00:00Last week we received notification from the Australian Government that they have
00:05varied the approval for the North Airport Road and that is to allow the
00:11construction of this road that cuts through vital habitat for the Canberra
00:15Grassland Earlis Dragon to, they've approved that to go ahead with
00:21some conditions. This is after a long community campaign to fight against this
00:25road, over 27 years now, and we are extremely disappointed and very angry
00:29that this approval has gone ahead and that we're going to see the destruction of
00:32this really, really important habitat. Well this road is going to fragment one of
00:36the last three habitats available for this species. It's going to cut it right in
00:41half and what that means is it reduces the ability for the three species to
00:46thrive in this area. This is a really, really important piece of grassland for
00:50the Canberra Grassland Earlis Dragon. It's a declining population that is a threat
00:57of going endangered or extinct and when we have a situation like this where the
01:03species is in danger, what we have to do is stop destroying its habitat and
01:07particularly when we've got such a small amount of habitat left and what's
01:10happening here is we're destroying more of its habitat which just pushes this
01:13species further to the threat of extinction.
01:16Let's find this plan. It must exist somewhere because the Federal Environment
01:22Minister's Delegate has accepted that there is a plan for rehabilitating and
01:29potentially even reintroducing Canberra Earlis, Canberra Grassland Earlis Dragons to
01:35this patch. If there are going to be individuals reintroduced here from a
01:39captive breeding program where's the plan that shows us that it's going to work
01:44because Canberra Airport Group's record to date has not been good in trying to
01:51maintain and let alone improve the population of dragons that lives in this
01:56area.
