Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like you to imagine a shady waterhole in Africa where groups of rhinos are drinking and resting after a day's penetrating heat. Imagine the horror of the rhinos when a poacher goes up behind a mother rhino, slices its ankles with a machete and then slashes its face off while still alive to take the rhino horn—and this can be with a young rhino nearby. I have actually seen videos of the aftermath of this, and it is truly shocking, distressing and disgusting. And now repeat this image over and over every day of the year.

As a result of aggressive poaching, one rhino dies every eight hours for its horns and there are now less than 27,000 rhinos left in the world. This animal has walked our planet for 40 million years but, unless urgent action is taken, it could be extinct within the next 10 years. I want to make it very clear that this problem is not caused by legal hunters; it is instead caused by the poachers, who are paid on average $A12,000 per rhino. So the incentives are huge. The poachers have a network of assistance to track down the rhinos. They can buy information from rangers who are employed to protect the animals, with the rangers receiving $2,000 to actually reveal their location to the poachers. The high value of the rhino horn means that even baby rhinos with very small horns are targeted and killed.

The problem is equally dire for elephants, which also face extinction due to the demand for ivory. One elephant dies every 15 minutes, which means that, just while parliament has been sitting today, nearly 40 more of these noble beasts have lost their lives purely for the value of their tusks. Some of the elephants are not shot but instead poisoned with cyanide, which results in a slow and excruciatingly painful death for the elephant and implications for the rest of the food chain that may come into contact with its carcass.

Australia is very definitely part of this problem, because a kilo of rhino horn sells here for up to $60,000 whilst ivory tusks sell for up to $8,000. Australians are importing ivory into Australia for personal use and we can still buy and sell ivory and rhino horn at auction houses et cetera. I congratulate Leonard Joel auction house for completely banning the sale of ivory and rhino horn in January this year. I believe that as a nation we need to completely close the markets for ivory and rhino horn. I congratulate the former minister, Greg Hunt, for introducing a ban on these products, so that products harvested after 1971 could not be introduced. But, alas, that has not been effective enough, because, in recent years, there have been 300 cases where elephant ivory has come into Australia and has been seized by officials. There are huge penalties for this—up to $250,000—but, sadly, there have been no prosecutions. It's the same for rhino horns. In recent years there have been 70 seizures and, again, there have been no prosecutions. The reason is that it is very difficult for Customs officers or law enforcement to carbon date ivory or rhino horn as being prior to 1975.

Domestic trade bans have already been enacted or will be enacted by China, the United States, France and India, and I believe that it is time for Australia to follow suit. African states, such as Zimbabwe, are now imposing very harsh penalties, with convicted poachers of rhino horn or elephant ivory in Zimbabwe routinely being sentenced to nine years jail. In recent years, at least 60 people have been convicted in that country alone. This illegal wildlife trade is the fourth most lucrative global crime after drugs, human trafficking and arms, and Australia is clearly part of the problem. All those people are bringing back what they think are knick-knacks into Australia—little items they may think would look nice on their mantelpiece—but, in actual fact, they've come from the death of a rhino or an elephant.

I would like to congratulate and thank Donalea Patman, the director of For the Love of Wildlife and Dr Lynn Johnson, the director of Breaking the Brand, who passed this information on to me. I am very keen to see a full ban in the same way the Turnbull government implemented a full ban of an importation of African lion hunt trophies and parts.