The following opinion piece was published in the Weekly Times newspaper, March 5, 2014, and was written by Phil Ingamells, from the Victorian National Parks Association.

The project to put cattle back into the Alpine National Park has put Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt in something of a pickle.

Should he leave decisions on land management to the states, as many in his Government will be pressing him to do, or should he act on his clear responsibility to protect the National Heritage-listed Alpine National Park?

alpine grazingThe Victorian Government hasn’t made it easy for him to surrender his authority. Its submissions have been careless, rushed and lacking in expertise.

Having made a pre-election promise to the mountain cattlemen that they’d get back into the park, the Victorian Government framed the exercise as a scientific trial to “prove” that alpine grazing would reduce fire.

But in December 2010 they hurried cattle into the park before they had even thought about out how to run a trial. Tony Burke, then federal Environment Minster, saw through the exercise and called a halt. This second attempt isn’t much better.

If you really want to know how grazing affects bushfires, you have to look at the behaviour of real fires, and two clever studies have done that.

One carefully measured the severity of fire across grazed and ungrazed areas of the Bogong High Plains after the 2003 fire. Another used satellite imaging right across the high country for both the 2003 and 2006 fires.

Both studies found that grazing didn’t significantly reduce fire extent or severity, and there was evidence grazing could alter vegetation over time to ­actually increase risk.

But the Victorian Government seems to be pretending these published didn’t happen.

Instead, the new “trial” will, inexplicably, put 300 cattle into the remote Wonnangatta Valley, letting them munch away on half the known population of a nationally threatened orchid.

Scientists and experienced land managers agree it will tell us nothing useful about fire behaviour. The Victorian Government is either showing incompetence, or taking the federal minster for granted, or both.