Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to bring the attention of the House to an organisation called the Kimberley Toad Busters. The Kimberley Toad Busters have been working very hard for some seven years from a core developed by one Lee Scott-Virtue in Kununurra and struggling to get recognition and some financial assistance to do a job that was vitally important to more Australians than Australians realised, quite frankly. Cane toads are an obscene little amphibian that is best treated with a golf club in my opinion, but others might have more humane points of view. But this little core group that Lee Scott-Virtue in Kununurra created has grown to some 7,000 volunteers. Toad busting is carried out 12 months of the year. It is a finely honed group that is well led and well organised. It is well motivated, because I do not think that there are any amongst us that recognise cane toads as being anything but a toxic, obnoxious pest. It does not endear itself to any one of us.

The important fact is that cane toads are an introduced species that have created havoc with our fauna since their introduction. They were introduced in a well-meaning way to combat the cane beetle, as I think you, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, would well know. Since then they have slowly worked on our Australian native fauna to its disadvantage. At all stages of the food chain, the cane toad attacks and destroys, because they, frankly, are absolutely toxic. They are toxic at tadpole stage. They are toxic as they emerge as nymphets. They are toxic as adults. All stages of the Australian fauna have been destroyed, from the smallest lizards to the largest crocodiles. We have crocodiles found with stone dead cane toads in their mouths because the cane toad toxin has impacted them as they struck the cane toad.

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