A few years ago Jackie Trad, the former Deputy Labor Premier, took a keen interest in a small bird known as the black throated finch. Her government had commissioned an independent review of the potential impact of the Adani Carmichael mine on the bird. That review had concluded that the mine risked pushing the bird to extinction.
It was one of the last ditch efforts to stop the Adani mine. Jackie’s efforts failed, the mine went ahead and 2000 people have jobs there now. Now we do not need to argue about Jackie’s study. We have real world data. Has the mine killed the black throated finch?
Last month the first official population estimate of the finch in the area of the Adani mine was recorded. There are now 2200 finch and, far from going extinct, they are thriving. This is because, as part of their approval, Adani was required to help protect the finch in ways that no one has ever done before.
The black-throated finch is a small, canary-like bird that is found predominantly in grassy woodlands.
One hundred years ago black-throated finch were abundant and the population spread from Northern New South Wales to the Atherton Tablelands in North Queensland. However, as a recent report into the finch concluded “by the 1940s they had mostly disappeared from the south-east of their former range.”
Or to put it another way, the green activists, whose natural habitats are the hipster bars and coffee shops of south-east Queensland, benefit from living in an area that destroyed the habitat of the black-throated finch. They now hypocritically lecture others about the need for environmental protection!
Back when the inner-city Brisbane developments were being built, there were no environmental offset policies in place, or even any need to even consider the impact of a development on birds.
Things are different today, and rightly so. Adani spent more than $1 million researching the habitat and behaviour of the finch even before they dug a hole.
The development of the Adani mine did disturb some of the finch’s habitat (up to 16,500 hectares if the mine is ever fully developed). However, Adani agreed to reserve more than 30,000 hectares to offset that impact. Compare that to Brisbane’s footprint of 1.5 million hectares.
In that 30,000 hectare finch reserve, Adani has installed dedicated watering points for the bird (to keep them away from cattle), controlled the vegetation to the birds liking and planted trees for the birds to nest in. In effect, Adani has built a 5-star hotel for the black-throated finch, and has done much more for its preservation than the Queensland Government ever has.
A condition of the 2014 approval of the Adani mine was for the Queensland Government to develop its own bioregional management plan for the black throated finch. Almost 10 years later no such management plan exists, and it is not even clear whether the Queensland Government has begun action on one.
It is now clear that Jackie Trad’s, and Labor’s, posturing about the finch was all for show. If Labor really cared about the finch why haven’t they developed and implemented their own plan to protect it. As soon as the politics of Adani moved on, Labor dropped all care for the finch no matter how endangered it is across Queensland.
This is a pattern that is repeated time and time again. The people that bleat the most about the environment normally live in concrete jungles. Those that do the most environmental protection are the miners and the farmers who actually live and work in the natural environment.
If you want to see real environmental destruction, visit a poor country. It is the industries like mining and farming that give us the resources to do good things like protecting our rare birds.
It is just another reason to support the industries that make Central Queensland great.
