Media release – TasNetworks, 21 September 2023
Helping Bonorong Fly High
TasNetworks is stepping-up efforts to protect and care for threatened birds.
The business is investing $165,000 to fund critical care services at Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary.
The three-year partnership’s part of TasNetworks’ Threatened Bird Strategy – aimed at preventing bird strikes and electrocutions, as well as caring for injured birds.
TasNetworks’ CEO, Seán McGoldrick, said the business has invested more than $4 million over five years to protect threatened birds, with promising results. It’ll repeat that over the next five years.
“Tasmanians need electricity that’s safe, clean, reliable and affordable. They also expect good environmental protection and stewardship,” Dr McGoldrick said.
“Our first priority is preventing bird deaths and injuries. We’ve already installed perches or flight diverters on more than 450 kilometres of power-lines in high-risk areas, with more to come.
“But we’re also passionate about caring for birds that do inevitably suffer injury. Bonorong’s the best-in-the-business at providing that care. We’re delighted to be helping,” he said.
The Director of Bonorong, Greg Irons, said the partnership will fund one-day-a-week of diagnosis and critical care for injured birds at Tasmania’s largest 24/7 wildlife rescue service.
“Our amazing team of more than 1,400 community volunteers support our wildlife rescue phone line. We’re looking forward to continuing to provide best-practice veterinary care with support from TasNetworks, including critical vet assessments when animals first reach us,” Mr Irons said.
There were 26 threatened bird incidents reported in the 2022/23 financial year – six fewer than the previous year. Despite successful mitigation efforts, reporting has generally trended-up in recent years as advertising and community awareness have grown.
TasNetworks also partners with the University of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Nature Trackers and bird refuges to help back its efforts with the best research and tracking.
Anyone who finds a threatened bird or birds injured or dead near power-lines is encouraged to call TasNetworks on 132 004.
Ben Marshall
September 21, 2023 at 15:01
Sadly, while there are good people in TasNetworks’ organisation who genuinely care about raptor injuries and death, TasNetworks, as a corporate transmission company, is a bird-killing entity by default, and by choice.
TasNet spends very little time, money or planning to prevent bird deaths, especially on local distribution lines, where a miniscule fraction have been fitted with bird-deterring ‘flappers’. Worse, TasNetworks is also poised to build hundreds of kilometres of new high voltage overhead transmission lines as part of Project Marinus (the North West Transmission Development) and is spending breathtaking amounts on PR campaigns to buy social license, or at least damp down community outrage at an environmentally unfriendly project our State neither needs nor wants.
At local fairs and festivals, TasNetworks sets up pop-up information booths, with carefully designed graphics (eg “Eagle Safety Zones”) and carefully scripted staff responses, all to establish a narrative that TasNetworks cares and is doing all it can to prevent eagle deaths and injuries. But none of it is true – their efforts are poor, and they’re refusing to seriously consider undergrounding the new lines as ‘economically unviable’.
While Sean McGoldrick and his PR team (which these days appear to comprise half the executive) are talking up grants like this one to Bonorong, an organisation deserving of greater funding and wider support, those organisations who call out TasNetworks’ poor record on environmental harms, particularly to raptors, lose support. In other words, this money to Bonorong, no matter how needed and deserved, is PR, not genuine care from McGoldrick et al.
TasNetworks also spend a great deal of PR effort on keeping the narrative, and the public discourse, to eagles and mitigation, deliberately ignoring their lines’ impacts on other raptors, owls, bats, pollinators and other critters. It’s allegedly economically unviable to bury the lines, but TasNet ignore the environmental unviability of the destruction their overhead lines cause, presumably because there’s no perceived cost to a dead animal, part of a species hurtling toward extinction.
TasNetworks is increasingly run as badly as Alan Joyce’s Qantas, so we’ll see more self-congratulatory back-slapping about eagles and ‘community benefits programs’ as TasNet sack more workers, outsource to Labor Hire companies, and bulldoze more farms and forests for new transmission designed to export privately-owned renewable energy. The renewable energy sector might be in a boom, but corporate PR is where the real money is.
I recommend that Sean, and anyone in his team with a conscience, reads Greg Pullen’s article in today’s Tasmanian Times: Eagle Deaths in Tasmania.
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Ben, thanks for the fine quality of your writing, and its pleasing presentation.
— Moderator