Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan has saved his forests from the sustainable, renewable timber industry. (Saving our forests and controlling our climate | The Spectator Australia.) There’ll be no more selective logging of beautiful, strong, and durable jarrah … but clear-felling will continue to pave the way for mining of bauxite to support the extremely energy-intensive industry producing aluminium.

Any parent who’s bought battery-powered toys for their kids must know that mining and transport can’t work on battery power. And aluminium smelters can’t run on battery back-up of fake renewables.

But McGowan insists Western Australian mining is saving Australia’s economy and environment. The Greens over there apparently agree with him. Now that all’s good in WA, they’re gunna educate us ignorant clods in the east. Farid Farid from the Mandurah Mail has joined the campaign to save koalas from logging. (NSW native forest logging up 175 per cent | Mandurah Mail | Mandurah, WA.)

They used a photo of a mum and a joey, not necessarily hers, sitting on a pile of logs to make their point. It’s pathetic. The picture feels posed. Koalas don’t usually sit on their bums and hold hands. Those ain’t logs either. They’re long dead trees that have been pushed into a windrow, presumably to be burnt. You can see the broken-off roots.

But the photo has certainly done the rounds. It’s been used in many advertisements to illustrate the imaginary threat to koalas from logging and clearing. The Environment Editor of The Australian used it in a half-page spread when he said that historical records a century after 1788 disproved my peer-reviewed ecological history. (CSIRO PUBLISHING | Wildlife Research.)

There are many more koalas across a much wider area now than there were when whitefellas set up camp in Australia. Farid Farid tells us that, ‘An estimated 64,000 koalas were killed when 5.5 million hectares was destroyed during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires in NSW.’

But the experts who made up the numbers to convince our governments that koalas will be gone in 30 years said that there were only 36,000 koalas in NSW before the fires. (Use of expert knowledge to elicit population trends for the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) – Adams‐Hosking – 2016 – Diversity and Distributions – Wiley Online Library.)

The fact is that koala plagues and megafires go together. Survivors breed faster than ever in the growth flush afterwards. Victoria’s supposedly last natural population in the the Strzelecki ranges has been through 20 megafires in 200 years including Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939, and Black Saturday 2009. They are still in unnaturally high densities.

Lock It Up and Let It Burn national park policy is great for the species. Not so good for the animals that are incinerated. Koala carers are unwittingly promoting the suffering of our iconic animal. Disease, dog attacks, and vehicle trauma are consequences of dense and expanding populations.

The NSW government has already pledged hundreds of millions of dollars of our money to double the numbers and the suffering. They’re well on track, even though they have no idea what the numbers really are. (Koala monitoring and habitat: Vic Jurskis responds I Australian Rural & Regional News (arr.news).)

Vic Jurskis has two books published by Connor Court (connorcourtpublishing.com.au)