A community meeting in Kiama has unanimously supported a motion opposing what they believe to be state government plans to ease tree-clearing controls.
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The February 4 meeting on the “war on trees”, arranged by the NSW Nature Conservation Council and Total Environment Centre, was hosted by Gerroa Environmental Protection Society.
“People are outraged that Premier Mike Baird is allowing the Nationals in the Coalition to dictate environment policy to the whole of the state,” NSW Biodiversity Review Campaign co-ordinator Corinne Fisher said.
“Our communities do not want the laws that have defended bushland and wildlife for more than a decade to be scrapped.”
The motion called on the Premier to halt species extinction, biodiversity loss and vegetation destruction in city and country areas.
“Clearly the new law is all about facilitating development, rather than protecting biodiversity and acting to mitigate damaging climate change impacts,” Ms Fisher said.
The campaign claims the government plans to abolish the Native Vegetation Act and Threatened Species Conservation Act and replace it with a new Biodiversity Conservation Act. They say negative impacts will include putting landmark trees and bushland in towns and suburbs at risk; renewing broadscale land clearing across the state; adding extinction pressures to the state's 1000 threatened species; and threaten clean, reliable water supplies.
Gerroa Environmental Protection Society secretary Howard H Jones said environmental assets in the Kiama area would be vulnerable if land clearing and threatened species legislation was weakened.
He said these included Kiama’s Illawarra Brush subtropical rainforest, and endangered bushland on private land at Seven Mile Beach threatened by sand mining.
A spokesman for Environment and Heritage Minister Mark Speakman said in 2014 the Independent Biodiversity Legislation Review Panel made 43 recommendations to the state government to integrate and modernise NSW laws governing biodiversity conservation and management of threatened species.
“The government announced that it would implement all of the panel’s recommendations as an integrated package of reforms,” the spokesman said.
“These reforms are designed to facilitate ecologically sustainable development, to drive better, more strategic, more effective and more targeted biodiversity conservation and to reduce unnecessary red tape.
“The government has also announced it will invest an additional $100 million over five years in the Saving our Species program.”
