Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I always do each summer, I visited Marrawah, Circular Head and the Tarkine in January. I popped in to see a good mate of mine Alice Carson. A shout-out to Alice and her family, who are wildlife carers on the outskirts of Circular Head. I asked Alice how things were going. She expressed her sadness and frustration at scraping 287 Tasmanian devils off the road in her area in Circular Head, where a healthy population was believed to be only 600 individuals. She has formally documented this and has handed in that documentation to the authorities,

You can stand at Alice's farm and literally look a couple of kilometres onto the horizon and there lies Robbins Island where there are plans to build one of the biggest wind farms in the Southern Hemisphere, including a causeway to the island. This island hosts one of the last, if not the last, disease-free populations of Tasmanian devils in Tasmania. The minister has before her on her desk a decision to approve or not approve this project. Robbins Island is irreplaceable and so is the Tasmanian devil.

I asked Alice about the facial tumour disease, which has received no federal funding since 2017, by the way. That's nearly 10 years! She said there had been reports of diseased Tasmanian devils in her area. Tasmania and the country were devastated to see a report on the ABC just a few days ago that included a Tasmanian devil, which looked barely like a Tasmanian devil, that was suffering from facial tumour disease in north-west Tasmania, not far from Alice's farm. It's absolutely critical that we fully fund recovery plans for the Tasmanian devil, including for more research into their populations.