Hello to all our Koala supporters,

Happy New Year to everyone and AKF staff are looking forward to 2014.

From today on, our only focus will be the Koala Protection Act. Until one exists, Koala trees will continue to be destroyed. The fires that rage in our country yet again are just a forerunner of what we can see in the future, so saving existing forests is now even more essential. In recent months there have been massive changes to our Government at a federal level and the worst of those changes is the “one stop shop” approach to environmental approvals.

Luckily there is a Senate Inquiry into some of these changes and I asked Dr. Douglas Kerlin our Landscape Ecologist to review those changes. Our submission to the Senate is at this link ( click here ).

As you can see we believe these first changes allow industry to have open slather and it is just not good enough.

There are also changes to the EPBC Act coming up and Douglas is now preparing a submission for that process.   We have grave fears that the EPBC Act (which we already think is weak), will be watered down even further. Doesn’t this all sound familiar and for those that are regular readers of my Diary, you will feel that it is just the same old, same old stuff.

What is different however, this year, is that AKF no longer will “play the game”. Our communication with our Federal Government will be more honest than ever.

Watch this space!

Thank you as always for your support.

Deborah