National parks are in trouble in NSW. Not only has the Coalition stopped building the national parks network (the rate of national park creation has dropped by 95%), but it’s now openly attacking existing national parks and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
While the NSW government remains unwilling to commit to protecting nature, it falls on us to give the public a voice and fight for change, without it national parks and native wildlife in NSW will continue to suffer.
Right now the NSW Government has plans for a massive expansion of commercial activities in Kosciuszko National Park (KNP).
The Government wants to add another 4,000 beds to the resorts, build bigger carparks, allow helicopters to fly their clients into the park and, in a shocking rejection of sustainability principles, heat the waters of Yarrangobilly with gas in a parody of a Japanese onsen resort.
Kosciuszko National Park is NSW’s biggest. It’s an area of extraordinary beauty and ecological significance, protecting rare alpine ecosystems that cover just 0.001% of the Australian continent.
In 2018, the National Party called for the Murray Valley National Park to be ‘degazetted’ (revoking protected status) to allow it to be logged again. Austin Evans, the former National Member for Murray, introduced a degazettal bill in November 2018. Mr Evans was not re-elected in 2019. However, it was not long before the Deputy Premier, John Barilaro, put degazettal back on the table at a National Party conference in June 2019. Mr Barilaro subsequently asserted in an ABC radio interview that he was not proposing degazettal, but an expansion of the controversial ‘ecological thinning’ trial that was completed by NPWS in 2018 (incidentally, the monitoring results showed negligible effects of thinning).
Budget cuts and restructuring that are crippling National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), leaving them without the means required to properly manage our national parks.
The Blue Mountains World Heritage Area is currently under threat from a NSW government proposal to raise Warragamba Dam.
Campaign Update: In a victory for community pressure, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced there will be “no threat whatsoever” to the Royal National Park in current planning for the F6 motorway. This is great news, but can only be viewed as a reprieve for now.
