2024-08-15
The NSW Auditor General has today tabled a performance audit into the Government’s management of threatened species and ecological communities . The report has identified that both funding and administration of threatened species programs in NSW are failing to achieve the objectives of preventing species extinctions.
Greens MP Sue Higginson and spokesperson for the environment said “This performance audit is evidence that the NSW Government is failing to address the extinction crisis and is not stumping up the effort or the money to protect nature including our most threatened and iconic species,”
“If this performance report was a report card, it would be a big red ‘F’ for fail, there is no other way to read this report. The raw numbers speak for themselves, a 19% decrease in the number of threatened species that are being actively managed, and 69% of threatened species are not being managed for conservation,”
“The NSW budget has been allocating less and less to the environment each year. It was allocated 1.73% in 2022-23, and has declined to just 1.61% under the Minns Labor Government,”
“The administrative failures of the Government are compounding the crisis, and do not effectively determine priorities, leading to delayed reporting that cannot provide a complete view of which species are even protected,”
“The gaps in the reported data means that the Government is creating a situation where it can not identify and respond to species decline. Even worse, the Government is not working with holistically across agencies on key threats, so the Government is effectively contributing to species decline, while purporting to care,”
“This audit is damning, and lays bare how poorly the NSW Labor Government’s response to threatened species has been, and continues to be. There are things this Government could do immediately to make significant steps in the right direction, such as ending the industrial logging of our public native forests, which is one of the most serious drivers of extinction of some of our most iconic forest dependent threatened species,”
“Taken alongside the report by Ken Henry into the parlous state of biodiversity in NSW, the scope of this crisis is enormous, it’s getting worse and is in part being driven by Government ineptitude,”
“We are rapidly heading towards the 2 year mark of the Minns Labor Government in NSW, the environment is still heading backwards on every measure. The Premier needs to pick up how drastic this situation is, or he will be the Premier that watched while our environment in this state died,” Ms Higginson said.