Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the House for the opportunity to speak on this issue of great importance to regional Australia. In speaking on this motion, I want to refer to an article in the Sunday Age newspaper on the weekend. It referred to a situation in the suburb of Macleod, where a lady by the name of Amanda Tattam reported on the loss of her six chooks. The chooks were named Honey, Honeyhead, Hannah Montana, Alannah, Chloe and Delta. The chooks were taken by foxes over two consecutive events. She is quoted as saying:

I was devastated, absolutely gutted. We'd raised them from a very young age. I've got high fences and they're well housed, and this latest entry by a fox, everything was bolted.

She went on to say:

The problem is that no one takes responsibility. There is a lot of buck-passing going on … and everyone has given up on even trying to control them.

I do not wish to sound flippant, because I know such a loss is devastating, particularly with young children involved, but all I can say to suburban chook farmers is: welcome to our world. The article refers to foxes, but it could just as easily be referring to wild dogs and their impact on Australian farmers. Wild dog predation on stock and native fauna is destroying regional life in many areas of this country, and I fear that people in the city do not even know that it is happening.

Part of my motivation in moving this motion was to help bridge that gap—to start building an understanding in metropolitan areas about the devastating losses caused by wild dogs. I fear that it will take an attack on a bushwalker by a pack of wild dogs before this issue is brought to the attention of the vast majority of Australians. That is not hyperbole or fear-mongering. The Queensland government's report and economic assessment of wild dogs made a similar point:

As with semi-urban areas, wild dogs can lower the quality of life in rural areas by posing a constant threat to livestock and, in exceptional circumstances, posing a threat to human safety. Threats to human safety are known to escalate when wild dogs encroach on settlements and are not actively repelled. The tendency for this is greatest at tourist attractions … where some people seek or encourage 'contact' with the wild dogs.

I stress that we are talking about exceptional circumstances in this regard, but there nonetheless is a risk to human safety. I am already hearing anecdotal reports in my electorate of Gippsland of wild dogs becoming less frightened, less timid. Farmers are telling me of packs of dogs shadowing their moves from a distance as they tend to their stock. I fear that an injured bushwalker or a young child could be at risk from attack in the future, and I fear that it will take such a horrible incident to make decision makers at all levels of government properly fund on-the-ground measures to reduce the impact of wild dogs on regional communities. I hope we do not need to have a person in my community injured before governments at all levels start taking the threat of wild dogs more seriously.

The motion before the House refers to the social, economic and environmental impacts of wild dogs on the agricultural sector and Australia's native wildlife. Wild dogs are conservatively estimated to cost the Australian agricultural sector in excess of $60 million per year, and they are an enormous source of anger and frustration in many regional communities. The constant predation in areas such as Gippsland, north-east Victoria and Eden-Monaro has resulted in sheep farmers retreating from some blocks of land, particularly those which interface with national parks. The loss of productivity in Gippsland alone is estimated at $60 million, as farmers have fled from those areas and no longer stock them with sheep. The costs that we are talking about are associated with the direct stock losses, the cost of prevention measures undertaken and the lost productivity. Of course, as stock prices have increased in recent times the value of those losses has escalated, and I think the $60 million figure is actually a conservative amount. I fear it could be much higher than that.

In addition to the economic cost in Victoria of $18 million per year, there are very significant social impacts. I have had the opportunity to speak to many landholders in my electorate, and the wives of farmers and farmers themselves report severe mental health issues stemming from regularly viewing very traumatic scenes of stock attacked by packs of wild dogs. I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting in Omeo with the Victorian Farmers Federation where local residents stood up and provided their firsthand accounts of the damage that has been caused to their stock. I was there with the member for Gippsland East, Tim Bull, and the member for Benalla, Bill Sykes, who are both actively involved in this issue.

We are talking about hardened farmers, people who are used to seeing some difficult scenes on their properties, but they are relating events with tears in their eyes as they describe the horrific scenes they go out to in the morning and see in their paddocks. There are graphic accounts of dogs emerging particularly from sections of public land and preying on young lambs. It is obvious just from talking to these people the stress that they are facing when they encounter such slaughter of stock, on an almost daily basis on many occasions. It is playing on the minds of many people in my community.

