FOLLOWING speculation about the potential redundancies of 100 staff members, Parks Victoria (PV) has neither confirmed nor denied if there will be any sackings.

“Our focus is on ensuring we have the right resources in the right place, this includes continuing to deliver our on-ground enforcement responsibilities,” a Parks Victoria spokesperson said.

“We have more than 250 authorised officers that focus on enforcement activities across the state.

“This includes more than 40 advanced officers that deal with more complex offences like firewood theft.”

The 100 redundancies were part of an operational review that was due to be announced this week, but it appears environment minister, Steve Dimopoulos and Parks Victoria have postponed the announcement until after the summer school holidays.

Parks Victoria operations executive director, Kylie Trott wrote to staff this week, and said, “We have identified some additional work is required to be undertaken to finalise the proposal, as a result the executive management team have decided to pause the operations review.”

She said the review announcement would be postponed until the new year, “following the peak visitation and fire season”.

The uncertainty has created conjecture around who would be responsible for enforcements in the wake of any such sackings with Parks Victoria staff reporting low morale following the sacking of four of its six enforcement officers.

One PV ranger said the enforcement officers played a critical role in advising park rangers and preparing briefs as part of the prosecution process and said they were not authorised to enforce.

They said PV rangers had already flagged refusing to take action against climbers in the Grampians and Arapiles parks.