01 Sep Aussie Wildlife Left for Dead

Would you rather be incinerated, starved to death or hit by a car? That’s the gruesome choice we’re giving our wildlife under Australia’s weak environmental protection laws.

Sometime this week, while Victoria and the Feds squabble over Covid lockdown timelines, a new bill is expected to pass federal parliament shifting the responsibility for protecting our native flora and fauna, to the States.

What’s wrong with that you might ask. Nothing, if the States had the resources to assess environmental threats and the will to prosecute those who break the law, but they don’t.

It was only 8 months ago that Australians joined with wildlife lovers around the world to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to animal rescue and habitat restoration, following the bushfires that destroyed around 18.6 million hectares of land across the Eastern states. Tasmania is 6.8 million ha, so that’s a lot of charcoal.

While we’re not Ok with koalas being burned alive, apparently, it’s acceptable if they starve quietly, out of sight, as long as they sacrifice their homes to a new job-creating industrial estate.

The ‘Streamlining Environmental Approvals Bill’ won’t even have national standards, a further dilution of already weak laws. Between 2000 – 2017 almost 8 million ha of potential threatened species habitat was cleared, only 7% of which was assessed under existing environmental protection laws.

Environment Minister, Susan Ley has also ruled out creating an independent national regulator, which leaves our wildlife vulnerable to being sacrificed for economic progress. 

According to the Society for Conservation Biology it would cost $1.6 billion to improve the status of all of Australia’s threatened species and return their health to the point where they can be removed from lists of at-risk flora and fauna.

Not a small amount, but after the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, the Federal Government allocated $50 million in wildlife recovery, the same amount raised by comedian Celeste Barber. Millions more was donated for disaster relief by celebrities, philanthropists and animal lovers, much of it off the back of pictures of scorched marsupials fleeing the flames.

With so much love for our environment, it beggars belief that the Commonwealth would not want to strengthen laws to protect it. And if money talks, then consider this. Nature based tourism contributes $23 billion to the economy every year. That’s got to be worth protecting.

#weakenvironmentallaws #koalalove #blacksummerfires #susanley #celestebarber