The tone of that meeting in Omeo was one of despair. It was also mixed with a barely concealed anger and frustration with the lack of action by governments at all levels. I have most recently been sent photos from one of the landholders in my electorate, and these are horrific scenes. I feel very fortunate that I have not had to go out and see the aftermath of such an attack. The photographs and the evidence of what is occurring, particularly in parts of the high country of Gippsland and the north-east, is something that I think everyone in this chamber should be made aware of. These farmers have the uncertainty when they go to bed at night of not knowing what they will wake up in the morning and find. They go to bed and they can listen to the dogs howling in the bush, and that must be playing on their minds. It is a very, very difficult issue for us. The emotional toll is enormous in regional communities.

One of the farmers in my electorate, Sally Moon, told the Bairnsdale Advertiser, my local paper, in May last year about the toll it was taking on her and her husband, Gordon, and her disappointment with the patronising attitude of government agencies. I will have to refer specifically to the former Brumby government in Victoria, which I feel over 11 years failed to do enough in this area. Sally said: 'I feel as if we are being totally abandoned. They treat us as if we are grass seed chewing idiots.' I think that sums up the attitude amongst many farmers—they feel that they are not getting support from governments.

The environmental impacts that I have referred to in this motion relate to the killing of native species by feral dogs, which I believe has been largely ignored by green groups who pretend to care for the environment. I have previously spoken in this place about these impacts, and I quoted at that time a man by the name of Robert Belcher from the Bonang area. He said that every time he opened up a wild dog after it was trapped or had been shot he found it 'chock-a-block full of either sheep and echidnas, and echidnas are native wildlife'. It is disappointing to me that we cannot hear the green groups talking about these issues. They spend more time talking about the need for humane dog traps than they do about the impact on wildlife or the thrill kills which see dogs ripping apart lambs or maiming sheep and just leaving them in the paddock. Remember that these dogs are not just in there for a feed; it is a thrill kill. There are massive amounts of stock being killed on an all too frequent basis.

The people in my electorate have combined to put a petition to the state government, and I acknowledge that the Victorian government is at least starting to take some serious action in this space. They have put together a $4 million commitment to provide a wild dog bounty and some aerial baiting. After years of neglect I think this is a very positive step in the right direction for the people of Victoria. I also acknowledge that this is primarily a state issue, but the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre was founded by the Commonwealth in 2004. The centre aims to counteract the impact of invasive animals through the development and application of new technologies and by integrating approaches across agencies and jurisdictions. These are words; they sound very impressive. But the people on the ground want action on the ground. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities a question in this place on the specific issue of feral animals and wild dogs. I quote from the answer that the minister gave me:

One of the challenges is that whenever we act we need to do it at the same time as the states are acting … Otherwise, all you do is keep trimming the numbers rather than making a real impact. When it can be coordinated, and from time to time it is done, there is an opportunity to be able to have a very direct impact on invasive species.

Given that the Victorian government is currently making a commitment to take direct action to reduce the impact of wild dogs, I would call on the federal government to be part of that solution.

I have a report here from the Parliamentary Library, which states that the funding allocated in 2009-10 for specific projects on invasive species, in particular, wild dog projects, amounted to $159,000. I do not suggest for a second that those are the only projects the government is undertaking in terms of feral animal control but, for projects specifically dealing with the wild dog issue, funding amounted to $159,000. I think there is now a real opportunity here for us, particularly in Victoria, to leverage off those state funds and make a serious attempt to reduce wild dog predation in Gippsland and right across Victoria.

Although my comments here tonight deal specifically with Victoria, because I am most familiar with those areas, I understand that this issue spreads right across Australia, into Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. It is an issue of great significance to many people who live in rural and regional areas. I am not suggesting at all that there is any easy solution to this problem. But we need to make it a bigger priority for government funding. It will take a partnership approach and a willingness from the new state government in Victoria to allow more flexible working arrangements, to allocate more resources to both professional trapping and shooting, and also helping to meet some of the fencing costs, particularly in those areas where Crown land is housing this menace.

We need to use all the tools that are at our disposal and, as I have said before in this place, we need to adopt a national approach and get serious about reducing the impact of these feral species across state borders. I will refer to my opening comments that, tragically, maybe it does take the slaughter of a few hens by foxes in a suburban environment to bring it home to all Australians that our farmers need more help to deal with wild dogs. (Time expired)

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