The quiet rural town of Widgee is home to lots of wildlife including koalas, which are now listed as endangered, and yet this year we have watched on helplessly as Gympie council has allowed a developer to clear hundreds of acres of koala habitat behind homes in Little Widgee Rd, the local school, and another large area behind the Widgee tip in Cole Rd.
The developer didn’t provide the required spotters on the ground while they dozed down tree after tree in prime koala habitat.
This week huge mature eucalypt trees that line the street are being removed, everyone of them visited by our local koalas, providing food and shelter.
The reason?
Because the developer said he needed to have “line of sight” – whatever that means.
Trucks and heavy machinery have been going in and out of the cleared acreage without any problems for weeks now and the removal of these trees is an unnecessary disgrace.
The local Koala Action Group held a meeting with Ergon a couple of years ago as they were talking about removing roadside trees in order to provide electricity to the proposed development.
Ergon agreed that because the trees were habitat trees, Mr Allen would have to put the power underground.
I strongly suspect that the removal of these trees is a sneaky way to avoid this added expense.
For council to have approved the removal of these trees is appalling.
They are well aware that they are critical to the local koala population but I guess the money that extra rates will bring in from this new sub-division is more important to them than the inevitable extinction of an iconic Australian marsupial.
We are rapidly losing our local population thanks to this developer and a council that refuses to listen to the locals and simply doesn’t care about koala protection.
Is there anything anyone is really prepared to do to protect the few that are left?
Or is calling them ‘endangered’ just lip service?
Because it seems koala habitat in this area, and I’m sure Australia wide, is in no way actually protected in any way by anyone.
– A Longmore
Widgee
