Koalas go political

Seeing a koala in the wild is quite rare. I was 59 before I ever had such a treat and I have travelled quite a lot in country and outback Australia. In 2008 we left Cape Otway on the Victorian south coast and towed our off-road caravan inland on a very winding mountain road. We had been told we may see koalas but didn’t really hold out much hope. Well, we did and we were beside ourselves.
 
About 5,000 koalas in NSW are thought to have died in the bushfires last summer, and their numbers may have dropped by as much as two-thirds in less than 20 years. Koalas have been declared as ‘vulnerable to extinction’. That’s the step above ‘endangered’.
 
Koalas nearly brought the New South Wales government down this week. The NSW government is a coalition of the Liberal and National (formerly ‘Country’) parties. It has successfully introduced legislation to increase the protection of koalas by increasing the number of species of trees that are protected from unauthorised land clearing. These trees have been identified by experts who say they are used by koalas for things like food, shelter and social needs. The leader of the National Party, an interesting character not suffering from lack of ambition nor a healthy sense of self importance, decided to attempt to bully the female Premier yet again by threatening to effectively split the coalition if they didn't amend the legislation. Steeled by her competent and popular leadership during Covid-19, she decided she had had enough and called his bluff. Threatened with extinction he backed down. She won and now his leadership is under a very heavy cloud. All of this in the middle of a pandemic, right! Go figure!

The extra is my better half mesmerised by seeing her first koala in the wild while I hurriedly swapped lenses to attach my zoom lens.