It was disappointing to see Melinda Pavey add a shovelful of hubris to the reporting of what was a genuine, informed and considered debate entered into by all councillors at Bellingen Shire on Wednesday over the threat of intensive logging and clear felling to our forests .
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The thoughtful contributions to debate on a detailed and obviously well crafted motion contrasted with Ms Pavey’s attempt to portray the whole process as political spin.
Ms Pavey should know political spin when she sees it. Her often repeated spin that koalas don’t need dedicated reserves (for example, see ‘More National Parks will not help Koalas’ in Courier-Sun 2 August, 2017) was steamrolled a month or so ago by her own government as they announced no less than eleven new koala reserves as the centerpiece of a new NSW Koala Strategy.
OK Melinda, well time for a fightback, after all you were reported at last year’s state National Party conference at Broken Hill saying that a couple of National Party seats at on the North Coast were at risk because of koalas.
We all know that those reserves your government recently established, including a couple in your Oxley electorate, were mostly in rough country, miles from good koala habitat and mostly already protected anyway. Your next contribution could be to fess up that we don’t need those new koala reserves either.
What we do need is substantial koala reserves based on high quality koala habitat before it is all intensively logged away. That’s what the proposal for the Great Koala National Park represents and that’s not spin.
Ashley Love
Coffs Harbour