The protection of native vegetation has long been a fraught issue in Australia, highlighted by the shooting in 2014 of Glen Turner, a NSW Office of Environment and Heritage compliance staffer allegedly gunned down by a land-clearing wheat farmer near Moree in the state's north. The issue is likely to be prominent again this year as the Baird government repeals the Native Vegetation Act and replaces it with a biodiversity conservation law, which conservationists fear will open the way to the broadscale destruction that Turner had been trying to prevent. Confidence among environmental groups that protection for the state's many threatened species won't be...
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