KOALAS PAY THEIR WAY
IN her hit song Big Yellow Taxi, Canadian performer Joni Mitchell lamented that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Unless the Gold Coast is very careful, someone one day could be singing about the disappearance of the koala from what remains of our bushland – if indeed we have any of that left, too. As Mitchell wrote: “They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum, and they charged the people a dollar and a half to see ’em.’’
Plenty has been reported about koalas recently. On Monday we told how visitors to a Currumbin Wildlife Hospital open day could not have expected a more confronting reality as seven koalas were rushed in before lunchtime after being struck by cars, attacked by dogs or suffering illnesses.
Last Thursday the Bulletin reported at least 10 koalas had been killed on roads that week between Tallebudgera Valley and Coomera. Our report today is a mixed bag. Cr Peter Young says road deaths are a direct result of the Gold Coast council not conserving enough land to protect wildlife.
On the other side of the coin are Dreamworld’s efforts to widen the koala gene pool with a breeding program to secure future populations. The park now has a special permit to take 25 males from the wild to mate, then return them to the bush.
As the Bulletin reported in December when the program was set up with Government approval, the local koala population had plunged from 10,000 to 2000 in about 12 years. The tragic irony of the koalas’ plight is on display every day in our theme and conservation parks, as tourists line up alongside locals to wonder at and hug koalas. But it was never more evident than during the G20 summit in Brisbane in 2014, when presidents and prime ministers all wanted their photo taken with these wonderful, iconic creatures.
Environmental economics expert Professor Tor Hundloe was part of a 1997 survey of foreign tourists that found koalas were the major attraction. His team estimated at the time that koalas were worth $1 billion to the national economy. Twenty years down the track, he now says that with inflation, the animals are worth double that – something the Gold Coast and rest of the country must consider when weighing up growth versus conservation in key bushland areas.