CLARENCE VALLEY COUNCIL'S WEAKENED COMMUNITY ADVISORY COMMITTEES

In December last year Clarence Valley Council made major changes to the structure and operation of  its community advisory committees. Previously these committees provided the opportunity for more detailed interaction between community members and Council.  The advice at advisory committee meetings was actually two-way - with council staff providing information in the specific area of the committee’s function and the community members responding.  As the community members of these committees were volunteers with a range of expertise, experience and local knowledge, their input complemented the competencies of staff and councillors.

 So what has changed?  The number of advisory committees has been reduced from ten to four.  As a result some areas are not adequately represented and there has been an amalgamation of responsibilities for each committee.

The Environment and Sustainability Advisory Committee (E&S Committee) is a good example of the problems with the new advisory committees.

This committee replaced the Biodiversity and the Climate Change Advisory Committees and covers a very extensive area.  Its remit includes the following strategies – Environmental Management, Biodiversity, Bush Regeneration, Urban Tree Management, Solid Waste Management, Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction.  It also has responsibility for a Koala Plan of Management and Coastal Management Programs.   

As meetings are now limited to two hours and there have only been two meetings this year, the range of areas to be covered indicates a lack of commitment by Council to either actually having effective community input or any commitment to the need for urgent action on very important environmental issues. 

Another major change has been the staff composition on all these committees.  Instead of the relevant manager, each committee meeting is now attended by the General Manager and the relevant Director at the next level of the bureaucracy.  An obvious result of this has been strengthening control on what is actually discussed at these meetings with any input seen to be undesirable being squashed pronto.

It is increasingly obvious that Council is having advisory committees merely as a box-ticking exercise and that it has no genuine interest in community input. 

-        Leonie Blain

 

CLARENCE VALLEY TOPS THE CHART FOR WILDLIFE PRESERVATION

On September 13th over a dozen Clarence Valley residents with gazetted Conservation Agreement (CA) properties received results of their surveys for the Land Libraries program from NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust ecologists.

Last year after training in equipment and sound capture techniques, these landowners were issued with two motion sensor cameras and one bio-acoustic meter per property to help with a statewide CA wildlife survey.

The Land Libraries project aims to promote public appreciation of biodiversity by collecting as much data as possible from private properties to help with long term investment and development decisions.

The landowners, who came from Pillar Valley, Swan Creek, Jackybulbin, Tullymorgan, Coutts Crossing, Copmanhurst and Shannondale were happy to learn that their records topped the charts in a number of areas. They clocked up 100,800 of 720,000 hours of survey effort, with 3,161 records from an overall 11,664, covering 605 of 1,200 identified separate species.

They had also forwarded a range of personal photographs from their properties to the NatureMapsr website for confirmation and lodgement with the NSW Bionet Atlas, adding to the now vast knowledge of Clarence Valley's shrubs, forbs, trees, fungus and wide range of birds, mammals, frogs, insects, and one endangered gudgeon.

It should be of interest to Clarence Valley Council, which owns and manages lands around Shannondale, that the most active mammal from that area was the Vulnerable Rufous Bettong. Also a previously unrecorded not-so-common Common Dunnart was a first for the property, while Brush-tailed Phascogales turned up at several sites. The night-time acoustics hero was the Powerful Owl with 208 calls, while Squirrel Gliders and Koala were active on several consecutive nights, as were 12 microbat species, including seven threatened and one federally listed as endangered.

Since  Council now knows a few species that its wonderful natural bushland supports, hopefully it will take more interest in its land and join in the surveys when the program is opened up next time around. The program’s success and the interest it has created makes this more than likely to happen.

-        Pat Edwards

 

 Published in the Voices for the Earth column in The Clarence Valley Independent , 1st October,  2025.

FROGS UNDER THREAT FROM BUSHFIRE

As we near that time of the year when landowners start dropping matches, filling the air with health threatening air-borne particulate matter, it’s timely to highlight some lesser-known impacts of burning.

We had observed one of those threats following an intense fire which blackened a swampy gully running through our property in 2017. Prior to that fire, any storm event would see the wetland erupt into a deafening roar as thousands of frogs seemingly emerge from nowhere to spawn.

However, for years following that fire, the wetland remained eerily silent and even now, after eight years, only six of the fifteen originally recorded species have returned, and even those are in greatly reduced numbers.

Our observations have been mirrored in a study that was conducted by Newcastle University and the Australian Museum 18 months after the devastating 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires.

That extensive study involved the collection of 16,000 files of overnight acoustic recordings of 35 frog species across more than 400 sites in northeast and southeast NSW. These found that the fires had significantly reduced the distributions of at least six frog species and others that are now locally extinct.

One worrying fact for us is that our frog ponds, constructed near the house and not fire impacted, were equally silent, with only low numbers of four species in residence eight years later.

What we need to remember is that frogs are fairly low on the food chain, and while frog-lovers might cringe at the thought, they are, nevertheless, crucial to the survival of a wide range of mammals, birds, and reptiles who depend on these amphibians for food.

University of Newcastle’s lead researcher, Dr Chad Beranek, made a very pertinent observation when pointing out that these findings raise serious concern for the survival of frogs under an increasingly fire-prone climate.

With no real rain falling in the Clarence for the past three weeks, and temperatures rising into the 30s, why are fire permits still not required?  Clearly the authorities are still not taking the bushfire threat seriously.

 

-            John Edwards

 

 Published in the Voices for the Earth column in The Clarence Valley Independent , 24th September, 2025.