IN Tuesday’s Guardian (April 22), Member for Mallee, Anne Webster, expressed the intention to wipe out the Environmental Defender’s Office, should the Coalition win.
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She is clearly ignorant of the adage – ‘No Economy Without Environment’.
The Environmental Defender’s Office (EDO) links eight, separate offices across Australia. It is a non profit, non-government, community based legal service, that uses the law to protect any aspects of our environment which are under threat. It holds government, industry and individuals to account in matters of pollution, inappropriate development and environmental destruction.
The EDO is not all-powerful. They don’t always win. In 2022, for example, they lost a case against the granting of a 30 year water licence, which by year 7 of the project, allowed 40,000 ML of groundwater to be extracted each year, to water crops at Singleton Station, near Tennant Creek.
Some years ago, I served on the Murray Catchment Management Authority. It was for me a blinding insight into the vulnerability of the land, vegetation, water, habitat and wildlife in the Murray Catchment.
Just last year, 30 more Australian wildlife species were listed as threatened. In spite of the efforts of the EDO, the illegal bulldozing of protected vegetation by landholders continues, driving creatures like koalas to extinction.
More than 80 per cent of our plants, birds, mammals, insects and frogs, are found nowhere else in the world.
A policy decision by an incumbent government to wipe out the Environmental Defender’s Office, shows a callous disregard for what is precious and beautiful in our rural landscape and a reckless readiness not to prevent its destruction.
Janet Field
Swan Hill
