Ever wonder why a lot of stories in our beloved local organ are printed without bylines? It turns out that people who have so little self-respect that they would work for the Advocate still have enough dignity to refuse to attach their names to some of the shoddier practices in which they are required to engage. One such article, about a report released by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW prompted me to look up that organisation's website to read the report. There I found a press release that rang oddly familiar.

Running the contents of the Advocate article and the press release through GNU Wdiff, a computer program for comparing the differences between two texts, (plus a bit of manual tidying) produced the following report on the excisions and insertions performed on the original by the Advocate:

TheTHE interest of developers will be put ahead of the broader community as new planning laws propsed by the O'Farrell Government place sensitive coastal environments at risk.

That's the warning the Nature Conservation Council has handed down in Coffs Harbour today as it launched a new report on risks to the environment posed by the proposed new planning system. The report, entitled 'Nature in the Balance, : Environmental protections at risk under the proposed new planning system for New South Wales.'

NCC chief executive officer Pepe Clarke said the report exposes serious flaws in the draft Planning Bill 2013, which is due to be debated in parliament State Parliament next month.

"The proposed new planning laws pose a serious threat to the sensitive environments that people value so much," NCC Chief Executive Officer Pepe Clarke said.

"These laws are unfair and unbalanced, putting the interests of developers before the needs of the broader community and the protection of the natural environment.

"Under the new laws, developers would have new rights to override local plans and challenge council zoning decisions, placing existing environmental protections at risk."

In addition, State Environmental Planning Policies, which contain protections for sensitive environmental areas including koala habitat, rainforest and coastal wetland will cease to exist under the new planning system. environment," Mr Clarke said.

"The government has announced that these planning policies will be scrapped, but has failed to guarantee that the environmental protections they contain will be carried over to the new system," Mr Clarke said.

"With development pressures mounting across New South Wales, in the Coffs Harbour and Northern Rivers region, we need planning laws that protect the natural environment and local communities.

"Instead, the government is proposing to reduce environmental safeguards in the planning system, and to exclude expert environmental agencies from important development decisions."

Under the new laws, He said high-impact developments like subdivisions and some industrial facilities will would no longer need approval from expert agencies, including DPI Fisheries and the Environment Protection Authority.

"Removing the requirement for approval from expert agencies will place our rivers, wetlands and wildlife habitat at risk, when they are already under stress from pollution and poorly planned development," he said.

"We are calling on Premier O’Farrell to withdraw these deeply flawed laws, and to develop a new proposal for a planning system that is fair, balanced and environmentally responsible."

See, if serious, professional print journalism were to die, we'd be at the mercy of bloggers who lack the skills necessary to strip all the boring detail from a story and reframe it to look like a local issue. They probably wouldn't even bother to capitalise the first word.