I woke up and thought I was in the land of Oz, the one with the wizard or some other fantasy place. All around us people were being ‘struck with enlightenment’. The first piece of amazing news was that the government had allocated over $2 million to help save the Tweed and Byron shire koalas. Then we hear that our little furry gum leaf-chewing friends have had their status up-graded to ‘vulnerable’. However, the icing on the cake took place at the recent Tweed Shire Council meeting where all seven councillors voted in favour of the remainder of the local koala population being categorised as being ‘endangered’.
However, not everybody is jumping with joy. In fact Reg Van Rij, Leda’s spokesperson for the Kings Forest and Cobaki Lakes development, sees koalas as a ‘hurdle’ that has to be overcome. To support ‘koala unfriendly’ development he spoke at a recent Tweed Chamber of Commerce breakfast this morning calling for members to vote for a ‘pro-business’ council at the September election. It is alleged that Leda was the largest financial contributor to the 2004 Tweed Shire Council election and look what happened as a result. The council was sacked and administrators ran our council for four years. Do we want a replay of this? It was during that period that the administrators, including Cr Max Boyd, our only local representative, were allegedly the only municipality in Northern NSW to ask for a bigger boost to the Tweed Shire population than the State Government requested. This stupidity opened the gates for Leda to walk in and monopolise 80 per cent of local ‘green-land’ development over the next 20 years.
KFC (Kings Forest Chaos) is a disaster slowly unfolding. Apart from the fact that our remaining koalas are threatened by this development, some 20 or so other endangered species in the Cudgen Paddock are threatened by this travesty that will change the shire’s way of life, for the worse, forever. So much can be said about the effects of an extra 15,000 tree-changers invading our fair shire, including the extra strain on our infrastructure: roads, water, health etc. I urge the good folk of Tweed Shire to consider this when they vote in the next bunch of councillors on September 8 this year.
Chris Degenhardt
(Koala supporter)
Tweed Shire resident
