BY MICHAEL SLOVANOS
ON-the-ground video footage from the southern part of Kosciuszko National Park has shown the NSW government’s claim that the brumby aerial shooting campaign is “humane” is a lie.
Long-time Snowy Mountain bushman Shannon Byrne, from Jindabyne, has shown video of starving brumby foals, deprived of their mother by random aerial shooting operations carried out by the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.
Byrne recently posted the video in response to reports that NSW Parks and Wildlife Service didn’t like the videos, but he pledged to keep posting them as long as NSWPWS continued to attack the “mountain way of life”, which he noted was also “part of the Australian way of life”.
Byrne says the PWS not only attacks brumbies, but people, repeatedly telling them where they can and can’t go. “They’re public servants and they have to realise we own the park – we dictate what goes on, not them,” he said.
“I’ve never seen such an incompetent group of bastards in my life, that we prop up and fund. Then to turn around and have the hide to say ‘we don’t like this’, well guess what, we don’t like what you’re doing to our way of life and if you think we’re going to sit up and shut up, it’s not going to happen,” said a visibly angry Byrne.
The shooting operations resumed recently after the Snowy Mountains Bush Users Group failed in a legal action against Environment Minister Penny Sharpe in the NSW Supreme Court in June in a bid to stop the aerial culling, which had been approved in October 2023. After a three-day hearing in July, Justice David Davies dismissed the case.
The long title of Sharpe’s department alone should tell us something about the intent of these state “environment” bureaucracies. Their purpose is clear – they lay claim to, and seek control of basically any activity connected to land. They are essentially the enforcers of Agenda 20-30 – the global society in which “environment” takes precedence over humanity.
In reality, Environment Minister Sharpe is a mere box ticker for the $300k to 500k pa (plus benefits) corporate bureaucrats of the Senior Executive Service who run these departments. They are a million miles from the likes of Shannon Byrne and the dwindling population of the towns and farms surrounding Kosciuszko National Park.
Agenda 20-30, as we have long known, seeks to depopulate these areas and expand the borders of this already massive area of park land. They claim to be “protecting the environment” but in the absence of grazing animals, grass and brush is left to flourish unimpeded, dry out, and burn, setting alight thousands of hectares of regrowth and older bushland.
When the fires are eventually put out by the dumping of often chemical-laden water, thick, spindly regrowth occurs. If this regrowth encounters drought conditions and catches fire again, the fire will be very hot and intense and do serious ecological damage, burning up the seeds that would normally survive “cooler” fires.
It is also widely acknowledge that Australia’s bushland was frequently cool-burned by the Aborigines to flush out edible wildlife. Regrowth grasses would also attract the ‘roos, a major source of protein.
Contrary to green ideology, the presence of grazing livestock in and around native forests actually protects them. Weeds, of course, can be an issue, but these can be controlled.
The Snowy Mountains of southern NSW and eastern Victoria have long survived the presence of wild horses but numbers have periodically ballooned up to an estimated 20,000.
The farmers and others living in the vicinity of the park are well aware of this but they argued in court for means of control other than aerial shooting which they maintain is inhumane and inflicts unecessary pain on the horses. Mustering and rehoming horses was one method favoured by locals.
According to environment bureaucrats wild horses “pose a risk to the delicate alpine ecosystem”. But these same bureaucrats are silent when fire destroys thousands of hectares of forest due to mismanagement of undergrowth.
