The swift parrot recovery plan announced by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, to mark threatened species day was not actually finalised and had not been shared with the experts who helped to develop it.
Once they had seen it, conservation groups and scientists said the recovery plan released on Thursday contained no meaningful action to address the key threat to the survival of the species: the logging of native forests.
The critically endangered swift parrot is a migratory bird that spends winters in Victoria and New South Wales and summers in forests in Tasmania. It is estimated just 300-750 mature birds remain in the wild, with studies finding the species could be extinct within 10 years if governments failed to do more to protect it.
Plibersek said the new plan and $1.3m in funding for projects to protect swift parrots had been released “to boost the long-term survival” of the species. It was one of a raft of commitments timed for threatened species day.
But release of the plan was news to the official recovery team for the swift parrot.
Members of the team said the last official draft they had received was a version released for public comment in 2019.
They said the plan was not finalised, noting the government’s own media release said two states – NSW and Victoria – had not yet signed on.
They first saw the document after it was provided by journalists seeking expert feedback on the new plan.
The environment department on Thursday said on its Facebook page that the plan was still “being finalised” and would be published in “coming weeks”.
“The crux of the issue is the minister put out a media release saying the recovery plan has been released and yet no one on the recovery team had seen it,” said Mick Roderick, BirdLife Australia’s representative on the recovery team.
“One would expect that recovery team members would see a purported or apparent final version before it is released and before the media has access to it.”
Dr Dejan Stojanovic, a conservation scientist at the Australian National University and a swift parrot recovery team member for more than a decade, said a version of the plan had not been circulated for years. It left members of the team feeling as though their collective knowledge had been “sidelined”.
Guardian Australia revealed last year that Tasmanian and federal bureaucrats had pushed for the plan to be changed to remove and play down the scientific evidence that logging was the biggest threat to its survival.
After reading the latest version of the document, Stojanovic said it focused too heavily on the threat of predation by sugar gliders instead of the key threat of logging.
The plan acknowledges that sugar glider predation is worse where habitat loss is severe, such as logged areas.
Stojanovic said it was a “lost opportunity” to develop a plan to end decades of damage from forestry that was “pushing the swift parrot to extinction”.
“Despite mountains of evidence that logging in Tasmania is the key threat to swift parrots, this government is trying to scapegoat a tiny possum for its inability to stand up to the forest industry,” Stojanovic said.
He said actions that were critical to protecting the parrots’ habitat on public land had been given a lower priority rating in the plan than other proposed steps, including educating the public about swift parrot conservation.
Stojanovic is a member of the ANU’s difficult birds group, which has been responsible for monitoring the species and conducting research including genetic analysis.
He said the group was now relying on public donations to fund its swift parrot work because it had not received any commonwealth funding since the previous Coalition government wound down a national science hub for threatened species.
He also said he had not seen any specifics outlining what the government’s $1.3m for swift parrot projects would be spent on.
The Tasmanian government has its own, separate swift parrot program.
A spokesperson for Plibersek said the plan had been “endorsed by the federal government’s independent threatened species scientific committee, which includes many of Australia’s most experienced and respected scientists”.
The spokesperson said the government understood the environmental value of native forests and it was proposing reforms that would require regional forestry agreements between the federal government and states to comply with national environmental laws.
“The government takes the advice of experts about which projects should get environmental science funding,” the spokesperson said.
Dr Jennifer Sanger, a forest ecologist with advocacy group Tree Projects, said the plan failed to address logging, including in parrot breeding habitat in Tasmania.
“I’m livid. Working as an environmentalist you always have this hope it’s going to be better and we’re going to get some real change this time,” she said.
“This recovery plan is a whole new level of disappointment because it has completely carved out forestry from any actions whatsoever.”
