Bureaucrats pushed for Swift parrot recovery plan to be changed to play down threat

Tasmanian and federal bureaucrats pushed for a recovery plan for a critically endangered parrot species to be changed to remove and play down the scientific evidence that logging was the biggest threat to its survival.

The swift parrot is a migratory species that spends winters in Victoria and New South Wales and summers nesting in forests scattered across Tasmania depending on where its main food sources, blue and black gums, are flowering. A CSIRO-published guide last year estimated the population had slumped to about 750, down from 2,000 a decade ago.

Peer-reviewed studies have found it could be extinct in 10 years if no action was taken to improve its protection, and that forestry was the greatest threat to its survival.

A new recovery plan for the species was expected last year but is yet to be released. Documents published online include several drafts drawn up by a swift parrot recovery team, and responses from state and federal departments.

It also suggested removing a sentence that said about 33% of native eucalypt forest was converted to plantation or harvested and 23% of identified nesting habitat was lost between 1997 and 2016.

Recovery plans are drawn up at the discretion of the federal environment minister and can have the power to require that habitat critical to the survival of a species is protected. Once they exist, ministers are legally bound not to make decisions at odds with them.

Plans for hundreds of threatened species and habitats have been delayed or abandoned. Guardian Australia revealed that almost 180 plans were scrapped by the then minister Sussan Ley in the dying days of the Morrison government.

The swift parrot recovery plan will need to be signed off by the new environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, before being released.