This article relates to the ongoing debate on Australian Rural & Regional News into Koalas and also Bushfires, Logging, Burns & Forest Management. A number of the reports and articles referred to in this article can be found there, including those by Vic Jurskis, as well as many others. People with expertise or experience in these fields are invited to contribute.

Vic Jurskis

Within a few short years the lights will go out in eastern Australia with the closure of Eraring power station. Fake renewables will be exposed and there’ll be a scramble to construct nuclear power stations that can plug into established grids. If all the inputs over the short life of the unreliable, intermittent generators and their enormous back-up batteries, as well as the energy wasted in turning on and off fairdinkum generators, were brought to account, it would be obvious that net zero is nonsense.

Think of mining, transport, manufacture, site preparation, installation, maintenance, construction of  transmission infrastructure, dismantling, disposal, rehabilitation.

But it will be too late for our major sustainable and renewable resource industry – native forestry. It’s finished in Western Australia and Victoria. It will be virtually finished in New South Wales when we get the Great Koala National Park later this year to ‘protect’ an irruptive species that is in plague proportions.

We keep getting more stories about koalas suffering disease, dog attacks, vehicle injuries, drought and immolation in ‘climate driven’ megafires, but journalists don’t ask where all these animals of a supposedly endangered species are coming from.

The Great Koala Scam was nearly exposed after Black Summer when NSW Dept. of Primary Industries (DPI) published data showing that koalas on the north coast continued to increase through the drought and holocaust. But the bureaucrats craftily covered their tracks. The relevant data were published in three separate papers without direct site-specific comparisons over time.

DPI and Natural Resources Commission then published a summary which diluted the data from intensively monitored and increasing coastal subpopulations with less precise data from hinterland areas where koalas aren’t monitored as closely and aren’t increasing as quickly. They reported that north coast koala numbers remained stable over five years including Black Summer.

The facts haven’t deterred the ecowarriors of North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) from trying to hasten the demise of the sustainable, renewable, solar-powered native timber industry. They don’t care about habitat for people, other than themselves. They’ve launched an application for an injunction to ‘save’ the overcrowded koalas that are breeding more rapidly than ever on all the soft new growth resprouting after the Black Summer holocaust that they helped to create.

According to the Guardian, “Environmentalists said scientists had estimated the black summer bushfires of 2019-20 reduced the koala population in the area by more than 70%. The alliance said its own surveys had confirmed the endangered species was still found in the forests, making it vital they were protected”.

When I lived in the area in the late 1970s, koalas were rare and healthy, forests were frequently burnt, open, healthy and safe. There was a pole cutter working in the silviculturally treated regrowth at Braemar, cutting power transmission poles with an 076 Stihl chainsaw and about a 60 cm cutter bar – about twice as big and heavy and awkward as needed for the job.

He was a little bloke about the same size as me, but he had no trouble carting the 076 around the beautiful open grassy bush. The poles were snigged to the skids with a small articulated wheeled tractor. There was no need to push scrub or make tracks.

Wyan sawmiller Greg Richards was working nearby. One day Greg caught a koala in the bush where he was working. He took it to the local one-teacher Public School to show the kids because people didn’t see wild koalas back then.

When I revisited the area 40 years later it was unrecognisable. There was dirty scrub with sick and dying trees. Green ideology had stopped ecological maintenance by mild fire.  Dailan Pugh and NEFA said that koalas were declining and endangered. When the scrub exploded in the inevitable Black Summer fires, it had suddenly become home to hundreds of koalas that perished in the ‘climate-driven’ catastrophe.

The major environmental problem in our forests is lack of sustainable fire management. The great majority of public forest is in reserves where a Lock It Up and Let It Burn management paradigm applies. The Great Koala National Park will exacerbate problems associated with scrub development, megafires, death and destruction, erosion, siltation and massive dirty emissions that aren’t included in our carbon accounts.

Real data from DPI show that logging has no impact on koala numbers and that they continued to increase in low altitude north coast forests through the Black Summer drought. Losses in high intensity fires were more than compensated by ongoing increases in koalas breeding on soft young growth resprouting from sick trees in unburnt forests and surviving trees in burnt forests.

Lock It Up and Let It Burn ‘conservation’, koala plagues and megafires go together.

Dailan Pugh and NEFA are doing a great job promoting plagues of the species, whilst condemning thousands of individual koalas to disease, dog attacks, vehicle injuries and immolation in megafires.

Our truly endangered species are those whose open grassy habitat has been choked out by scrub in the absence of maintenance by mild fire. It is effectively illegal to apply sustainable fire management in any New South Wales forests, whatever their tenure. Instead of managing a healthy and safe landscape with frequent mild burning, it is split up into zones with various counter-productive restrictions which ensure perverse outcomes.*

I expect that  the court will grant the injunction against logging because The Law Is an Ass. Especially since it’s been driven by green ideology.

But I beg you, as Editor, to give democracy a chance. Our new Premier Chris Minns seems like an honest bloke. Perhaps you could ask him to have his Environment Minister reply to the questions you posed nearly two months ago:

• Did koalas decline in their north coast ‘stronghold’ through the Black Summer Drought and megafires?
• Which way is it? Are koalas generally declining or are they turning up everywhere when effective surveys are used?
• How many different areas were covered by the 1000 survey sites? How many areas had no koalas?
• If koalas are declining, why would you want to relocate them from areas where they are “problematic” to areas where they are thriving?

Time is running out. Not for koalas, but for fairdinkum people in fairdinkum environmentally friendly industries that could support a healthy, safe, diverse and resilient landscape. It’s rather ironic that greens aren’t opposing the massive clearing of forests for bauxite mines, gigantic windmills, huge transmission towers and large swathes of pest and weed gardens under the lines, let alone the massive sterilisation of productive agricultural lands for solar and wind ‘farms’.

* 129-138_human_fire_maintains_a_balance_of_nature.pdf (bushfirecrc.com)

Vic Jurskis has written two books published by Connor Court, Firestick Ecology and The Great Koala Scam.