The current Noosa Parks Association (NPA) newsletter projects another effort at justifying the pending plans for commercial development of Cooloola National Park.
It manufactures this justification by constructing a fictionalised collision of principles and declaring the NPA to have struck a ‘moderate balance’ between the two.
One of these, the Cardinal Principle, is very real. It requires that National Parks “provide, to the greatest possible extent, for the permanent preservation of the area’s natural condition and the protection of the area’s cultural resources and values”.
This principle has been the keystone of National Parks in Queensland since their inception. It is the very basis of what they are and why we love them as we do.
The proposed collision would be fatal to it.
The event poised to steamroll the Cardinal Principle in this terrible collision is not a principle, as asserted by chief NPA theorist Michael Gloster, but an act of commercial opportunism being advocated by the state as a direct result of corporate-lobbied policy formulation within the tourism department.
The NPA spiel confects this commercial development scenario into a principle and then alleges it to be so fundamental, and so noble, that a ‘moderate balance’ would be struck by driving it fatally into the Cardinal Principle.
This confection by NPA starts with a significant truth: “The traditional owners of Cooloola, the Kabi Kabi people, have a moral and legal right to co-own and co-manage Cooloola with the Queensland Government…”
This is absolutely correct. However, neither the government, nor its development goals and process, nor the NPA are either providing or advocating for this distinct outcome.
Upon that primary truth the NPA spiel then adds this house of cards: “…and to benefit culturally and financially from a commercial Cooloola Great Walk with overnight catered accommodation. This principle flows from the advent of Native Title in the early 1990s.”
This very assertively and falsely implies entitlement and imperative under Native Title to ‘a commercial Cooloola Great Walk with overnight catered accommodation’. Yes, the Kabi people do have cultural and financial rights upon any development in the Park. However, to use those intrinsic Kabi rights to leverage entitlement to any commercial interest is a heinous use of logic.
This gruesome logic also leads us to the edge of a very steep and slippery slope. If Kabi entitlement to economic benefit validates on-park development, where might that path end, or not end? Hotels? Resource extraction? Boutique or even broad-acre agriculture? The potentially doomed Cardinal Principle provides the only secure barrier to such functional drift by explicitly designating protection of natural and cultural values while excluding western economic land tenures and construction, such as the CABN project.
Moreover, NPA’s ‘moderate balance’ fails to advocate the Kabi peoples’ primary, autonomous rights of park co-ownership and co-management. It focuses solely upon the provision of benefits that are subsidiary and subordinate to the private commercial contract. This secondary benefit is then used as a PR tool to justify the development and its destruction of the Cardinal Principle. This smacks of opportunism and neo-colonialism.
There is no collision between the Cardinal Principle and authentic Kabi Law. The collision involves a speeding corporate tourism vehicle, not one that conveys social justice to any cultural group.
