The free camping sites are not major cost centres for Parks Victoria. Credit:Peter Braig

The regulatory impact statement invokes the government's cost recovery guidelines, insisting that it is obliged to end free camping because it is unfair to commercial camp ground operators. In doing so it applies the principle of "competitive neutrality" that is intended to protect private enterprise from "unfair" competition from state agencies. But at the basic and very basic free camping levels no comparison with commercial rates is possible because there is no market. Commercial operators do not offer such primitive sites and at the suggested fee of $13 per night there would be no profit in doing so.

The cost recovery guidelines do allow costs to be weighted against benefits, and allow exemption from full cost recovery for activities that deliver social benefits, including protection of cultural heritage. In its impact statement, the department rightly boasts that national parks play a vital role in doing this. The problem is that it fails to recognise free camping, or camping in general, as part of our cultural heritage. If there were an informed appreciation of the role of camping in the evolution of our culture and also as a profound way of engaging with the environment, it would be much less likely that free camping would be seen as an easy – or appropriate – target for cost recovery.

The free camping sites are not major cost centres for Parks Victoria. The risk is that improving services would add more to costs than can be retrieved in fees. The guidelines warn agencies against this, of pursuing their own self-interest by inflating of levels of service beyond the needs and wishes of the stakeholders. If, as seems likely, the cost of collecting fees at the basic level does exceed the value of the fees retrieved, then the abolition of free camping would be financially irrational.

There is something plain mean about this proposal, especially as the department threatens to close down camp grounds unless costs can be recovered. And the issue is set to broaden as the department indicates that it intends to introduce fees in state parks as well. But this is just a new version of an old story. Bringing campers – indigenous and non-indigenous – under control has been a goal of authorities from colonial times to the present. Around the country, they are now closing in on the remaining sites operating outside the market: remnant free camping is a last stand against the total commodification of the Australian holiday. Ironically, abolishing it will encourage feral camping, which will be much more costly to manage.