The NSW government is introducing legislation to water down the existing biodiversity protection laws which will enable large scale clearing which will increase CO2 emissions and destroy valuable native vegetation, and flora and fauna.  New South Wales has some of the best biodiversity conservation and protection legislation in Australia enacted in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when conservation of threatened and endangered ecosystems and species were a significant priority.  They are not now.  Under the new proposed legislation to be tabled in the NSW Parliament in October up to 500 ha in a year can be cleared without any development consent or environmental appraisal or a combination of both.  Rare and vulnerable forest and woodland ecosystems can be cleared.  Only threatened forest ecosystems and woodlands cannot be cleared under the new legislation.

Already woodland birds in central and western New South Wales are on the brink or extinction.  Most of our small ground and arboreal marsupials are either extinct or exist only in a fragmented National Park system.  The new laws will spell the death knell for many of our remnant rare, vulnerable and critically endangered ecosystems, flora and fauna species, or paddock trees surviving into the future.  So what has happened to caring for our country?  The New South Wales government is bent on bending over backwards to acquiescing to a small minority of farmers and businesses.  We have had several decades of Land Care to care for our farming land and conserving ecosystems and species on private land.  That is about to be turned on its head.

Who benefits?  Anyone involved in agribusinesses or housing developments that want to maximize their bottom line and ignore our natural heritage that was managed successfully by Aborigines for 40,000 years or more.  We as  new immigrants to this country have only been here for just under two hundred and thirty years .  Yet we have destroyed or modified huge areas of our rich natural environment causing major extinctions of local endemic flora and fauna species.  The new legislation will cause further loss of native habitat and extinction of native plant and animal species.

Another aspect to this is that a state-wide vegetation mapping system underpinning the new biodiversity laws, uses technology that cannot accurately distinguish between the many different vegetation ecosystems .  Independent audits show that it is only 30-50% accurate.  So when it comes to assessing what can be cleared, it will not be able to do the task at hand. The government has spent millions of dollars running a discredited vegetation mapping program that will only make the task more difficult to protect ecosystems and species.  Only vegetation data that is 80% or more accurate should be used for biodiversity protection assessments backed up with stringent and incorruptible assessment processes.

We request that the New South Wales government keep the present biodiversity conservation laws to protect our biodiversity, our natural heritage, and private land for future generations.  We also ask that all the ecosystem mapping and audit systems be made more accurate and transparent than they are at the moment to protect what remains of biodiversity on private land.  Private land conservation is as important as public land conservation.  It is needed to create viable nature conservation networks across all land tenures.

We want to protect our valuable natural ecosystems and species for generations to come, not to be made extinct for the purposes of short-term economic benefit.