Shooting in NSW NPs

[Chris Sanderson <>]

Hi all,

 

I generally stay out of this shooting/birding debate as I have good friends on both sides of the fence on this one, but dirty politics always annoys me so here goes.

 

In safety risk management, a risk of medium would usually indicate that through some kind of control measure you have ensured absolutely that there is no risk of death, otherwise the action must be judged as coming with a high risk.  But of course risk managers ignore high risk activities all the time, otherwise we would not be allowed to drive cars for work.  They are attempting to suggest with this risk management change that they are "ensuring" that shooters will not be in the same areas as anyone else, thus removing the risk of people who aren't shooters being injured or killed.  However this assumes that both shooters and others will do the right thing and stick to their designated areas, which seems pretty naive to me (perhaps deliberately so).  In terms of effectiveness of control measures I would think this would fail a safety audit under the new workplace health, safety and environment legislation.  Management directives as a way of stopping risky behaviour sit somewhere below wearing safety gear (i.e. bulletproof clothing) and way below avoidance (i.e. not shooting) and engineering solutions (impractical in this instance).

 

In my opinion this change is more politics, this time to attempt to mislead the public as to the actual risks this will pose.  People didn't like the honest opinion that the government couldn't guarantee people's safety, so instead of lowering the risk, they've changed the language...

 

Actually if people want to challenge the validity of shooting in National Parks, it would possibly be worth seeking advice on the responsibility of the NSW Government to provide a safe workplace for their parks rangers, and whether this action fails in their duty of care to their staff?

 

Cheers,

Chris

ps. if you don't like the idea of shooting in national parks (or mountain biking, horse riding etc.) as seems to be inevitably rolling out across the eastern seaboard, perhaps it's worth considering donating to someone like AWC or Bush Heritage, who are doing great conservation work and creating reserves that are well managed and much safer places for animals to live.  Birders can even visit many of them, either to help with surveys or even to camp and just go birding.

 

http://www.australianwildlife.org/AWC-Sanctuaries.aspx
http://www.bushheritage.org.au/places-we-protect

 

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 3:42 PM, martin butterfield <> wrote:

The silencer proposal has been ruled out by O'Farrell.  He probably expects that this strong stance will establish him as a staunch defender of safety.

I contacted an SMH journalist about the overall proposal  seeking to find what the risk analysis says about the probability of someone getting shot. His response included   

"The risk assessment doesn't offer hard numbers. It simply presents a risk rating of high, medium or low for the risk of park visitors being shot.This latest draft says the risk is now "medium" because of the move to zoning."

I leave it to others to put a value on "medium" but i would have expected, for any normal person to be able to endorse such a proposal, words such as 'extremely low', 'negligible', 'minimal' to be used rather than 'medium'.

Fa be it from me to attempt a diagnosis of the mental state of the Premier of NSW or his Minster for the Environment but clearly both were hiding behind the door when common sense was handed out.  Unfortunately every time ICAC has held  a hearing recently the probability of anyone defeating O'Farrell at the polls gets reduced further.

Martin