National Parks Act, we couldn’t just walk away. Retired and former staff, with deep and extensive experience in park management accumulated over decades, formed the Victorian Protected Areas Council (VPAC).

VPAC is a professional association for current and former protected area managers that advocates for the critical role of protected areas in conserving natural and cultural values and visitor experiences, supports the professional development of current staff and facilitates ongoing contributions to protected area management by former staff.

The parks we love

Our national parks and other protected areas are living cultural landscapes, cared for by Traditional Owners for thousands of years. The reserve system we have today was built through passion, dedication and visionary policy but unfortunately not in consultation with First Nations People. Treaty will introduce new approaches to land management with the input of First Nations People, reshaping nature conservation and protected area frameworks in Victoria.

The story of national parks begins in 1892 with Tower Hill, Victoria’s first national park. By 1961, degraded by grazing, resource extraction and pest invasion, it had been downgraded to a state wildlife reserve.

Will the same fate befall our more recent national parks? The government is increasingly expecting them to focus on tourism and cater for incompatible or damaging recreational activities (such as deer hunting and gold prospecting), all whilst defunding critical and often long-term conservation programs.

The modern era of protected areas in Victoria really began with saving the Little Desert from development in the 1960s. This victory led to the establishment of the Land Conservation Council in 1971, now the Victorian Environment Assessment Council (VEAC), which undertook systematic investigations of Victorian public land, incorporating scientific evidence and extensive public consultation. It developed recommendations to government for appropriate uses of public land across the state. This has resulted in the establishment of a world-class system of parks and reserves, based on evidence, not politics.

The National Parks Act gave us as managers the tools to do our jobs properly. This legislation is prescriptive with clear objectives, beginning with the protection of nature and cultural values and concluding with the encouragement of recreation and education, subject to those activities not detrimentally affecting conservation values.

The unravelling

VEAC has been largely sidelined by the current government. Assessments that were once transparent and science-based with broad public input are now undertaken by government-appointed panels, influenced by political interests and with limited scientific or public input.

The government has announced it will not create any new national parks after the three central west parks. This is an appalling environment policy at a time when the status and future uses of nearly two million hectares of state forests needs to be re-evaluated following the end of native forest logging. It abandons the world-leading land-use assessment process maintained by successive governments for over half a century.

The marine parks story breaks our hearts. We’ve watched the commitment to protection crumble. The number of fisheries officers, who educate fishers and enforce protections, have been halved and two fisheries stations closed. Without enforcement, marine national parks are just lines on maps.

This pattern repeats everywhere we look. Management plans we developed with community input are ignored; the contract with affected communities broken. The shift to landscape-scale plans without specific infrastructure direction has created a void that tourism interests fill with their own agendas.

We see a fundamental misunderstanding of – or deliberate disregard for – the National Parks Act‘s objectives as evidenced by the government’s decision to no longer fund day-to-day conservation programs and to rely on short-term external grants. Not surprisingly, external funders are unwilling to underwrite the costs for what should be Parks Victoria’s basic land management obligations.

We have managed visitor impacts while balancing recreation with conservation, dealing with long-term recovery from bushfires, floods, and the effects of grazing and logging. Alpine peatlands and reintroduced wildlife, like the Southern Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby, need ongoing expertise. Parks Victoria faces persistent funding shortages, restructuring, and staff transfers, including fire and emergency roles moved to DEECA in 2023 and proposed staff transfer to the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority in 2026. This further reduces management capacity and expertise, eroding the professional foundation supporting our protected area system.

Why we’re speaking out

We’re speaking out for parks, for the communities they serve, and for future generations who deserve to enjoy them. We need to do three things urgently.

First, to alert the community that parks need help. Despite excellent work quantifying environmental, social, and economic benefits, this knowledge hasn’t translated into sustainable funding.

Second, to convince politicians about what parks provide: protection for nature, wellbeing benefits for people, and protection of ecosystem services like water catchments, flood mitigation, fish breeding habitats and carbon storage.

Third, to seek a better management model for our parks. Are Parks Victoria’s management responsibilities – spanning from Albert Park to national parks – too broad? Would a more conservation-focused entity like NSW’s National Parks and Wildlife Service or a federal park management agency, such as those in Canada and the United States, better serve our parks and the community?

We’ve dedicated our careers to building and strengthening Victoria’s system of national parks. Now we’re sounding the alarm. It’s time we act together to protect our parks.

Adapted from a presentation by Felicity Brooke to the VNPA AGM, 21 Oct 2025.

Felicity Brooke, VPAC President, was a parks planner, ranger, and regional coordinator of interpretation information and education, 1987-2024.

Charlie Pascoe, VPAC Vice-President and VNPA Councillor, was a park and biodiversity planner and manager across Victoria, 1988-2024.

victorianprotectedareascouncil.org