Do those golf club NIMBYs really give a fig about the gang-gangs?

As part of the arsenal of their objections to the Federal Golf Club's development application for its controversial retirement village on six hectares of the Red Hill course, NIMBY-burghers of the area are saying the development will be disastrous for the ACT's already endangered gang-gangs.

The development would remove 358 trees, some of them the scarce ye olde trees whose holes the cockatoos nest in. One impassioned letter to the editor has claimed that the development, if allowed, will be the "last straw" for the species.

I am so used to my mind's door slamming shut when NIMBYs pipe up that I am surprised to find that door still a little ajar in this case. But I know that it is because in this case gang-gang cockatoos are part of the mixture of the controversy. Whether or not these "last straw" NIMBYs are exaggerating things, one feels one must, because of the emblematic and adorable birds, prick up one's ears to listen to the NIMBYs' plaintive songs.

But the thinking, intellectual animal lover must always stay alert to the ways in which sentiment may distort his reasoning. In Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel Black Mischief, two militant English RSPCA activists, Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Sarah Tin, visit Africa and are aghast at the minor discomforts of farm animals but blind to the atrocities being suffered by humans.

What if, in this Canberra case, to feel and believe that the habitats of some fowls are more important than the building of homes for retirees to spend their twilight times in is to be guilty of rabid Dame Mildred Porchism? Too sensitive for my own good, I will continue to agonise over this.

Meanwhile from my long, long experience of studying and of reporting on Canberra's NIMBYs (and ours are some of the finest in the world) I know that there is usually considerable daylight between their true motives and the reasons they give for opposing proposed changes.

The true motives are almost always the locals' concerns for erosions of their properties' values, for ways in which influxes of unattractive people (especially the working-classes, the disadvantaged and the elderly) will stain and spoil their neighbourhood's hitherto lovely, quiet, leafy lustre.

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At their worst, NIMBYs do a great deal of harm, especially to the battling disadvantaged. And so when I come to power, my government will introduce science-based compulsory NIMBY Conversion Therapy. We will do this for the NIMBYs' own good and for society's sake.

And in this Federal Golf Club case I wonder if any of those NIMBYly invoking the real or imagined threats posed to the cockatoos actually, in their property-values-hardened hearts, gives a fig for the fowls? A rigorous polygraph test might find them out.

Meanwhile my own delight in the gang-gangs and my interest in their protection is sincere and selfless. Whatever happens at the Red Hill golf course site will have no impact on the modest property values here in my frost pocket in battling Lower Garran.

But the thought that anything extra might be done, by tree-smashing development, to add to the endangered gang-gangs' existing bushfire and climate change-exacerbated struggles should shiver thinking Canberrans' timbers.

These cockatoos are the ACT's emblem because they are emblematic of the ACT, of our being the "bush capital". The joy they give is an ingredient of the never-to-be-taken-for-granted joy of living in a bush capital territory so bush-blessed that one's city's faunal emblem is right here among us.

Canberra and the ACT is world-unique in this. Most of the world's jurisdictions' animal emblems are either so man-eatingly dangerous (like Florida's panther and Montana's grizzly bear) or so elusively secretive and shy (like West Bengal's fishing cat and the city of Edinburgh's unicorn) that animal emblems and citizens seldom meet.

And the gang-gangs are ornithologically fascinating and are especially engaging to watch and to mingle with. We give them frugal servings of sunflower seeds to eat and clean water to drink, for which they pay us back threefold with their characterful presence.

Rubbing shoulders with them in my garden, my inner ornithologist itches to ask them searching questions about their species. For they are so, so mysterious.

Again and again the entry for them in my Volume 4 of the monumental and ultra-scholarly Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds owns up to so many things about them being "poorly known" or "not fully understood".

And of course their being enigmatically "not fully understood" contributes to their charisma. It is a fine thing for a faunal emblem to radiate some mystique.

As they nibble and natter beside me at my garden table, I find myself telling them (just in case they understand, and from their intelligent expressions I'm sure they do) that "You are essential to this city's unique character, to the peculiar joys of living here."

"And so the scarce olde trees you cannot survive without seem so pricelessly important that I can imagine chaining myself to them to defy the developers' satanic bulldozers. Does that make me a Dame Mildred? Very well then, it makes me a Dame Mildred."