You are quite right Chris. There was a link in https://theconversation.edu.au/saving-australian-endangered-species-a-policy-gap-and-political-opportunity-10914 and I would urge anyone with concern about this issue to make a submission to this Senate Review

Thanks Mike - that was only because we lacked space. It is indeed a problem with which the TSSC is trying to deal. Western Australia and the Northern Territory have regular reviews using the IUCN Red List Criteria as a basis for their recommended listings. The other states and territories have far more ad hoc systems with lists often remaining wrong and unchanged for years. There are also different standards of precaution when it comes to listing, and often different scales with some states, such as New South Wales, listing many populations as threatened. Given that each state and territory has different legislation for protecting threatened speices, each with differing regulations, the result is an administrative mess. As with having an EPBC List that is outdated and incorrect, the confusion of state lists contributes to the disrespect for threatened species lists.

Jeremy it is not all bad news. Many recovery plans have worked well, many animals and plants would be extinct were it not for the hard work and dedication of researchers and conservation managers, both government and non-government. Listing such species is an essential step along the way to recognising that there is a threat of extinction and doing something to prevent it. There certainly needs to be reform following COAG but it does not mean abandoing lists or recovery plans.

Also I would suggest that you, and many others, misinterpet what Hugh Possingham and others are trying to do by discussing triage. Essentially what they are looking to do is retain as many species as possible for a given amount of money. This means putting the cheap and easy ones at the top of the priority list and asking whether the more difficult and expensive ones are worth it. If society agrees they are, then the total funding should be increased to cover them. Instead we are effectively dooming many cheap and easy species for the sake of saving a few expensive ones It is not true that they are wanting species to go extinct - they actually want as few species to go extinct as possible given a limited budget. This budget becomes even more limited if large amounts of the money allocated for preventing extinctions is spent on species that are not severely threatened.

To an extent this is happening Max. Both the Northern Territory and Western Australia have taken full account of the status of each taxon listed in the Action Plan for Australian Birds 2010. While the relevant committees in each state did not necessarily agree with the listings proposed, they did with most and provided reasined arguments for why they adopted a more or less cautious approach with a few taxa. The Commonwealth TSSC is, as noted in the article, also looking at ways of bring the national list in line with the most recent assessments of status and has been seeking the advice of BirdLife Australia.

I suspect, however, that it will never be the case where the status of taxa is developed entirely independently of the elected arm of government. While the current Treatened Species Committee of BirdLife Australia attempts to maintain a high level of professional integrity with a realistic but substantial level of precaution when making recommendations based on imperfect data, one can envisage a situation where such committees could be dominated by groups that are more or less conservative in their assessment of extinction risk than would be acceptable to the elected government of the day. Unquestioning acceptance of such lists would have undesirable political consequences so it is inevitable that any legislative power to create and modify status will ultimately rest with the minister. There could also be substantial inconsistencies between assessors of different groups and many taxon groups, of course, have only a handful of people with sufficient expertise to make assessments.

You are certainly right in that sense, Jeremy - the fact that species need listing at all is a recognition of failure. And keeping species just out of reach of threatened species criteria is hardly a measure of sustainable living. There is indeed a tendency to think that extinction prevention is the whiole of conservation rather than just one facet. On the other hand, if we allow species to slip into extinction unremarked and unmourned, there is no logical end point - so we continue to maintain the struggle for sustainability on multiple fronts.