This post provides an excellent summation of some of the issues about the ban on the summit walk and the coming closure of the entire Mt Warning National Park....
Follow the link to read the whole thing...
Gladys Berejiklian stoking the fires of racism in Northern NSW
Gladys Berejiklian and the ruling Liberal party in NSW are pushing an absurdly Machiavellian ‘public consultation’ process over the future of public access to Mount Warning (Wollumbin). The process appears designed to create frustration and turn it into racial tension, which they will no doubt invent another program to address. They have achieved this by:
- Excluding people who would be directly impacted by a permanent closure (ie those who want to climb the mountain) from the “public consultation” process on the basis that they are not “key stakeholders.” They will be “consulted” after all of the decisions have been made. The government actually published this strategy.
- People who have an interest in maintaining public access rights, or who simply oppose racism and sexism in government policy and the abandonment of fundamental principles such as separation of church and state are also excluded from the public consultation process. Their opinions literally do not count.
- The actual traditional owners are also excluded from the public consultation process, in favour of aboriginal groups from the gold coast area who are onboard with Gladys Berejiklian’s agenda.
- Opportunistically removing a chain used by climbers in the final ascent under the false flag of safety, while the national park was closed due to covid.
- Repeatedly extending the closure and delaying a decision on the long term future of the park, and gradually changing their justification from covid, to safety issues associated with the chain, to the religious beliefs of aboriginal people.
- Passing the buck when it comes to answering public enquiries about the closure. The person who is supposed to be responsible is Matt Kean, minister for the environment. Matt has not been answering enquiries. On July 29 everyone who had contacted Matt got a response from Naomi Stephens from NPWS. This claims to be a direct personal response, but everyone who wrote to Matt got the exact same letter. It did not address any of the issues raised by interested citizens or answer the questions that were actually asked. In Naomi’s response she said not to contact her with any follow-up queries, instead telling people to contact Russell Madeley from NPWS. She included his email address (it bounces) and his phone number (gets directed to someone else’s answering machine).
- Publishing a postal stamp “featuring” Mt Warning, which actually shows a different, much smaller hill, with Mount Warning in the distant background and with the summit clipped out of the image.
- Claiming via the NPWS website that “The independent engineer's assessment led to the conclusion that catastrophic failure of this chain section was very high.” Putting aside the fact that this statement does not actually make sense, the engineer’s assessment did not make this claim, and the NSW government have not offered any explanation of how it led to their conclusion. The Engineer’s report was vague on the technical details and contained numerous spelling and grammatical errors. It appears to be highlighting the risk of a single post bending (not breaking) under very conservative assumptions. The report also highlighted that several previous inspections had been done, and several of the posts had already needed to be replaced, with no record of any sort of catastrophe, or any indication indication that the urgent need to take down the chain was previously acknowledged.
The Machiavellian nature of the public consultation process was initially spelled out very clearly on the NSW government website, but has recently been amended to make it appear more democratic.
Follow the link to read the whole thing...
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