On the South Coast Track, four days' walk from the nearest road, a bushwalking guide picks her way down from the Ironbound Range toward New Harbour, the only sounds the wind and her own boots on button grass. It is this — hours without an engine, a light plane or another walker — that clients pay to buy. In recent years she has passed pink survey tape and laminated notices pinned to trees near Melaleuca, describing a private operator's plan for a chain of guided lodges along the same track, part of a Tasmanian Government process inviting companies to build inside the reserve she works in. Nothing has been built yet. But the track she leads walkers down, and the proposal pinned to a tree beside it, are both products of the same decade-long state strategy: sell Tasmania's wilderness so hard that eventually someone proposes building on it.
That strategy is not hidden. Tasmania is a small, remote island economy with few large industries left standing — native forestry has shrunk, mining is patchy, manufacturing is marginal — and for more than a decade, under successive Liberal governments, Hobart has bet increasingly on selling what the mainland cannot: the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA), roughly 1.58 million hectares, close to a quarter of the state's landmass, one of the largest and least-modified temperate wilderness reserves left on Earth (approx.; Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania, TWWHA overview). This topic does not ask whether tourism should exist — it plainly should — but whether the way the Rockliff government has chosen to grow it, by inviting commercial development inside the protected estate itself, is sustainable on the government's own evidence.
What the government did
Tasmania's visitor-economy strategy runs through T21, a formal partnership between the state government and the tourism industry, which set out to more than double annual visitor expenditure to over $5.2 billion by 2030, from its 2018 base (Tourism Tasmania/T21, 2030 Visitor Economy Strategy, updated Jul-2024). The mechanism for reaching that target inside the reserve estate is the Expressions of Interest (EOI) process for tourism investment in national parks, reserves and Crown land, introduced by the Hodgman Liberal government in 2014 and continued by Gutwein and Rockliff. It invites private operators to pitch unsolicited development proposals — huts, lodges, camps, in some cases helicopter access — for sites inside Tasmania's reserved land, including the TWWHA, which the government's own Parks and Wildlife Service (PWS) then assesses in-house through a Reserve Activity Assessment (RAA).
In December 2016 the state and Commonwealth governments jointly revised the TWWHA's statutory management plan, reclassifying areas previously designated Wilderness Zone — where the 1999 plan's objective was to "maintain or enhance wilderness quality" — into Recreation Zones, where built tourism infrastructure is permitted (DPIPWE/NRE Tas, Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Management Plan 2016, statutory effect 21-Dec-2016). The 2014 draft plan went further still and drew more than 7,000 public submissions opposing it; the government partly retreated, and the final 2016 plan lifted the Wilderness Zone's total area by roughly 7 per cent, about 78,000 hectares, compared with the 1999 plan (approx.; TWWHA Management Plan 2016, comparative zoning analysis). But it is the rezoned Recreation Zones, not the enlarged Wilderness Zone, where the EOI proposals have since been lodged.
Two proposals show what that pathway produces. At Lake Malbena, inside the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, tourism operator Wild Drake sought approval for a standing camp on Halls Island and a helicopter landing site nearby, with up to 240 flights a year between Derwent Bridge and the lake. The Central Highlands Council rejected the proposal; the state's planning appeal tribunal overturned that rejection and granted a permit; the Supreme Court of Tasmania dismissed environmental groups' appeal against the permit on 6 July 2020 (The Examiner, 6-Jul-2020). Separately, the Federal Court found in November 2019 that the Commonwealth's decision that the project needed no federal environmental approval was legally invalid, sending that question back for reassessment (Federal Court of Australia, 12-Nov-2019, as reported by the Environmental Defenders Office). On the South Coast Track, a separate operator's proposal for a chain of private lodges progressed through the same EOI pathway despite sitting almost entirely inside the formally mapped Wilderness Zone.
Alongside the reserve-based push, government tourism marketing has ridden a very different asset. MONA, the private museum David Walsh opened on the Derwent's Berriedale peninsula in 2011, was built and funded without state capital. It now draws more than 400,000 visitors a year, and close to a third of all Tasmanian visitors cite it as a reason for their trip (Deloitte Access Economics, MONA economic contribution study; Tourism Tasmania visitor motivation data, 2023).
The strongest case
A small island economy with few other levers, and a museum that proved the brand works
Tasmania's government can fairly say the strategy is working on its own terms. In the year to December 2025 the state hosted 1.386 million visitors who spent $3.7 billion — for the first time above pre-COVID levels — and annual visitor spend has grown 44 per cent, an extra $1.124 billion a year, since 2019 (Tourism Tasmania, Tasmanian Visitor Survey, Visitor Data Snapshot YE Dec-2025). The visitor economy now supports an estimated 50,800 jobs, 15.6 per cent of every filled job in the state (approx.; Tourism Tasmania, TVS, YE Sep-2025) — in a small economy with a shrinking native forestry sector and a salmon industry under its own regulatory strain, that is not a marginal contributor but one of Tasmania's largest employers of scale. MONA is the strategy's best evidence: a privately funded gallery, built with no state money, that Deloitte Access Economics estimates now generates over $134 million a year for the Tasmanian economy and has helped drive a 45 per cent rise in Hobart's accommodation capacity since 2011 — proof that one well-judged investment can reposition an entire state's tourism brand without requiring a single hectare of wilderness to be built on. On that logic, a small, tightly limited number of high-yield, low-footprint wilderness experiences — modelled on the state-built Three Capes Track, which charges a walker fee that helps fund its own upkeep — is a rational way to fund conservation of an estate government budgets alone cannot maintain, while spreading visitor income to remote west and south-west communities where mining and forestry jobs have not returned.
