The Sydney Morning Herald’s Mike Foley tells us that 20 per cent of development applications relating to proposals ‘threatening koala habitat’ are for renewables. He doesn’t tell us why there’s so much koala habitat given that koalas are supposedly headed for extinction because of lost habitat, the Black Summer holocaust, more clearing, and climate change.

Before Black Summer, New South Wales started an inquiry to find out what was happening to our allegedly declining koalas. During the fires, koalas started turning up everywhere. Many thousands were reportedly killed. Consequently, koalas north of Victoria were declared an endangered species. Many thousands of the same species were also killed in Victoria and South Australia. But they weren’t listed.

After the listing, ‘previously unknown’ koalas started popping up everywhere in New South Wales. In Kosciuszko National Park, for example, where experts had told the Threatened Species Scientific Committee there were basically none. The endangered listing was based on expert advice, not extensive data. The results of which were boasted about it in a scientific journal: A quantitative, scientific method for deriving estimates of koala populations and trends was possible, in the absence of empirical data on abundances.

Late last year, Tweed Shire Council reported that thirty koalas were hit by cars or attacked by dogs in just three months. Meanwhile, we have been bombarded with ads from the Koala Industry telling us their habitat is being fragmented by development and they’ve nowhere to live. In fact, koalas are breeding like rabbits in unmanaged bush and invading new suburbs. Even in Sydney.

They turned up around Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor in 2017. Warning signs were erected on the main roads. After Black Summer, the Koala Inquiry and the Endangered listing, a ‘hidden population’ was suddenly ‘uncovered’ in the nearby scrub.

Our Lock It Up and Let It Burn ‘conservation’ paradigm promotes koala plagues and megafires which generate massive dirty emissions that are not included in our Fake Carbon Accounts. Council of Australian Governments’ 2004 Inquiry after the Canberra disaster gave us emergency response, evacuation, and ‘education’ instead of sustainable land management by mild fire.

Now we have a Bushfire Industry. After every disaster, emergency generalissimos and academic experts mark their own cards. NSW multi-million dollar Bushfire Research Hub gave advice to the Black Summer Inquiry and got increased funding.

Meanwhile NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) was monitoring north coast koalas before, during, and after Black Summer using efficient and effective technology. They released the results in a boring bureaucratic report on forest monitoring. ‘This recent trend shows a stable meta-population over the last 5 years, including after fires burnt 30 per cent of koala habitat in 2019.’

Koalas have been increasing on the north coast for many decades because their food has been increasing. They eat soft young shoots. Initially, they bred up in dense young regrowth from intensive logging and in timber plantations. As forests were increasingly ‘protected’, they suffered lack of mild burning to recycle nutrients and keep them open. Trees of all ages started declining in health. Declining trees keep resprouting soft young growth. Koalas are now in unnaturally high numbers through all the forests.

If you trouble to look at data from three separate scientific papers published by DPI, you’ll find that koalas continued to increase through Black Summer in lower altitude north coast forests. The increases more than compensated for the casualties. But the details were blurred when koala numbers were averaged across all altitudes and habitat quality classes for the whole region.

Koalas are now breeding faster than ever in all the soft new growth from Black Summer. Victoria’s supposedly last natural population in the Strzeleckis has been through twenty megafires in two hundred years. The first was around 1820 after Aboriginal management was disrupted by smallpox. The others included Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939, and Black Saturday 2009. Nothing to do with Climate Change. Koalas are still there in unnaturally high numbers.

We could achieve massive real reductions in genuinely filthy emissions from megafires by restoring sustainable fire management. It would have no effect on climate, but very positive effects on human and environmental health and safety. Koala populations would be reduced to sustainable levels. Chlamydia doesn’t cause disease in natural low-density populations. Irruptions and invasions of areas where koalas didn’t live naturally would cease along with unnecessary suffering from dog attacks and vehicle hits.

It would solve Minister Plibersek’s dilemma, but it wouldn’t suit the Fake Renewables Industry, the Bushfire Industry or the Koala Industry. Forests could be used for sustainable timber production and fairdinkum conservation instead of being cleared for giant windmills.

Vic Jurskis can also be found at connorcourtpublishing.com.au

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