Alan Veacock, Cumbalum
What an outstanding effort by Liberal MLC Catherine Cusack, to stand up to the premier and a belligerent National Party to thwart what would have been a death sentence for what remains of the koala population in NSW.
Take a bow Catherine, you have done a great service for the koalas and your community that passionately support them.
John (Pork) Barilaro and Clarence MP Chris Galaptus claiming ‘farmers deserve certainty’ is farcical. Do the koalas deserve extinction? One has only to watch great programs like Landline on our poorly funded ABC to see that a growing number of farmers are actually replanting koala trees on their property in an effort to reintroduce these iconic marsupials.
If the NSW government was serious about koala conservation they should be paying all relevant landowners compensation for their conservation efforts.
The National Party is now in serious decline. They have become little more than an agent for the fossil fuel industry, and the irrigation industry, and with this latest effort, the property developers wanting to clear koala habitat. They continue to pay the price at the ballot box and still they refuse to embrace modern environmental policies or to accept anthropogenic climate change as the existential threat to the very people they claim to represent.
Yes, Allan thank God there are great conservatives like Catherine Cusack who are prepared to put principles above politics. It’s appalling, but not surprising that local Nationals MLC. Ben Franklin didn’t have the guts to do the same and voted for this destructive legislation. Ben is very good at toeing the party line when it involves outdated anti-environmental practices the Nationals are so notorious for, one would have thought this fellow would have learnt his lesson when he failed miserably to win the seat of Ballina despite a mountain of pork-barreling money thrown at us. We hold our environmental credentials and beliefs high around here and are not going to be bought that easily by pork-barreling money, possibly from the rorted Community Grants Scheme that Gladys Berejiklian is now in so much trouble over. As previously stated – like many other regional electorates are now doing – we’ll shamelessly take the money but pass on the unwanted “nasties” that come with a now struggling outdated National Party in serious decline.
Yes, the Nationals in decline… & it took Catherine Cusack – another ‘stand-up
woman,’ to do it.