Concerns misplaced
The concerns about the Office of Environment and Heritage (OE&H) being dissolved are misplaced. The fact is we don't need an independent scientific assessment to tell us there has been a significant reduction of conservation values in national parks, and forests generally, over the past two decades.
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The independent reviewer of the Regional Forest Agreements, former Victorian chief fire officer Ewan Waller, expressed his concerns that submissions focused on native forest logging, rather than the fate of threatened species, supposedly protected in national parks.
One example is the extinction of koalas in the South East National Park, due to dieback. Twenty years since the first extensive canopy dieback event, there is still no consideration of, or action on this threat. Indeed, the ongoing belief in the OE&H is that there was something wrong with the koalas, rather than the degraded habitat is no longer able to support the species.
Mr Waller also expressed concerns about a lack of transparency regarding forest and threatened species monitoring. Despite the fact that money wasting koala surveys have been ongoing for the past 13 years, there are no publicly available records from these surveys for the past six years.
The RFAs are supposed to be based on the National Forest Policy Statement. While the state government's management is not founded on the NFPS, our environment will continue to decline, and paying for agencies that ignore this fact benefits no-one.
Robert Bertram, Bermagui
Regional priorities
Looking out at our beautiful bay on April 3 the ocean was perfectly calm and a large school of salmon was leaping out of the water chased by an equally large pod of dolphins. What a great sight.
With Easter holidays coming up tourists to our area will be thrilled to experience such natural wonders. Charter boats will be flat out and beach anglers will be ecstatic.
Next morning, however, I checked the bay again. This time I could see no fish or dolphins, just a commercial fishing boat working just beyond the surf break.
I could accept this if the catch was to feed the hungry, but no, the only commercial value in salmon is as pet food. The other problem with fishing in this close is, of course, the smaller fish which are killed but slip through the net make a perfect shark attractant right on our beaches.
What we need is a no commercial fishing zone inside a line between Green Cape and Tathra. Tourism is the future of this region, not cat food.
Robert Corlett, Merimbula
Message for politicians
The recently issued Ipsos Climate Change Report 2018 has some interesting results in its survey of Australia's attitudes toward climate change.
When asked what causes climate change, 46% said it was entirely human caused and 33% that it was part natural and part human. In all a whopping 79% of us who acknowledge the significant impact of us humans on our planet.
When asked what about the impact of climate change in Australia so far, some of the responses were: 52% said more frequent and/or extreme droughts; 48% said more frequent and/or extreme bushfires; 48% said more frequent and/or extreme storm events; 47% said more frequent and/or extreme floods; and 47% said destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
On the question of renewable energy, 64% responded that increasing the amount of power generated from renewable energy sources should be an essential or high priority.
Finally, when asked to rate the federal government's climate change performance, while 50% said it had been fairly or very poor, only 13% said fairly good or very good.
Surely some messages here for politicians in the coming election.
