More than 50 swift parrots have been sighted in Canberra over the past week, as the critically endangered bird migrates from Tasmania to mainland Australia looking for food.
Minister for the Environment, Rebecca Vassarotti called on the Federal Government to improve the national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999 and said the plight of swift parrots was a real-life example of why urgent action was needed.
“Research by ANU [the Australian National University] has found that there are fewer than 300 swift parrots left in the wild, so while the sight of 50 of these beautiful parrots in Canberra is a welcome one, the reason they are here tells a story of national environmental devastation that needs to be reversed urgently,” Ms Vassarotti said.
“The swift parrot breeds in Tasmania and migrates to the mainland each winter, turning up anywhere in the south east, sometimes as far north as Queensland,” she said.
“Outside the ACT, their habitat is under attack, with their breeding grounds in south east Tasmania and important winter habitat on the NSW south coast both being logged.”
Ms Vassarotti said logging, which was largely exempt from the EPBC Act under regional forestry agreements between Federal and State Governments, represented the single biggest threat to the survival of the swift parrot in the wild.
“If there’s no change, the species is on a 10-year track to extinction,” the Minister said.
“We need to see leadership from the Federal Government – including a plan to improve environmental standards rather than accept ongoing environmental decline and destruction.”
She said an independent review of the EPBC Act, released October 2020, found it was failing to stem an extinction crisis.
Ms Vassarotti said the ACT had taken proactive steps to conserve habitat for the parrots and other woodland dependent species though its management and conservation of the most intact woodland in Australia.
