Animal protection does not win votes …

*Pic: Kelly Garbato FLICKR

Submission to: the International Policy Team of the CITES Management Authority of Australia in the Department of the Environment

I have been an international dealer in antiques for the last fifty years and a past president of the AAADA, and for more than 30 years an Australian government accredited valuer of the Decorative Arts. I respectfully suggest that I may have something to contribute to this debate.

Those wanting to prevent the export of and the illegal trading in ivory tusks should consider using the Singapore solution about drugs, namely the automatic death penalty for the possession of tusks in the country of origin.

An edict banning the sale or international movement of worked ivory that was made before the introduction of the CITES regulations will serve no useful purpose except to prevent the orchestras of the world from travelling with their instruments, thus ensuring the potential destruction of every second-hand ivory-keyed piano.

The killing of any endangered animals is a crime against our humanity.

I live in Tasmania where in less than two hundred years of white settlement we have conducted the only perfect act of genocide against the original Aboriginal inhabitants …

• White settlement pushed the Thylacine to extinction.

• Currently the Tasmanian Devil is in serious trouble and heading for extinction.

• The Swift Parrot, being the world’s only migrating parrot, is critically endangered.

• The King Island Scrubtit is down to less than fifty birds in half a square mile.

• The endangered Giant Freshwater Crayfish is unique to this island and lives up to seventy years while weighing up to five kg.

All this, and our Tasmanian and Australian politicians in the Class of 2016 could not care less.

Animal protection does not win votes in a society that for reasons of political expediency hates the Greens.

The opposite of this, namely the extraction of natural resources to create ‘Jobs and Growth’, is seemingly a political winner.

As a result the current Tasmanian and Australian Liberal governments jointly applied to UNESCO to delist Tasmania’s World Heritage Listed Forests for logging, woodchips and mining. This in part was to advantage an extended but corrupt Malaysian family which set up in Tasmania having cleared their own forests in Sarawak while enriching themselves ( according to Lukas Straumann in his new book Money Logging HERE ) to the tune of some 15 billion dollars.

This act of bastardry, had it been approved by UNESCO, would have pushed all the above-named critters to extinction within 10 years.

Do not talk to thinking Tasmanians about elephants because these will survive in both Africa and India.

Australia is a rich, first-world country that has not had a recession for 26 years.

The bandwagon of ivory is an excellent diversion because it distracts our politicians from important matters occurring in their own backyard.

We must all make an effort to fix our respective problems at source, but not in some totally impractical way that affects the livelihood of many but with no effect on the perpetrators.

I suggest that killing the perpetrators rather than the elephants would be a win-win solution for all involved. This would be a serious campaign that we can all support.

*John Hawkins is a Sandhurst-trained former British army officer, now an Australian resident of almost 50 years. For the past 14 years he has been enhancing the Bentley landscape in the Chudleigh Valley, Tasmania. He is well known for his two-volume standard reference on Australian Silver, and for his knowledge of the Life and Times of Erich Abetz.

• phill Parsons in Comments: Joining the Swift Parrot in migration is the Orange Bellied Parrot but their winter feeding grounds in Australia are threatened by development. The problem with jobsngrowth is it has failed as population has grown. Supposed to solve the problem of jobs/growth has made it worse as the pool of unemployed shows …