Ms O’CONNOR question to MINISTER for PARKS, Mr DUIGAN
Ms O’CONNOR – I do. It is reasonable for a minister to talk about legal advice that they have received, but you do not have to provide the Solicitor-General’s or Crown Law’s advice. But it is interesting you were not prepared to say your legal advice said there was no risk to the Crown in signing on with a company that is in liquidation.
I will go to my next question. Minister, the Halls Island Public Access Program, which I only found out about yesterday, has a provision – some words on it that say:
All visitors must have a history of respectful relationships with the hut owners.
Now Mr Daniel Hackett, who has a lease over Reg Hall’s Hut, or Halls Hut, thinks he is the hut owner.
This is discriminatory and punitive to bushwalkers and fly fishers. People like Greg French, a passionate advocate for the wilderness but who has publicly disagreed with Daniel Hackett’s heli-tourism proposal.
Do you think it is good enough that Tasmanians are being denied access to a public island inside the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area on the basis of, likely, spite and personal grievance? How have you allowed a situation to develop where an individual developer and director of a company under liquidation gets to deny access to Halls Island to people who he feels have been mean to him?
ANSWER
Mr President, information on the Halls Island Public Access Program has been listed on the proponent’s website since January 2019. I think there was a suggestion that had been created in the last month, maybe yesterday. Someone made that assertion. Anyway, it has been up there since January 2019. I am advised that visitation to Halls Island has substantially increased over time, noting that it has been subject to leases going back quite some time. The information was updated last month and the process has been made even simpler for people to contact the proponent to access the island.
With regard to any trespass concerns, this is a matter for the proponent. For anyone interested in visiting the island, they should review the publicly available information on the proponent’s website. I would note that there have been potentially some acts of vandalism in the past, and the proponent is understandably wary of such events occurring again.
