Image from Nine News
By Situation Theatre 26/8/2020
From granting new coal mining licences under Greater Sydney reservoirs, to increasing land clearing by 1200% since 2016, NSW Liberals are doing all they can to mitigate the risks of demands for climate action to company profits.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian came out strongly yesterday to accept all the recommendations of her corporate donors, promising her Government’s environmental vandalism on behalf of these interests will continue for so long as the community allows her to get away with it.
A recent Australian National University Report used “a vast number of measurements of the state of our environment: weather, oceans, fire, water, soils, vegetation, population pressure, and biodiversity” to produce an Environmental Condition Score.
NSW scored 0.3 out of 10.
A Natural Resources Commission report described land clearing as a “state-wide risk to biodiversity”, adding:
Our environmental protection laws in NSW are broken. Rampant land clearing, the logging of burnt and unburnt forests and the diversion of billions of litres of water from our rivers are leaving forests, woodlands and grasslands and the biodiversity they support scarred and starved.
Here’s a dilemma. Massive land-clearing contributing to climate change, leading to worse fires and native wildlife depletion. And yet a recommendation of the NSW bushfire review is...further clearing. How do we stop this being exploited further?#FightForPlanetA
— The Cathy Wilcox (@cathywilcox1) August 25, 2020
Dailan Pugh, a spokesperson for the North East Forest Alliance, said “We are in a climate and extinction emergency, clearing more vegetation and releasing its carbon into the atmosphere is pouring more fuel onto the fire, it has to stop.”
Yesterday Ms Berejiklian said that while she accepted that the climate is changing, her party accepts millions in donations from fossil fuel, logging and agricultural communities and as such it was her duty to protect them from nasty environmentalists.
Read more about the environment record of the NSW Government here:
The Berejiklian government’s failing environmental record
Berejiklian government uses COVID-19 crisis to further environmental vandalism