Rosalie Woodruff MP | Greens Environment spokesperson
National Threatened Species Day marks the day the last thylacine died in Tasmania. Under the Hodgman Government, much of our remaining native wildlife faces a similar fate.
Instead of learning the lessons of the past, the Liberals came into office and immediately cut expert staff from the Threatened Species Unit within DPIPWE. Hundreds of Threatened species are without an up to date ‘recovery plan’, and only a select few have any population monitoring, at even the most inadequate level.
Not only have the Liberals cut resources to threatened species protection, they are destroying critical habitat.
Oldgrowth forests - home to swift parrots, Tasmanian devils, wedge-tailed eagles, quolls and other listed threatened wildlife - are being destroyed every day. The Liberals still intend to log the 356,000 ha of high conservation value forests, currently set aside in reserves.
The thylacine was hunted to extinction. This government’s sanctioned slaughter of hundreds of thousands of native animals every year, through so-called crop protection permits, is putting many more at risk.
We are living in a worldwide biodiversity crisis, with galloping rates of extinction never before seen in the planet's history. Responsible and caring governments value and protect threatened flora and fauna, because we need intact environments to keep functioning natural systems.
In Tasmania, however, the Hodgman Government is putting our wildlife at risk of localised and general extinction in every way possible.
On National Threatened Species Day, we implore the Liberals not to let more native and endemic wildlife go the way of the Tasmanian tiger. The thylacine should be the last reminder we need to protect what is vulnerable and precious.