Dan Andrews’ parks choke towns, divide communities and favour white men

A Cranbourne family arrives at a Rubicon campsite to find a thicket of blackberry weeds adjoining a power station. A park ranger’s job is reduced to cleaning toilets. A Preston couple can’t find a parking spot at Warburton, where traffic to Mount Donna Buang is choked, and a bike trail plan divides the community.

Outside Olinda Falls, a cyclist swerves around cars banked on the roadside. Decayed interpretive boards baffle foreign students at Badger Creek, with one Facebook user describing the facilities as “a disgrace”.

These are scenarios experienced by weekend visitors to Victoria’s forested communities, where a parks deficit is dividing towns, accelerating ecosystem collapse, increasing bushfire threats and wedging bush users against one another. 

As research mounts confirming the health benefits of nature exposure, Melburnians are being channelled into parks designed in the 1990s for a population that has since more than doubled. While Sydneysiders enjoy several million hectares of integrated forests within an hour of the CBD, Melburnians can experience only fragments in Australia’s most cleared state.

“By our calculations, no Victorian government over the past 60 years has a worse record when it comes to park creation than the Andrews government,” says a Victorian National Parks Association report.

By 1992, the Kirner-Cain governments had protected 1.96 million hectares of forest as national park. Between them, subsequent governments protected roughly another half million. Former premier Steve Bracks declared one of his proudest achievements as “the Great Otway Range National Park — the biggest coastal national park in Australia. We removed logging … paying out $80 million and now we’re seeing 10 times more jobs created in tourism, hospitality and recreation in that area.”

Yet despite promises to protect areas including Mirboo North, Strathbogie Ranges, Central Highlands and East Gippsland, the Andrews government hasn’t legislated any large-scale additions to Victoria’s national parks estate. Nor has it implemented most Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) recommendations for improved and expanded conservation areas.

Instead, the Victorian government has stewarded the worst ecosystem crisis in the state’s history. Despite its promise to end native logging next year, it continues to introduce logging into state forests scheduled for national parks protection. It subsidised a frequently unlawful pulp log industry that increased bushfire risk, worsened species decline and cost Victorians hundreds of millions that could have funded nature reserves and associated jobs.

In state forests (managed by the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action) and national parks (managed by Parks Victoria), limited infrastructure serves a sector of largely white male bush users — 4WD enthusiasts, bikers, hunters and adventurers — over birdwatchers, community walking groups and tourists. The former are high-impact and politically organised; the latter are not. In January, an Upper Yarra management report warned that the “type of visitors attracted are not always aligned with local values considering catchment health and minimising bushfire risk”. 

Collection and publication of parks data remain deficient, but one survey ranks “inadequate maintenance of assets or facilities” first in the top 10 threats to visitor experiences. Other non-climate threats include illegal activities, inadequate facilities, visitor conflict, inadequate park servicing, overcrowding, weeds and changes to access.

Some parks host world-class walking tracks, but many are dilapidated or closed, with outdated signs and no information on sovereign Country, First Nations cultural knowledge or ecosystems. “Walking tracks are being managed by feral deer,” one bushwalker told me, nominating Donna Buang, Maroondah catchment, Cement Creek and Tanglefoot loop tracks among those degraded by weeds, logging and neglect.

Alongside impacts on Melbourne’s water quality and supply, this limits Melburnians’ nature exposure. Studies show proximity to nature parks influences people’s willingness to visit them, and polls show 72% to 90% of voters want them protected, expanded and better resourced. According to a 2022 analysis, Parks Victoria receives only “0.37% of the annual state budget, to manage 18% of our land areas and 5% of our marine waters”, with much of this budget going towards metropolitan parks. 

So threadbare is Parks Victoria funding that workers warn potential employees on Seek’s review page. “If you can’t deal with lack of funding then this is not the place for you,” one writes. Others write: “Trying to deliver on the smell of an oily rag … So underfunded that it cannot deliver even basic services”; “Understaffed and overworked”; “Maintenance of park assets within a limited budget is very challenging”; “People in regional jobs are feeling disillusioned”.

This might be fixable before the 2026 state election. A well-resourced parks system can relieve the bushfire and invasive weed threats from the bottleneck of crowds, which places stress on rural fringe towns and environments. The Andrews government can reverse the damage from its neglect, protect carbon stocks, create jobs, revitalise regions and improve nature experiences for Victorians.