The Liberal Government is committed to showcasing, protecting and celebrating our unique natural and cultural heritage assets, while growing our tourism industry and creating jobs for Tasmanians.

The draft Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Management Plan released yesterday focuses on managing our wilderness areas in a responsible way while ensuring we can use them to generate tourism and jobs. The draft Plan is about protecting what makes these areas unique and ensuring as many people from here and elsewhere get to enjoy them now and into the future.

The extreme Greens are the only section of the community who cannot see that we can give Tasmanians and visitors better opportunities to experience the World Heritage Area while also protecting the unique values within the area.

It is apparently news to the Greens that UNESCO actively encourages managers of World Heritage Areas to develop sustainable tourism offerings which foster understanding and appreciation of the Area*.

UNESCOs World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism Program identifies the importance of “providing World Heritage stakeholders with the capacity and the tools to manage tourism efficiently, responsibly and sustainably based on the local context and needs”.

For Christine Milne and the Greens to claim that being open to sensible and appropriate tourism offerings that showcase the World Heritage Area is in conflict with our management responsibilities simply shows that there anti-everything agenda is way out of line with best practice principles around the world.

This is evidenced by some of the tourism offerings available in World Heritage Areas around the globe.

To date there has been a very positive response to the draft Management Plan from Tasmanians. They understand that a ban on all tourist offerings or low-impact facilities, as the Greens would have it, is not the way to allow the TWWHA to be recognised, experienced and protected in the long-term.

To date the only objections we are have heard from extreme Greens are ill-informed, sensationalist and have been spouted without actually reading the draft Plan. The unique wilderness values in the TWWHA remain front and centre in the draft Management Plan. Selective special species timber harvesting was already permitted in a small number of zones within the area, and ENGOs signed off on this under the previous Labor-Green Government.

The hyper-sensationalist claims that sensible and appropriate tourism development means huge developments in wilderness areas is laughable, a desperate attempt by the Greens to convince others to join their anti-everything agenda.

With the draft Plan out for public consultation until 22 March 2015, twice the statutory minimum consultation period, there is an opportunity for all Tasmanians and stakeholders to participate in an informed discussion and share their views.

* http://whc.unesco.org/en/tourism/
Matthew Groom, Minister for Environment, Parks and Heritage