Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act

President of the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program₁, and animal research ethics expert, Dr Ian Gunn, today, Wednesday September 10, 2014, expressed dismay at the Victorian Minister for Agriculture, Peter Walsh’s proposal to undermine measures put in place by the previous Labor government under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act, to protect the Dingo (Canis lupus subsp Dingo) as a threatened native species in Victoria.

It has been more than two years since Environment East Gippsland began legal action to sue the government’s logging monopoly, VicForests. In August 2009 we applied for an injunction for an immediate stop to logging at Brown Mountain. A year later, on 11 August 2010, the ruling was handed down. We had won our case! Here are the details.

A new you-tube film about the forest protectors' camp and community at Goongerah, South East Gippsland, near Brown Mountain. The long trial for the wildife on Brown Mountain has come to an end - all except the final decision by Justice Osborn, which all await with baited breath. This is a land-mark trial where real-life avatars have come out and opposed the 160 year old treatment of Victoria's forests and animals as colonial spoils for the taking and Victorians as mere servants to the State.
Read inside a fascinating summary of the arguments and evidence from either side: Vic Forests (for logging) and Environment East Gippsland Inc. (for nature). Revelatory of Department of Environment and Sustainability.

The Auditor General's report pointed out numerous inefficiencies, duplications and limits of resources. What it missed was to clearly highlight is that huge amount of time and money is spent on listing endangered species and the production of management plans but no further action is taken or enforced to properly rectify the problems. (Hans Brunner, wildlife ecologist, Victoria)

In a press release on April Fools Day 2009, Gavin Jennings interpreted as a 'pat on the back' a terrible report by the Auditor General on the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988.[1] The report said "the government's lack of baseline data or output performance measures means that it is not possible to conclude whether or not the Act has achieved its primary objectives. The available data, which is patchy, indicates that it has not," and notes failure to use the conservation and control measures in the Act, inadequate listing of threatened species, failure to develop action statements, to monitor implementation of these, or to assess their effectiveness, and that penalties for offences under the Act have not been reviewed or updated and therefore are not an effective deterrent." So government has no reliable statistical basis to make statements on wildlife numbers and health or to issue cull-permits in Victoria. Local independent counts are potentially more influential - like this one.