Collateral damage

Destroying Greater Glider habitat is ok if you're trying to save the planet

The greater glider is in pole position to win the Marsupial of the Year contest. Australia’s largest gliding possum has pushed the much-fancied koala into second place in the latest rankings. Fittingly, the winner of the battle between creatures struggling for survival will be announced next week on Channel Ten’s The Project, a show that has been hovering on the brink of extinction for some time.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has been drumming up support for the panda-eyed eucalypt munchers with their teddy bear ears. "If smooth gliding, extra fluffy fur and smelly conversations are your thing, vote for the Greater Glider!" It urges on its website. It claims the Greater Glider population has halved in the last 20 years because of bushfires and logging.

This makes it odd, to say the least, that ACF is not raising a stink about Lotus Creek, where 310 hectares of old-growth forest are about to be bulldozed to make room for wind turbines. 

The Lotus Creek Wind Farm is 100 per cent funded by the Queensland Government and is supported by the Commonwealth. The environmental cost of the project in the Connors Range adjacent to the Glencoe State Forest is well documented. Researchers counted 138 greater gliders during their environmental assessment. The old-growth trees provide hollow dens for the creatures to rest during the day. The area offers a rich habitat for Koalas and Squatter pigeons and is a refuge for the Powerful Owl and White-Throated Needletail, all classified as vulnerable.

An ecological assessment report listing five Matters of National Environmental Significance under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was placed on Tanya Plibersek's desk shortly after she became Environment Minister in 2022. It gave Plibersek strong grounds to block the project as her Coalition predecessor, Sussan Ley, had done. Yet Plibersek overturned Ley's decision and sanctioned the destruction of remnant bushland on the Great Dividing Range that was virtually untouched by farming.

The ACF has not raised an eyebrow about the Lotus Creek atrocity. Neither has it lodged an objection to Twiggy Forrest’s Upper Burdekin (Gawara Baya ) wind turbine development that received Plibersek’s rubber stamp in June. Ditto the French giant Neoen’s plans for Mount Hopeful 65 km west of Gladstone, approved by Plibersek in April, and the Boulder Creek Wind Farm she approved in June 2022

, in which the Queensland State Government has a 50 per cent stake.

Wind turbine developments also threaten to destroy greater glider and koala habitat at Mount Fox north of Ingham, Moah Creek and Boulder Creek to the west of Rockhampton. The Queensland government has approved all three, and Plibersek's signature is regarded as little more than a formality.

The gulf between Plibersek's actions and words is wide enough to be viewed from outer space. On Friday, Plibersek announced the Government would co-host the Global Nature Positive Summit next month in Gadigal Country, or Sydney as it was once known. "Australia can be a global leader in protecting and restoring nature and stopping biodiversity loss," she said.

Yet our nature-positive Environment Minster has sanctioned the destruction of at least 1260 hectares of Greater Glider habit in old-growth forests in Queensland while supine environmental bodies like the ACF, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society urge the Government to roll out renewables faster.

The three activist organisations, with a combined income of more than $58 million at their disposal last year, are staunch advocates of renewable energy and are strongly opposed to nuclear. None has been prepared to question the cumulative environmental damage of land-hungry wind, solar and pumped hydro schemes. They have shown little compassion for scores of rural communities with uglification forced upon them by pious city-based bureaucrats drawing lines on maps.

A decree by the European Union to ban imports of beef contaminated by de-forestation has gifted the laptop activists another chance to beat up on regional Australia.

 The ACF is running a slippery campaign of moral equivalence to portray tightly regulated rotational clearance of woody growth on well-managed Australian farms with illegal tree-felling by cattle ranchers in the Amazon Basin.

The activists want to change the definition of “old-growth" to anything older than 15 years. If beef farmers become collateral damage in the EU's virtue-signalling campaign, so be it. To them, anything that hastens the glorious vegan revolution must be good.

The Save Our Big Backyard campaign raises the green left to new level of unsteady, bare-faced hypocrisy. There is ample evidence to show that the biggest threat to the sanctity of our native vegetation and wildlife comes from wind and solar farmers, not the cattle industry. Vast hectares of land that have survived more than 200 years of settlement farming are being sacrificed for the sake of the planet.

Future generations will look back at these people with disdain. They will gaze at scarred hillsides where dynamite was used to build access roads and clear the ground for vast concrete pads as big as a football field to erect giant wind turbines which will have long-since been removed. They will wonder how on earth an affluent, sophisticated and environmentally conscious nation could sanction such things. Future anthropologists will write textbooks about the religious fervour that led early-21st-century humans to believe they could harvest energy directly from the wind and the sun. They will be puzzled as to why they didn't adopt nuclear technology, just as cultural historians of Mesoamerica are curious why the Aztecs never discovered the wheel.

There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable energy developers grows in regional and rural Australia, and people in the city begin to latch on. The backlash is particularly noticeable in Queensland, where the Labor government appears to have given up hope of retaining any seat north of Sandgate. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanised communities into action. Anti-renewable billboards funded by small donations have begun to appear along the Bruce Highway south of Gympie.

Premier Stephen Miles took to Instagram last week, posting an unflattering video of himself endorsing the bilby as his nomination for Marsupial of the Year. The recovery in numbers of the burrowing big-eared critter makes it one of conservation's success stories. Miles, on the other hand, is heading the way of the Dodo.