Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—This is something we should be able to work together on. We have a significant problem with feral cats in this country—6.3 million of them. If you think about that, it's the equivalent of just about every person in Sydney having their own cat. These are cats out there in the wild, killing our native animals and creating biosecurity risks. It's something we need to be able to deal with. There are 3.2 billion animals slaughtered every year by this feral cat menace.

At the beginning of the global pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, I was advocating job creation programs which were focused on dealing with the feral animal problem. I was advocating to the government that here is a perfect opportunity for us to do something that will have a lasting impact on our environment while keeping people in work and perhaps providing people who've been out of work with valuable job skills. I had in mind the excellent Indigenous rangers program. This is a program which has created over 2,100 jobs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout the country. Their job, quite simply, is working on country and providing custodianship of land, including the mitigation of bushfire risks, biosecurity risks and improving land and land management practices.

On the eradication of feral animals, we've been focused on cats, but let's also say something about feral horses, an issue very close to where we are, and the member for Fenner will be able to attest to this. It would be good if we could get a bipartisan position on this. I think the Liberal and the Labor parties could agree; the National Party appears to be divided on this issue in New South Wales. We have a significant issue with feral horses in this country. As the member for Sydney was saying, if we call them 'brumbies', they are kind of cute and part of our heritage. If we call them 'feral horses', we can focus on the problem—the devastation they wrought on our environment. We have got a problem. We have a challenge with unemployment as well. Let's put our minds together. As the old saying goes: kill two birds with one stone when dealing with feral pests in this country.

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