Five million hectares of unmanaged pastoral leases in outback Western Australia would become national park land under a proposal being put before the Barnett government to expand the Indigenous ranger program and create more than 200 jobs.
The 66 leases are dotted throughout the Pilbara, midwest, and Gascoyne regions, spanning a 1,000km range from Geraldton to Port Hedland and stretching inland about 6ookm to East Murchison in the south and Roy Hill in the north.
They were purchased by the state government for conservation purposes in the late 1990s.
Two of the areas, at Ningaloo and Shark Bay, are adjacent to world heritage areas, and others, like a smattering of leases around Karijini, south of Karratha, surround existing national parks.
Under the proposal put forward by a consortium including traditional owners, Pew Charitable Trusts, Reconciliation WA, and four-wheel driving groups, the leases would be transitioned into national parks over a period of 10 years, with Indigenous rangers doing the work in fire mitigation, weed control, and eradicating feral animals.
It mirrors the federally-funded Indigenous protected areas and Indigenous ranger programs, the long-term funding of which is under threat despite receiving a glowing review in a report commissioned by the prime minister’s department.
The proposal would cost the WA government up to $11.5m a year but an analysis by Social Ventures Australia found it would to create an annual benefit of $42.7m, of which $25.5m would be a direct saving to the state government in housing, health, and other expenditure.
“It’s a model which ticks all the boxes,” Pew’s David McKenzie said.
The group will lobby the Barnett government and the Labor party to adopt the proposal in time for the 2017 state election.
“The social return on investment is unprecedented,” Mckenzie said. “There’s very few programs that will deliver like ranger programs do.”
The Barnett government has focused on Indigenous unemployment in remote communities as one of the key problems to be overcome in the remote community services reform process which sprang out of the debate about the closure of Indigenous communities.
In 2015 it announced a 5m hectare network of national and marine parks over the Kimberley region, to be jointly managed by native title holders.
The federal government currently funds 109 ranger programs employing almost 800 rangers, including the Nyangumarta rangers at 80 Mile Beach, located about halfway between Port Hedland and Broome.
The chief executive of Nyangumarta Warran Aboriginal Corporation, Nyaparu Rose, said the program had provided employment to people who had been unemployed their whole lives, allowed elders to share their knowledge, and allowed younger people to connect with their culture.
She supports the proposal, even though hers is not one of the 25 native title groups that would directly benefit, because she said it was the best way to support the economic and cultural survival of Indigenous peoples in remote areas.
“The ranger program … is the best initiative the commonwealth has ever put out for people,” Rose told Guardian Australia.
“It is working. It covers all health, education … a lot of our young people are being sent to prison and it keeps them away from prisons, and it’s also taking people back to country that they left for so many years.”
Rose said it had also helped preserve the Nyangumarta language because being on country with elders encouraged younger people to learn.
“You feel so proud and so happy about being there because it’s home to us as Indigenous people,” she said.
Rose said it was “only right” that native title holders be given care of the land.
“It’s not right that some other people run our parks because we need to have that full ownership [because of] what we get out of it as the people up in this country, this place,” she said.