What the primary record shows
The scale of Tasmania's bet is visible in the primary numbers themselves. Tourism now touches every part of the state economy Treasury tracks, and the reserve estate the government has opened to development is not a marginal corner of the map but close to a quarter of Tasmania's entire landmass. Since the 2016 rezoning, conservation groups and the Tasmanian National Parks Association count at least 30 commercial development proposals lodged for sites inside the TWWHA (approx.; Tasmanian National Parks Association, TWWHA development tracker) — a volume the government's own assessment system was not originally built to handle.
The state's own auditor has tested the assessment system once. The Tasmanian Audit Office's Report of the Auditor-General No. 3 of 2020-21, released 22 September 2020, reviewed the EOI process across its first two rounds (June 2014 – October 2019) and found the Reserve Activity Assessment tool "not geared to deal with more complex proposals received through EoI" — the government's own regulator saying, in its own words, that the process handling Lake Malbena-scale projects was built for something simpler (Tasmanian Audit Office, Report No. 3 of 2020-21, 22-Sep-2020). The same report rated public transparency only "reasonable" and recommended widening the EOI Assessment Panel and strengthening public consultation.
The World Heritage Committee has separately put the government on notice. In 2015 it warned that without "strict criteria for new tourism development," commercial building inside the TWWHA risked the property's wilderness character and cultural values — the qualities the listing exists to protect, and the same qualities Tourism Tasmania markets to visitors (UNESCO World Heritage Committee, correspondence and decisions, 2015; World Heritage List entry 181, whc.unesco.org). It has continued to seek reporting from Australia on tourism development inside the property since, a level of international scrutiny few other items in the state Budget attract.
The private door into public wilderness
The core problem is structural, not any single approval. Tasmania has an independent statutory body, the Tasmanian Planning Commission (successor to the Resource Planning and Development Commission), built to give major and contested developments external, expert, public scrutiny. Most EOI proposals inside the reserve estate do not go through it; they are assessed instead by the Reserve Activity Assessment process, run inside the same Parks and Wildlife Service that manages the land and, in some cases, stands to earn licence revenue from the outcome. The Auditor-General's own finding — that the tool is not built for complex proposals — is not a campaign group's characterisation, it is the state's independent auditor's. A process that lets a helicopter-access commercial camp inside a World Heritage wilderness zone receive less external scrutiny than a contested suburban subdivision is not a transparency gap at the margins; it is the design flaw the 2020 audit identified, and one government has only partly addressed.
Lake Malbena shows what that design flaw produces in practice. A federal court found, in November 2019, that the Commonwealth's own environmental approval process for the project was legally invalid — a serious, formal finding — and yet the same project's state planning permit survived a Supreme Court appeal eight months later, on different legal grounds entirely. Two courts reached two different conclusions about the same helicopter pad and standing camp because Tasmania's approval pathway for reserve tourism is split across bodies that do not have to agree with each other, or even directly engage with each other's findings, before a project can proceed.
The South Coast Track proposal raises a related problem. The government's own 2016 management plan defines the Wilderness Zone's purpose as retaining "a challenging, unmodified natural setting" — close to the opposite of a chain of serviced private lodges — and the proposed route sits almost entirely inside that zone. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has separately raised concerns that the south-west's cultural landscape, one of the longest continuously occupied Aboriginal landscapes on Earth, had not been adequately assessed before the proposal advanced toward licensing (Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, public comment, as reported by Wild magazine and the Tasmanian National Parks Association). Neither concern has stopped the proposal moving through the EOI pipeline, and Tasmania's own bushwalking clubs remain split on it.
The net effect, after a decade of this process, is a system that satisfies almost no one on the state's own record: at least 30 proposals lodged since 2016, several still contested years later, none delivering the fast, transparent investment pathway the EOI process was meant to provide, and none giving conservation groups or the Aboriginal community confidence the assessment is independent of the government promoting the projects. A process built to be quick and business-friendly has instead produced years of litigation; a process meant to protect a World Heritage listing has produced a growing list of contested proposals sitting inside it.
The product Tasmania sells is emptiness. Every hut, pad and licence approved inside the World Heritage boundary is a small loan against the one asset the brand cannot manufacture twice.
The risk to the future
Spending down the one asset tourism cannot rebuild
Tasmania's tourism brand is built on scarcity — wild country with no engine noise, found nowhere else in Australia at this scale — and scarcity is the one input a government cannot manufacture a second time. A beach can be replanted and a museum can be expanded; 1.58 million hectares of largely unmodified wilderness, once built inside, cannot be returned to its prior state on any political timeframe. Every contested approval that proceeds without the external scrutiny the Auditor-General found the current system lacks adds to that spending, and a UNESCO "in danger" listing — a real designation the World Heritage Committee has applied elsewhere when it judged a government's tourism development approvals inadequately assessed — would damage precisely the reputational asset Tourism Tasmania and MONA have spent fifteen years building, at a cost no marketing budget could repair quickly. That risk compounds with a physical one: dry-lightning bushfires already burned significant tracts of the TWWHA in the summers of 2015–16 and 2018–19, killing stands of ancient pencil pine and King Billy pine that cannot regenerate after fire (approx.; Tasmania Fire Service and Parks and Wildlife Service incident records). Pushing permanent visitor infrastructure and helicopter access deeper into that same remote, fire-prone terrain raises the stakes of the next bad summer, in the same country the government is simultaneously promising investors and walkers will stay wild indefinitely.