GREAT FOREST NATIONAL PARK MYTH EVAPORATES

FEATURE Peter McDonell

For over a decade, a small cohort of special interest lobby groups had lobbied hard publicly and behind closed doors to create a national park, which would result in widespread land tenure changes adversely impacting tens of thousands of people.

The proposed park would encompass a massive 355,000 hectares of forest within the Victorian Central Highlands and include what was previously Victoria’s primary native forest logging areas.

The key driver behind the creation of the park was to bring about an end to the native timber harvesting industry, as the park advocates cited this as the key process threatening the existence of the Leadbeater’s possum and the mountain ash forest. The Victorian government ended native timber harvesting on January 1, 2024.

Despite achieving the stated goal of ending timber harvesting in the central forested areas, the slick and well-funded public relations campaigns that attempted to build a social licence and to turn the concept into a reality rolled on. It should be noted that at no time has either the Labor, Liberal, or National Party ever held a policy position to create the park.

Over the last year, both the Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, and Environment Minister, Steve Dimopoulos, have made repeated public comments that did not support the creation of the park. This included the Premiers address in August, 2024, to the Herald Sun Bush Summit where she stated “I won't be putting a padlock on our public forest; it's not who I am, and it's not what I believe”, which followed on from Minister Dimopoulos’ statement on ABC 774 Radio in June where he stated that “The government is not looking at creating new national parks” and that the government has “no commitment to a National Park.”

This stance was bipartisan, with Nationals MP Melina Bath sponsoring the largest petition to go before the Victorian Parliament that called for no new creation of national parks.

Despite seemingly no interest from the major political parties, the Great Forest National Park campaign did incredibly well to leverage awareness from a sympathetic media for the best part of a decade.

In July 2025, Minister Dimopoulos again reiterated the government's stance that they never had a policy to create a national park and won’t, which came as no surprise, seeing it was consistent with their previous messaging; however, it caused a flurry of media attention as it appeared that the reality was finally dawning on the park’s proponents.