About Us Heritage Organisations in WA What's On Join Make a Donation
Places to Visit
Accommodation
Online Shop
Heritage Icons 2004 Conferences and Forums Endangered Places
Education Natural Environment Luisini' Winery Golden Pipeline
1999 State Heritage Convention Report
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
HERITAGE - THE WAY FORWARD
by Mr Peter King Chairman of the Australian Heritage Commission
I am delighted to be with you today for this historic gathering - Australia's first state heritage convention. I would also like to acknowledge the Noongar people of the Swan Valley, in whose country we are meeting today.
We've just heard about what is wrong with heritage. This is healthy. It shows that we care about what is happening to the places we love. And this is very much why we are all here today. We have a shared will to ensure that our special places are respected and secured for the centuries ahead. It is only by identifying what's wrong and what needs fixing that we can move forward and improve our approaches. This realisation has been driving the work of the Australian Heritage Commission for the past few years and has, in fact, helped to lay the foundation for this historic WA Heritage Convention. As we are about to spend three days discussing the best possible processes for doing this, we should have firmly in our minds just why it is worth making the effort to get it right.
Australia, after all, is a land of outstanding heritage value. It is the only developed country in the world with a biodiversity which is defined as mega-diverse; it is the home of the oldest continuous culture on earth, having been occupied by Aborigines for more than 60,000 years; it has a rich and varied history of European settlement over the last 200 years, and it has become the home of people from every culture in the world, with a consequent richness of tradition and cultural diversity.
As we all know, Australians have not always appreciated and protected their heritage places. The rapid development/destruction phase of post-World War II brought us the loss of many nationally, regionally and locally important places. Losses like Lake Pedder, Sydney's Regent Theatre and much of the WA mallee heath land shocked Australians into fighting for their National Estate.
In the early 1970s, the government of the day called for a committee of enquiry into the condition of our heritage. The response was overwhelming with more than 650 submissions from the community, led by the National Trust, trade unions, resident action and conservation groups. The upshot was the identification of a 'great public concern for the conservation and presentation of the National Estate,' and the birth of the Australian Heritage Commission in 1975.
This movement had bipartisan support in Parliament. Leading Country Party Member, farmer and future Minister, Ralph Hunt, captured the spirit of the moment when he said during the second reading of the Australian Heritage Commission Bill in 1975:
'The environment, and for that matter the National Estate, surrounds all of us. It belongs to all of us. It is not the monopoly of any one man. It is not the monopoly of one generation, one group, one party, one government. It is ours to pollute, to destroy, to desecrate, or it is ours to value, to preserve, to protect, to hand on to the next generation.'
With the establishment of the Commission came the Register of the National Estate -Australia's first official inventory of its special heritage places - both natural and cultural. Since the Commission's foundation, States and territories have followed suit, introducing their own legislation and establishing their own heritage councils and bodies. Where 25 years ago, we only had community support, today Australia has a substantial network of legislation, registers and bureaucracies all working for the conservation of our heritage places. And community support still continued to grow.
By 1996 the Commission (and others in the heritage field) recognised that this growth had been somewhat ad hoc, the result being a plethora of different laws and processes relating to heritage and the environment at all levels of government. This had created duplication of effort in some areas, and had left complete gaps in others causing confusion and unnecessary conflict in the past. Work to correct this started on a number of fronts.
The Commonwealth Government for example has been progressively implementing two important reforms since 1996. The first of these was the Review of Commonwealth/State Roles and Responsibilities for the Environment conducted for the Council of Australian Governments or COAG, and the second was the reform of Commonwealth environment and heritage legislation. One of the outcomes of the 1997 COAG review was an Agreement to rationalise existing Commonwealth/State arrangements for identifying, protecting and managing places of heritage significance. This was to be done through the cooperative development of a National Heritage Places Strategy - the first ever for Australia.
The agreement sets out the key matters that the National Strategy will address. These include looking carefully at the role of each level of government, exploring the possibility of a national list and developing and agreeing on national principles and standards for managing our heritage places. To achieve the goals of the agreement it may be necessary for governments to adopt new responsibilities and to amend existing legislation or develop new legislation altogether. The overall objective of the agreement is to ensure that heritage systems are compatible, complementary and streamlined across all levels of government. Duplication must be minimised and certainty provided to property owners, decision makers and the community. Gaps in our efforts should be closed.
The Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Heritage has just released a Commonwealth Consultation Paper on the National Heritage Places Strategy. Developing the Strategy has involved consultations with State and Territory government Ministers and officials. This consultation paper contains a specific section on principles that would be used by the Commonwealth and the States in implementing the Strategy. The 12 principles build on those agreed by Heritage Ministers in October 1997 and by the National Heritage Convention, which was held in Canberra in August 1998.
I believe the Strategy is one of the most important developments to emerge in heritage management in Australia. It sets a new benchmark for best practice in this vital field. The outcomes from the Strategy will eventually shape the content of new heritage legislation, which will be in the form of a 'chapter' in an Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, a Bill on which is currently in the Parliament. It is my view that the principles in the National Strategy should also translate through into the process for framing new legislative heritage provisions.
