BEFORE the last election Barry O’Farrell told me at Port Macquarie that politicians in electoral mode will tell you what you want to hear; the trick is to get it in writing.
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Apparently that doesn’t work either.
During the run-up to the last State election Mr O’Farrell promised:
“We have no intention of doing deals with the minor parties, to sell out those plans. There will not be a decision to turn our national parks into hunting reserves.” (The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2011).
On January 28 last year, in a statement in the Lith- gow Mercury, Barry O’Farrell promised to keep the State’s electricity generators in public hands.
“We have absolutely no plans to privatise either the generators or the poles and wires,” he said.
So it was with a sense of disillusion I read that, in a deal with the Shooters and Fishers Party brokered by Mr O’Farrell and Oxley MP Andrew Stoner to secure the passage of the Electricity Privatisation Bill, the government will be opening up some national parks, nature reserves and State conser- vation areas to recreational hunters.
The parks include World Heritage Areas where the Coalition says shooters will only be allowed in the areas not zoned WHA within them.
Yet those undeclared areas have been assessed and ready for zoning into the WHAs for years.
The NPWS website declares the “Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area features rare dry rainforest, dramatic gorges and waterfalls, extensive wilder- ness areas, wild and scenic rivers and an amazing array of wildlife.
“Everything in the park is best seen up close - immerse your senses and yourself in this wild place while you camp, walk, paddle, picnic, cycle, horse ride, fish or swim.”
The Barrington Tops NP is also a World Heritage Area which is “a bushwalker’s paradise, with an excellent walking track network that includes short and easy walks to more difficult overnight hikes, with plenty of sites to set up a bush camp for the evening”.
Dorrigo NP rainforest, soon to be a “conservation” hunter’s dream, is also a World Heritage Area which “contains a range of forest types that protect an enormous variety of animals and birds, like red-necked pademelons, the vibrantly coloured wompoo fruit-dove and the spectacular regent bowerbird”.
The Coalition maintains that shooting in those World Heritage Areas by Game Council accredited “conservation” hunters will be in parts of the World Heritage Areas which are not World Heritage Area.
A hunter with a .308 rifle could take a deer at 900m in open country, so most bush walkers would not like to be anywhere near a hunter in Oxley Wild Rivers NP.
However, they will have no idea if they are, if the procedure which operates in State Forests is adopted.
In State Forests there is a permanent sign at the entrance to the forest, but users have no idea on which days shooters will be in there hunting.
Let’s not fall for the “conservation hunters” tag the Game Council tends to put out there.
These people are recreational hunters who do this stuff for the joy of it.
Otherwise, they would be trapping and then shooting like Bernard Whitehead is doing with great success with pigs and wild dogs down Maria River way.
According to Greens MLC David Shoebridge the Game Council of NSW, a body that was supposed to be self-funding, received more than $2.8 million of public funding per year over the past four years to promote recreational hunting on public land in NSW.
The Invasive Species Council found that in 2007-08 the registered Game Council “conservation hunters” who filed their reports as required each accounted for an average of less than two feral animals per year on public lands.
For this they received $3,516,462 of your tax money in that period.
That was $453 per feral animal and half of them were rabbits, which numbers would have been replaced while the hunters were in the car on their way home.