ANAO slams management of Australian national parks, including Uluru and Kakadu

The government body tasked with managing six Commonwealth national parks, the Director of National Parks, lacked oversight and direction, according to an Australian National Audit Office report released Friday.

"The Director of National Parks has not established effective arrangements to plan, deliver and measure the impact of its operational activities within the six terrestrial national parks," the report said.

"As a result, it is unable to adequately inform itself, joint managers and other stakeholders of the extent to which it is meeting its management objectives."

The director oversees the Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Kakadu, Booderee, Christmas Island, Norfolk Island and Pulu Keeling national parks, covering 2.1 million hectares across Australia worth over $200 million in assets.

Home to nationally and internationally significant sites, the parks receive $50 million per year in government funding.

All seven of the auditor's recommendations were agreed to by the director, including a review of risk management frameworks and whether it was meeting its obligations under federal environmental laws.

Under those environmental laws, the director must establish a 10-year management plan for parks.

A lot of the auditor's recommendations double back on a nearly two-decade-old report by the office in 2002, which was critical of many of the same problems as the 2019 report. At the time, the director also agreed to the mostly identical recommendations in that report.

Indigenous staff lacked clear pathways beyond entry-level work and represented 60 per cent of the parks' casual workforce but only 15 per cent of full-time, ongoing staff, the auditor found.

At Kakadu, the managerial board decided to host governance training for staff in late 2016, but the auditor found no evidence training ever took place.

Training registers were not uniform across the park, with inconsistent methods to log what training staff had finished. A training log at Kakadu had not been maintained since 2017.

The auditor found the parks had no updated climate change strategies, with the latest expiring in 2017.

The director also failed to get managerial boards at Kakadu, Booderee and Uluru - which are jointly managed by traditional owners - to establish constructive relationship with traditional owners, the auditor said.

One interpreter at Uluru said the bureaucratic English at managerial board meetings was "very difficult to interpret and explain" to Indigenous people, the auditor found.

The six parks had 45 high-priority actions listed, which are meant to be solved in seven days, but some dated back as far as December 2015.

The audit found eight threatened green parrots died in a translocation program to Phillip Island in June 2017, but this was only reported until November 2017, five months after the last parrot died.

Despite a call to immediately fix a faulty diesel bowser at Kakadu in December 2016 which had been leaking into the environment, it wasn't listed as fixed until August 2017. The auditor couldn't find any documenting evidence on the fix or confirm recommended groundwater testing had been performed.