The Andrews Governments fault? It's the Greens that force through these closures then they won't take responsibility for the decisions.

The Andrews government or the Greens. It doesn't really matter. They are both dictated to by the Anti-Australian Axis (David Flint), a group of faceless men who hate Australia; the same people who want you to vote yes to the recognition of Aboriginal culture, so that Michael Mansell's black state can gobble up Gippsland, with the help of the senile ex-lawyers on the High Court.

Yes Mark. Mark my words, if the Andrews government were serious about anything more than securing green preferences or just limiting the bleeding of votes?

They'd mount an irrefutable case for nuclear energy! Namely as a (cheaper than coal) thorium reactor or reactors to replace the old coal fired boilers at latrobe!?

Thorium is the most energy dense material on the planet! 5,000 tons enough to meet the entire energy needs of the planet for a year! And there's enough of this material in the soil to last for a thousand years! And thousands more if we start to mine it from igneous rock!

The roll out of MUCH MUCH CHEAPER THAN COAL, MUCH MUCH CLEANER THAN COAL, SERIOUSLY SAFER THAN COAL, thorium based CARBON FREE nuclear power, is exactly what the planet needs to save it and exactly what Victoria and South Australia need to save their manufacturing/industrial sector!

Labor acolytes will tell you if asked? Nuclear power is not Labor party policy!

But if asked to provide a cogent substantive persuasive reason, why not? Will simply parrot the same vacuous mindless message!? Like a preprogrammed M3 player, with the right buttons pushed?

Then wonder why people like Trump and a case for long overdue change is the new phenomena in today's body politic! Getting these folk to get serious about change we can all believe in; is arguably far more difficult than merely getting a donkey to gallop?

But then in a comparative IQ test? The inordinately obstinate Donkey would likely win?

Example:
Q: How many Labor politicians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Duh, what's a light bulb? You mean somebody changes them? And the toilet paper?
Q: How many L's in Can Can?

A: More than all my (hooves) fingers and toes?

Ah well, you can always tell a victorian. But you can't tell them very much!
Alan B.

It is very sad to see that the Labor Party has completely abandoned its traditional base, where labourers and family interests took high priority.

The honourable thing would be for the Party to at least change its name. The 'New Greens' would be the appropriate replacement, given that the Party has adopted Greens policies..

There was a time when the light on the hill burned brightly And when the impossible was made possible and the unaffordable made affordable!

Thus the impossible unaffordable snowy mountains scheme was built and Australia changed forever! Then we saw the brown coal latrobe station built as public property and our manufacturing and proccessing based economy put into overdrive. Queensland and NSW boxed on building dams and black coal power stations!

And for a period, we were the third wealthiest nation on the planet and a creditor one at that! Thanks to the enterprise, endevour and sacrifice of previous generations!

Generations that survived two world wars and the Great depression! And watched as both war torn and basically bankrupt Germany and Japan lifted their economies out of the basement!

Germany via the Marshall plan and Japan via cooperative capitalism, where everyone put the national interest first! Germany flourished and became Europe's premier economy! On the back of manufacturing and massaged technical innovation! And after a period of prolonged struggle Japan rose and rose to become the world's second largest economy! And as in Germany, on the back of reliable nuclear power!

Yes, old fashioned solid state nuclear fusion is problematic! Without question and costly given around just 1-5% of the fuel is consumed.

The rest problematic waste until now! Now it's possible to use it to produce cheap energy until as much as 95% of it is used to generated very low cost energy!

Always providing we can keep it out of the hands of price gouging private interests! And make it do what the snowy mountains scheme did for former generations! Enough with the endless excuses and prevarication!

If it's impossible for you? Stand aside and let other less fearful folks do it for Australia and our seriously subverted National Interest! What the oldies were able to do with far less can't be that hard surely? Alan B.

When the Gallop Labor government in WA made its decision to end all old growth logging in 2001, it declared 35 new national parks in order to protect old growth remnants. But each new park contained a core of old growth surrounded by a much larger area of regrowth and it wasn't just logging but almost all forest management activities stopped within this expanded national park area. This was in spite of an urgent need to apply silvicultural treatments to the regrowth forests, many of which had been logged decades previously.

Today, we have a severely degraded forest ecosystem in south west WA with state government funding still inadequate to allow proper management of the existing national parks, let along the remaining state production forests.

The environment was the big loser in the 2001 Labor govt decision and I fear that the same outcome will result from the Andrews government's recently announced decision.

It is a common result everywhere.

We had a nice little national park on the southern side of the Burrum river, north of Maryborough. The bush was nothing special, not even a good example of wallum vegetation. However it fronted the Burrum almost opposite the village of Buxton, where a very large, & unusual for a Queensland river, clean white sandbank filled most of the river.

National parks, with their earlier philosophy of encouraging public access & use, had picnic tables, garbage bins & a few other improvements along the river, where it was beautifully safe for small children to play on the sand, & in the shallow still water.

The new Goss Labor government repaid the greens by gazetting a bunch of new parks. Of course they had no money to increase the budget or staff to maintain these new parks. They decided to lock up our little park, in favour of new assets.

They tried. When fences disappeared they tried large trees chopped down, [this is in a park], & dragged across the tracks. When these disappeared too, they tried large ditches. Miraculously these filled in over night.

I don't know who won, I moved out, but it is typical of lefty attitude. They use anything to buy the ratbag fringe vote, destroying most that is good just in passing.

Mark, Like many in your profession, you continue to mistakenly label the groups you criticise as “environmentalists” and “environmental activists.” You actually flatter them, as none of the leading individual activists or groups, have any understanding of the unique nature of the Australian natural environment, or any clue as to how to conserve our precious forests. Preservationists, eco-political activists & saboteurs are much more accurate descriptors of those you describe in your article.