I WAS devastated to find last week that Minister Tony Kelly has chosen the money he will get from flogging off 80 housing blocks at Goolawah Estate, rather than save the koala I found there and named after him.
I felt sure when I wrote in this column last time that no matter what cynical people told me to expect from this Government, Mr Kelly, once he knew the real facts about the high conservation value of this very special patch of forest, would reverse his decision to open up the Goolawah Estate Sections 3-5 (Stage 2) for subdivision.
I thought that surely he had just not been properly informed.
I figured the decision by the local Department of Lands at Taree to ask Kempsey Shire Council to rezone that area for Environmental Conservation had not been conveyed to him.
So I spent an awful lot of time last week trying to get assurance from his advisor, Michael O’Brien, that Mr Kelly actually knew the full facts.
Even when I got the reply from Warwick Watkins, chief executive of the NSW Land and Property Management department writing on behalf of Mr Kelly, I still could not believe Mr Kelly actually knew about the Endangered Ecological Community he was about to destroy, the core koala habitat where breeding koalas come, where the beautiful glossy black cockatoos feed, drink and spread their feathers showing that glorious flash of red.
The area where I sat at night for a week recording threatened species of bats with an anabat recorder under a big old red gum.
Where one night a great brush-tailed possum bailed out of his hollow in a tree and crashed down into the leaves of a tree beside me.
Where I saw an antechinus, a curious little marsupial hopping mouse type thing, come down out of the old red gum tree right on dusk to look at me and just hop past once he worked out I would not harm him.
But Mr Kelly and this State Labor Government will. They really will clear fell the whole bloody place with bulldozers and chainsaws.
They will churn up the soil and shape it into nice flat blocks and advertise them for people who love nature and the lovely environment in a seaside village to come and buy the blocks from them.
And fill up a tiny little bit of the black hole comically known as the State Budget.
It should make an excellent photo opportunity for Kristina Keneally in her high heels up there on the bulldozer in a hard hat.
Clearly State Labor have lost their moral compass.
I grew up in a Labor family.
Johnny Weingarth, an old mate of mine from Crescent, even talked me into handing out once for Neville Wran. “Wran’s Our Man” I think the poster said.
I saw Paul Landa give us the EP&A Act which at last gave the environment some protection from inappropriate development, with legislation such as the Threatened Species Conservation Act.
I saw Bob Carr and Bob Debus create new national parks up and down the coast, not enough but it was a great step.
What happened to State Labor? What happened to the true believers and the people who understood the need for development, for jobs and prosperity for the working man and his family but alongside the preservation of what makes Australia a great country?
Well, Nathan Rees would not let the Shooters into national parks and that took some courage because they knew the Shooters could stop their legislation in the Legislative Council.
I saw Nathan Rees in his dying moments as premier try to save the Riverina red gum with the declaration of some badly needed national parks.
Keneally, Sartor and Macdonald soon got rid of that, apart from a greatly reduced area, while still allowing logging in the future NP for five years.
In the past 15 years the NSW Labor Party has taken the integrity out of the EP&A Act, and invented new legislation which allows developers to rort the system.
That includes the BioBanking system which was designed to allow clearing of high conservation value vegetation with offsets and a credits system.
The NSW Nature Conservation Council rightly refused to touch it and would not lend the BioBanking system development credibility with their presence.
So far not one developer has used it because it is so much cheaper and efficient to just use Part 3A.
State Labor has brought in Biocertification to zone whole areas so developers are not inconvenienced with little patches of threatened species.
When he was minister for planning, Frank Sartor, ironically now the new Minister for Environment, introduced the planning strategies which have allowed huge “development with constraints” areas, which is code for possibly high conservation value areas that the developers want.
State Labor promised five year reviews of things such as the Private Native Forestry Code, the Plantation Code, and the Regional Forest Agreements which are never done on time and are usually a whitewash, just a tick-a-box effort to pretend they care about environmental damage.
I thought Mr Kelly was not part of this entire disregard for the community and its environment.
And I still hope he has not been fully informed and will change this decision.
Despite Warwick Watkins’ claims of “the chronic shortage of developable residential land in Crescent Head”, the Department of Planning has deliberately held up the rezoning of Goolawah Estate to ‘Environmental Conservation’ while they sorted things out with the native title claim in the courts.
All the time they were secretly planning to reactivate the subdivision against the explicit advice of the Taree Department of Lands based upon their own environmental consultant’s report.
And they have continually frustrated the Portofino DA on the Killuke land across the road at the base of the mountain.
Last Thursday the Environmental Defenders Office launched, on behalf of the North Coast Environment Council, a Freedom of Information Application on all the Departments of Lands and Planning correspondence involved in this case, along with the Minister’s office and the Kempsey Shire Council.
Perhaps that search of internal memorandums and communications between all those parties will turn up some interesting facts.
And if you never thought you would see the day The Nationals fought to save a forest, just watch this space.
Email a friend