"Rudd has direct responsibility to save species" - Brown

Over the eight years of operation of the nation's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act a major species, the Swift Parrot, has moved rapidly closer to extinction because of federal and state policy, Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown said today.

"It is not unlike the government-deliberated extinction of the Tasmanian tiger a century ago."
Releasing a new report on the Swift Parrot, Senator Brown said deliberate logging of its only known nesting and feeding habitat, near Tasmania's coasts, is seeing its population crash to, now, below 1,000 pairs.

And logging of more of its critical nesting habitat is set to continue during this spring and summer breeding season.

The Swift Parrot overwinters on mainland Australia, feeding from the blossoming of box woodlands from Toowoomba to Canberra to Adelaide. A legally required management plan to save its habitat has been suppressed since 2006.

The report, by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford, recommends reclassification of the parrot as "critically endangered" and Prime Ministerial action under the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) to notify the Tasmanian government that a serious "dispute" and potential withdrawal from the RFA is underway unless logging of the birds' habitat and food trees is halted immediately.

Only three per cent of black gum habitat, a major blossom food species for the Swift Parrot, remains in Tasmania. More than 1,000 hectares of the bird's nesting habitat is being woodchipped each year in Tasmania. Now Forestry Tasmania is waiting only until Swift Parrots finish nesting this season in the Weilangta Forest before resuming logging of one of their richest nesting areas and remove it forever as a bird nursery.

"Prime Minister Rudd is directly responsible. It is up to him to invoke the provision in the Regional Forestry Agreement to end the destruction of this bird's only nesting place on Earth," Senator Brown said.

Senator Brown intends to question the Prime Minister's department about this responsibility in Senate Estimates this week.

Further information: Ebony Bennett 0409164603