The death knell for the bill came when Nile ruled out support for changes to native forestry laws,which would have made it easier for landholders to remove trees.
Without Nile’s support,the bill could not have passed the upper house and it was also likely to fail in the lower house because Nationals MP Geoff Provest told Nationals leader Paul Toole on Monday that he would not support the bill. Liberal MP Felicity Wilson also ruled out supporting the bill.
Millionaire businessman and environmental crusader Geoff Cousins,who waged the high-profile campaign to stop the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania during the 2007 federal election campaign,also delivered a blistering warning to the NSW government,saying he would “do everything I can to run a major campaign against the Perrottet government in the next election” in response to the bill.
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“I would liken the sort of campaign I would run to the Gunns pulp mill campaign,” Cousins,a former adviser to John Howard,said. “If they want to go up against that,that’s fine. But it would include a major advertising campaign and I would do everything I could to bring down a government that would put forward legislation like this.”
The Nationals introduced the bill to make it easier for landholders to clear private native forestry without duplicate approval processes between state and local government. However,Provest said no one in his Tweed electorate had ever raised it with him as an issue.
Critics of the bill have warned it could water down environmental regulation and destroy the habitat of koalas,which are endangered in NSW.