My name is Glenn Forest. I’m the environmental officer for the Shoalhaven region in particular Creswell here at HMAS Creswell and responsible for the environmental management and heritage management within the base.
The base is predominately the Royal Australian Naval College which is the introduction for Naval Officers into the Navy and into the ADF and so all new officer come here. They undertake leadership, management training and they get inculcated into maritime ways and then throughout the course of their career they come back and undertake more leadership and management training.
Well, defence has an environmental policy for sustainable environmental management across defence and it is particularly important here at Creswell because we have a number of environmental risks. We reside within the middle of a national park; we’re adjacent to a marine park, a commonwealth reserve and a state national park. So, all those in particular are quite important but also we operate in an area that we need to keep operating in. And so to be able to do that we need to ensure we have sustainable environmental management.
Well, we have ships operating in the bay and we have dolphins and whales and other protected species operating in those areas as well. So, the two need to operate together. We’ve got a bombing range on the other side of the bay and in that area we have a number of threatened species. We’ve had threatened species that have been relocated from this side of the peninsula, from Creswell, over to the bombing range, which seems strange in itself but those activities are compatible and they can work together. We have indigenous environmental management that we have within HMAS Creswell and that’s adjacent to a very important indigenous area.
We ensure… we endeavour to make sure that our environmental management isn’t done on emotion; it’s not done on perceptions. That we put some science and rigor behind how we manage the environment and we’ve done that on a number of cases. Our kangaroo management here, it could be perceived that there is an over abundance of kangaroos but we’ve put some science behind that and they are sustainably managed. We’ve put some science into the management of our threatened species, our contamination management. So taking away the emotion and taking away the esoterics of why we do things and putting some factual basis behind it.
Yea. For all the goodwill in the world, and all the policy and documentation and education that’s put in place, things still happen. Things break, natural disasters occur. So it’s important that we have a risk management strategy in place and a reactive response to emergencies, and that’s been demonstrated on a couple, a couple of times through fire management. We’ve had a number of major fires come though the park that have threatened both the sensitive environment, the heritage, through oil spills, where we have infrastructure in place to respond to these emergencies at short notice and professionally.