Memory extinction

THIS is our family reunion, Fremantle 2016 photo.
We were so disappointed that, six years later, it is no longer possible to take such a photo.
We must save our NUMBAT – on the wall and in the wild.
Diana Corbyn
Willagee

A record to be proud of?

IN your article “Charges dropped” (Herald, August 13, 2022) you report our state Labor MP, Simone McGurk, of being proud of “the McGowan government’s record in environmental reform”. 

It seems she doesn’t share the opinion of the prosecution and police who not only withdrew charges against Fern Huck for criminal damage to her office by writing anti-gas slogans on her office windows, but are also paying almost $5000 towards the legal costs she incurred as a result of having been charged.

I suggest that Ms McGurk can only be so proud of the actions of the government of which she forms a part when she ignores the concerns, and even alarm, amongst her constituents. 

Just recently she and her Labor colleagues were in the trenches with the community protesting the brutal destruction by Colin Barnett and Main Road WA’s Roe 8 project. 

Now they are the ones driving the Bunbury Outer Ring Road project against strong community alarm and protest. 

How is the BORR any different from Roe 8? 

Apart from the fact that an alternative, less destructive route, over previously cleared land has been suggested.

How does the McGowan government’s strong support for Woodside’s unnecessary and destructive Scarborough Gas expansion fit with a ‘proud record in environmental reform’? 

Or the way in which it slapped down the EPA when it tried to suggest bringing in measures which we understand to be imperative to ensure compliance with the Paris emissions reductions targets or net zero by 2050. 

Or the threat to the Kimberley from the fracking the government appears keen to promote? 

Or the continuing threats to our last remaining remnants of jarrah forest by bauxite mining?

Yes, there are indeed some instances of environmental progress. 

But when we’re facing the ecological emergency we experience ever more obviously in events relating to climate change and the biodiversity indicators ringing alarm bells, as federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek clearly articulated when releasing the long-delayed State of the Environment Report, our state government falls far short of the action I believe Fremantle wishes to see. 

We continue lagging on real action on electric vehicles, including electrified public transport, improved planning legislation, innovation and endeavour for WA to transition to renewable energy with community batteries and wind generation which WA is so ideally placed to benefit from, and much more.

No Simone McGurk, trotting out the hackneyed political platitudes doesn’t satisfy me.

Louis de
Villiers White Gum Valley

A dingbat?

Hope any campaign is better informed than this! It’s a NUMBAT – or should that be that the author of this is a DINGBAT?

Ian Ker
South Fremantle