The Australian Heritage Commission has been an active player in these developments. As the statutory authority, which advises the Commonwealth on heritage matters, it has assumed a national leadership role and has been one of the driving forces of change. Over the past two to three years we have been holding on-going discussions with key stakeholders on these issues. When I became the Commission's chairman last year, I could see that the next step in this process was to bring together all those with a stake in Australia's heritage places. We needed to sit down together, tease out the issues and reach consensus on some of the critical issues facing Australia's heritage places.
We initiated the historic two-day National Heritage Convention or HERCON in Old Parliament House Canberra last August. I believe that this was the first time that representatives from all sides of the heritage spectrum, including indigenous, natural and historic, had been brought together at a national level. Convention delegates helped to develop, and then unanimously supported standards, which would be the basis of a unified approach to the care of heritage places in this country. This HERCON work and the subsequent release of the National Heritage Places Strategy have laid the foundation for more specific development at a state level.
It is the States, which are at the coalface in this arena. They have primary responsibility for protecting places of State and local significance through legislation and systems, including working strongly with local government to achieve these goals. WA has taken a lead in embracing and clarifying one of the key issues raised at HERCON-that is, taking an integrated approach to heritage. Last October, a group of WA community and government representatives met in Perth with AHC staff to thrash out this issue.
As a result, the Perth workshop participants prepared an inspiring statement about the scope of integrated heritage:
'An integrated approach to heritage means all heritage organisations and stakeholders coming together and working towards a common understanding and respect for all heritage values, including natural, historic, cultural, indigenous, scientific, social, aesthetic and spiritual'
The workshop group explored what this might mean in practical terms, including: managing in a way, which respects all heritage values equally; developing common criteria and sharing information; strengthening linkages between the groups that value the different types of heritage; and securing endorsement by government and a legislative structure to make it work. The workshop group also stated their belief that the agreed principles and standards from HERCON should be adopted as an important starting point for achieving an integrated heritage regime at the state level. The opportunity to initiate integrated approaches is here - now - but could easily be lost.
The big challenge is to develop integrated approaches across the natural and cultural divide and across heritage and land management agencies within government. We need to recognise that landscapes result from the evolutionary history of the Australian land and its interaction with culture over more than 60 000 years. This is a concept, which is fundamental to the goals of ecologically sustainable development. We are far more likely to achieve a durable 'stewardship' among land managers if we can eliminate this opposition between nature and culture.
The Topical workshops to be held here on Friday will give us a perfect opportunity to further explore the concept of integrated approaches to heritage and particularly to demonstrate its relevance to processes and policies in Western Australia.
As a complementary step in this direction, I launched yesterday in Western Australia, a tool kit of materials to assist communities with their work in this field and especially in tackling the nuts and bolts of heritage issues. The kit contains charters for managing natural heritage places as well as a guide to assist communities to identify and conserve their heritage places. I would encourage you to take a look at this material, which I believe are available at this convention.
But today we have been asked to focus on the Principles. We do not have to start from scratch - the Australian Heritage Places Principles already exist. You have the opportunity to move the debate forward. I encourage you to think about how these principles might apply in the WA context and what issues will need to be addressed in implementing them.
The challenges that you face include:
You have a unique opportunity over the next few days to take up the baton and establish a model for other states to follow. But before you proceed let's look at the overall picture of our achievements to date and where we would want to be in 10 years time.
What we currently have is:
We have travelled a considerable distance in the last half of this century. We have managed to pull out of a spiralling disregard for our heritage to a point where we have a range of systems in place to help protect our special places. But can we see a horizon for our heritage, which is positive and achievable?
Where do we want to be in 10 years time? I am sure that some of our goals will remain constant. In 10 years time we should be confident that Australia's invaluable heritage places are safeguarded for the future. Consequently, we would all want to see governments of all levels, the community and industry regarding the conservation of our natural and cultural heritage as a mainstream activity and not an add-on.
To do this would mean that we would need a streamlined, consistent and interlinking national policy framework underpinned by an agreed set of best practice principles and standards. This means that in 10 years time we should have an effective national strategy covering policies and programs as well as complementary legislation between all levels of government.
In 10 years time we should have embraced the notion that proper respect for indigenous heritage is one of the key elements necessary for reconciliation. This means that we, as a society understand that indigenous heritage places require special care and should have an equal seat at the heritage table. So, as we would not think of running a bulldozer into a cathedral, neither would we consider taking a bulldozer across a special indigenous site. This means acknowledging that heritage is different for different cultural groups - and that this diversity is one of Australia's strengths worth celebrating.
But I very much hope that in 10 years time we have matured enough as a nation to at last acknowledge that what we value cannot always be measured on a ledger. There are often strong economic benefits for heritage conservation. But a society of any cultural depth must have the courage to conserve its heritage for reasons, which transcend economics. You cannot put a price tag on biodiversity. You cannot put a price tag on spiritual and aesthetic values. You cannot put a price tag on memories.
We know what we want to achieve, but what is it realistic to hope for? One thing is sure, if we are to reach our goals we will have to travel further and faster in the next 10 years than in the past ten. We will all need to pull our weight, but governments in particular will need to take up the challenge of moving beyond the pilot studies and paper work and catching up with the community and its 'can do' record.
Finally, congratulations to the National Trust here in Western Australia whom I believe are celebrating their 40th birthday later this year . Many thanks to you for hosting this far-sighted convention. In addition, I would like to thank everyone who has helped organise and taken the time to participate in this event, and a special mention to the Shire of Swan for providing not only the venue but also the opportunity for some fascinating tours.
