Environment Tasmania has today welcomed the resolution by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee (WHC) to adopt, without amendment, a decision to urge the Hodgman Government to take its Draft TWWHA Management Plan back to the drawing board.

Andrew Perry, Environment Tasmania’s spokesperson for forests, said “What’s essentially happened here is the Tasmanian Government has removed a bunch of critical protections for the World Heritage Area, and said we know this looks bad, but you can trust us to do the right thing. But now the World Heritage Committee has said we don’t trust you, that’s not good enough, put those protections back in.”

Environment Tasmania has today welcomed a decision by the UN's World Heritage Committee (WHC) urging the Hodgman Government to take its Draft TWWHA Management Plan back to the drawing board.

Andrew Perry, Environment Tasmania’s spokesperson for forests, said “What the UN's World Heritage Committee has done here is reiterate the concerns of Environment Tasmania, numerous other eNGOs, and thousands of ordinary Tasmanians. What we’d like to know now is how many voices does the Hodgman Government need to hear before it listens?

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) Draft Management Plan demonstrates the Tasmanian Government intends to abandon the concept of ‘wilderness’ amongst a range of changes that water down protections to allow invasive tourism development and logging in the internationally renowned area.

Abandoning wilderness is a reckless and nonsensical move given its importance for the state’s reputation, its centrality to tourism branding and its use as an important conservation management tool.