The Member for Burnett Stephen Bennett has been banging the drum in State Parliament, calling again for a Parliamentary Inquiry into the 2018 bushfires.
Mr Bennett spoke on the Nature Conservation (Special Wildlife Reserves) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2018 regarding a number of significant concerns raised by stakeholders.
“The long title of the Bill allowed me again to call for a Parliamentary Inquiry into the bushfire’s and the Queensland Governments lack of consultation with those who have been excluded from the process, those who have lost so much,” he said.
“We need to make our State as prepared as possible, it is good public policy that we review these devastating fires.
“The opening paragraph of the Explanatory Notes in this Bill clearly acknowledges that the government cannot adequately protect Queensland’s large protected estate.
“This Parliament needs to facilitate some very serious investigation as to why fires have occurred in the first place and to the extreme levels experienced.
“However today we debated a Bill that would increase the protected estates without any regard to bush fire mitigation.
“The State Government is a land owner like everyone else, with perhaps more obligations to their neighbours to do hazard reduction burns and maintain these protected estates.
“There is no way that anybody looking at the current state of the burnt out national park areas can say that there is responsible management of these areas at present.
“So I ask, what is the future of the Special Wildlife Reserves being proposed in the Bill?”
27/03/19