Beautiful Cape York Peninsula - World Heritage one day, clearfelled for cotton the next!

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Lyndon Schneiders
Cape York and Far North Queensland Campaigner
Wilderness News, June 2000

A wise person once told me that the path to protecting the Cape York wilderness would have more twists and turns to it than the Great Ocean Road. And so the prophecy has proven accurate.

It is now seven years since The Wilderness Society helped put Cape York back onto the front pages through the trail-blazing Starcke campaign. In that time, we have seen our hopes come close to realisation on a number of occasions, only to have them dashed by the ebb and flow of regional and national politics.

Our objectives have always been the same - the protection of the environmental and cultural treasures of the Cape York wilderness through World Heritage listing and the return of traditional lands to their original custodians.

Moonlight on Savanna, Lakefield National Park (by Kerry Trapnell)

Along the road we have acquired new friends and developed unique alliances. The strongest ties have developed between environmentalists, pastoralists associated with the Peninsula Cattlemen's Association, and Aboriginal groups and communities. These ties have been bound through the Cape York Heads of Agreement (Land Use) process.

Throughout all that time, we have stood firm in the belief that the best prospects for the future of Cape York and its peoples are intricately linked to the protection of its natural and cultural values. This is why World Heritage has been so important. It also involves recognition that the protection of Cape York is a matter of global importance.

That this view has not been universally shared is an understatement. For a range of interests, including the Queensland National Party and their leader, Rob Borbidge, the Howard government and sections of Queensland's Department of Primary Industries and Natural Resources, the idea of not 'conquering and civilising' the Cape appears to be intolerable.

In the minds of these people, the Cape is a place of untapped potential wealth. Soils are there to be cultivated with cotton, cane and food crops, wild monsoonal rivers are primed to be dammed, untold mineral wealth waits to be liberated from the restrictive confines of the earth, and the extensive wilderness forests are chock-a-block full of merchantable timber. For these groups, the Cape remains the final frontier of development.

For followers of the cult of development it is irrelevant that the results of one of Australia's most extensive surveys of economic potential, the five-year-long Cape York Peninsula Land Use Study (CYPLUS), found little in the way of mineral wealth, suitable soils for agriculture, high quality timber or the availability of suitable infrastructure - such as even one sealed road.

Therefore, it is not surprising that some of these interests have reacted rather negatively to news that, two months ago, the Beattie government finally bit the bullet and provided funding for the long awaited assessment of the significance of the conservation values of Cape York. This assessment, which will build on the work of the CYPLUS project that identified 82% of Cape York's 14 million hectares containing values of conservation importance, was a key plank in the State ALP's election policies in 1998.

This new assessment proposal, developed by a group of eminent scientists and environmentalists, has been labelled the SOS process. SOS is short for Statement of Conservation Significance. The project, expected to be completed in six months, and which will cost $183,000, involves three stages.

The first stage involves gathering and collating all existing literature and research available on the natural environment of Cape York. Obviously this will draw heavily from information gathered for the CYPLUS process. It will also involve gathering all research undertaken since the completion of CYPLUS related projects in the mid-1990s.

	Normandy Floodplain Lakefield National Park (by Kerry Trapnell)

The second stage will feature the convening of an expert workshop in Cairns. This workshop will bring together international and national authorities on Cape York and tropical environments. The workshop will develop a series of themes of conservation significance. For example, it is imagined that the theme of significance of the Cape's tropical rainforests will be paramount, as will be the significance of the extent of tropical wilderness savanna.

Following the expert workshop, the final stage of the SOS will involve the evaluation of these themes against internationally recognised conservation criteria - including World Heritage, the Ramsar Convention for internationally important wetlands etc. This will provide the core of the Final Statement of Significance. This final document will identify which parts of Cape York Peninsula should be afforded the highest levels of protection through World Heritage inscription and complementary management and use. Past informed 'guesstimates' have identified that approximately seven million hectares of Cape York Peninsula may contain World Heritage values.

This information will be critical in guiding the development and implementation of a 'pastoral property acquisition fund'. The creation of an acquisition fund was a key recommendation of the Cape York Heads of Agreement and is consistent with the Beattie Government's Cape York policy platform. That the identification of World Heritage values and their protection through voluntary land acquisition are not part of Commonwealth Minister for the Environment, Senator Robert Hill's, world view was made perfectly clear in a copy of correspondence between Senator Hill and his Queensland counterpart, Rod Welford.

In this extraordinary letter, dated April 17 this year, Senator Hill wrote: "I have noted your advice regarding the Queensland Government's action to assess the natural and cultural values across Cape York. I remain concerned that an assessment against an international criterion (World Heritage) may disenfranchise significant groups in the community."

This comment was written just four months after the Cape York Regional Advisory Group (CYRAG), representing all significant groups across Cape York, including cattle producers, the Queensland Mining Council, local government and aboriginal communities, unanimously passed a resolution supporting the Statement of Significance Assessment, including World Heritage.

The Chair of the CYRAG then wrote to Senator Hill on January 31, 2000, drawing the Minister's attention to this resolution.

On the beach at Quintells Beach, Lockhart River (by Kerry Trapnell)

Who are these significant interests that oppose the SOS, Senator Hill? Of course, Senator Hill isn't alone in opposing World Heritage and the protection of Cape York wilderness. Since the funding of the SOS process, bureaucrats from the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and the Department of Natural Resources have moved heaven and earth to gain community backing for ridiculous proposals to dam the Cape's wild rivers and clearfell the tropical savanna woodlands for sugar and cotton.

The bureaucracy is out of control. For example, while the CYPLUS process identified 8,500 hectares of Cape York that would be suitable for intensive agriculture, the Department of Primary Industries now claims that 3.8 million hectares of country are suitable.

The same with dam building. Although CYPLUS clearly ruled out the prospects for irrigated agriculture outside the south-eastern corner of Cape York, the Department of Natural Resources now proposes undertaking a water development study of every major sub-catchment across Cape York.

One step forward, two steps back. This has been the unhappy story for Cape York over the past decade. Hopefully, in six-months time, with the SOS process completed and the values of the Cape finally documented, the likes of Senator Hill and the dam builders will have to accept the inevitable. They will no longer be able to stand in the way of environmental progress on Cape York Peninsula.