Environmental Offsets Framework.
THEY call it “protecting biodiversity”. We call it what it is – theft and extortion carried out under the colour of law.
The offenders are the managers and councillors of Nillumbuk Shire Council, north of Melbourne, who tout themselves as “The Green Wedge Shire”.
Cairns News would willingly back down from this harsh description of a shire council if commonsense were employed, but the case of a local resident named John who needs to remove a large, dangerous gum tree on his property qualifies them for this description. Even mainstream media is somewhat outraged by this incident.
John faces council-imposed costs of about $10,000 to qualify him for the “privilege” of removing the obviously dangerous 30-metre-high tree that has already dropped large limbs on to the lawn where his children play.
The major part of the “application process” to remove the tree is to buy a “tree offset credit”, valued at $5000.
This is a payment some councils charge when a person or developer removes a tree, instead of (or in addition to) planting a replacement tree themselves. It’s a way for councils to maintain or increase overall tree canopy even when development occurs.
That is a scam and a fraud in itself. Eucalyptus trees and shrubs are essentially large woody, invasive weeds with little value, except in the minds of delusional environmentalists. There are literally tens of millions of them growing across Australia and every summer millions of the “protected” trees are burnt by raging fires.
Our forefathers made good use of them for fuel and building timber, in days when timber mills dotted the landscape. But in 21st Century Australia governments and councils, misled by environmentalist dogma turned into policy, have given gum trees sacred status, forbidding farmers and other land owners from cutting them down without permission and threatening massive fines.
There is also a large degree of hypocrisy on the part of governments, who destroy vast swathes of trees for highways. Do they pay offsets for all of those thousands of trees they knock down? If they do, it’s a merely another massive impost on taxpayers and government budgets.
John in Nillumbuk Shire, an optometrist, sought permission from the council to cut down the tree, but he was told there were several steps he’d have to take first, each attracting a fee. The $5000 “tree offset credit” is the first of those charges.
Of course the $5000 is in addition to the cost of cutting down the tree itself, which comes to around $2700. Then on top of that is another handly little fee-maker, a “biodiversity assessment report”, bringing the total bill to $10,000.
We could make a “biodiversity assessment” in less than 10 seconds: “It’s a big fricking tree that’s in danger of falling over!”
Nillumbik Shire Council told A Current Affair it is “reviewing a planning application to remove a tree from John’s property, noting that any native vegetation removal impacts local habitat and biodiversity.”
“Native vegetation offsets are compensatory measures that aim to balance the ecological impact of vegetation removal by protecting native vegetation with similar habitat and biodiversity value elsewhere in the local area,” a council spokesman said.
“As part of the native vegetation offset program, the applicant needs to provide a Native Vegetation Removal Report to assess the biodiversity value of the tree and its offset value. Only then will we know the cost to the property owner.”
Another day, another bureaucratic money grab in the name of “saving the environment”. Any clear thinking Aussie can see through this palpable baloney and it’s time environmentalists were given the boot and the nation given the opportunity to return to commonsense values.
