Propoganda machine in overdrive
Hats off to Minister Jennings for turning his Department into the ALP’s propaganda office. When the DSE asked part of the Department to do a survey for endangered animals in East Gippsland, the Departmental staff were so poorly resourced that they didn’t have enough time to do the work properly. Eventually, it was left to a small environmental group to come up with the resources that eventually located some of the rare and endangered Potoroos living in part of the East Gippsland Forest that Vicforests wanted to knock down.
Faced with this embarrassment, and with only limited tax payers funds, how do you think the Department would react? Well, there was no money made available to do an extensive flora and fauna survey so the geniuses at DSE, under the direction of the Victorian Government, did what they always do so well – they came up with a public relations program which is now installed on the DSE web site as the “Protecting East Gippslands Old Growth and Iconic forests“.
This PDF includes a number of photos from East Gippsland showing what a great job they are doing. Sadly, they’ve only included the ‘BEFORE’ shots. For your information, and to give the public a more balanced picture, I suggest that you tell DSE to include some of the AFTER shots which appear on the Brown Mountain Gallery page of this website.
If you have time, read the last Monitoring Annual Harvesting Report (MAHP 2006/07) which will point out things like the huge area of forest DSE/Vicforest have not checked for regeneration or the thousands of hectares of failed forest regeneration that needs urgent work. These things just keep appearing year after year but DSE is just too busy pumping out propaganda and wasting our taxpayers money.
Ring the Minister and tell him to stop wasting our money and start doing the urgent work that needs to be done to protect state forests.