Today’s approval by the Commonwealth Minister for Environment of the Snowy 2.0 project opens the way for an infrastructure white elephant that will decimate Kosciuszko National Park while driving up greenhouse gas emissions and energy prices.
“The Minister’s approval under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act for such a destructive proposal signals the failure of our national environmental laws’ stated Gary Dunnett, Executive Officer of the National Parks Association of NSW. ‘Last week the Australian National Audit Office published a damning report of the way the Commonwealth sidesteps the protection of matters of national environmental significance, and today we see that failure play out in their refusal to protect the threatened species and National Heritage listed landscapes of Kosciuszko”
“Never before has millions of tonnes of contaminated waste been dumped in a National Park, pest fish and diseases spread across the headwaters of the Murray, Snowy and Murrumbidgee river systems, a critically-endangered species been driven into extinction or hundreds of hectares of threatened species habitat destroyed in a National Heritage listed place.”
“The Federal Government has completely ignored the 50 energy, engineering, economic and environmental experts and organisations whose analysis utterly discredited the claimed benefits of Snowy 2.0. Their Open Letter to the NSW Premier and Prime Minister states “It is now evident that Snowy 2.0 will cost many times its initial estimate, not deliver its claimed benefits and permanently damage Kosciuszko National Park to an unprecedented extent. Snowy 2.0 is not as it has been publicly portrayed. There are many alternatives that are more efficient, cheaper, quicker to construct, and incur less emissions and environmental impacts.”
Today’s decision will go down in history as an appalling assault on one of Australia’s most fragile and precious of national icons, Kosciuszko National Park.”
ENDS
Contact: Gary Dunnett, Executive Officer NPA 02 9299 0000
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