Matters of Urgency — Invasive Species Management

Varun Ghosh

The Senate will now consider the proposal, under standing order 75, from Senator David Pocock, which is also shown at item No. 16 on today's order of business and is shown on the Dynamic Red:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

the need for increased investment to protect Australia's landscapes and wildlife from invasive species, which cost around $25 billion a year and are driving native species towards extinction. With bird flu spreading around the country, the Environment Minister has said managing threats like weeds, feral cats, foxes and pigs is 'more important than ever'. The government must fully fund a long-term plan for management, research and eradication.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

David Pocock

I seek leave to amend the motion.

Leave granted.

Varun Ghosh

With the concurrence of the Senate, the Clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

David Pocock

I amend the motion in the terms circulated in the chamber and I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

the need for increased investment to protect Australia's landscapes and wildlife from invasive species, which cost around $25 billion a year and are driving native species towards extinction. With bird flu spreading around the country, the Environment Minister has said managing threats like weeds, feral cats, foxes and pigs is 'more important than ever'. The government must fully fund a long-term plan for management, research and eradication.

Just this morning, we heard that fire ants, one of the worst invasive species on the planet, have been detected at a logistics hub in Sydney's inner west. If they spread, they'll cost an estimated $2 billion a year and threaten human health and wildlife. This would be just the latest in a long history of invasive species doing huge damage to this incredible continent.

For tens of thousands of years, First Nations people cared for this continent across thousands of generations, and we have to face up to the fact that, over just 230 years, we have one of the worst records of mammal extinction in the world. We are a wealthy country that can do something about that. We have Australians who love this place, who want to see nature protected. We've got farmers who want to play their part. What we need are coordination from all levels of government and long-term planning. Invasive species is not something that you can throw some money at for five years and at the end of a program say what a great success it was and move on to the next thing. We need sustained funding and effort in this space. At the turn of the century, 21 Australian mammals were thought to be extinct. Today that number is 43—more than double. Invasive species like cats, foxes and rats have likely been the main cause of more than 90 per cent of those extinctions, and 267 invasive species now affect 82 per cent of Australia's threatened species.

There are a lot of numbers that get thrown around when we talk about invasive species, but I think we need to remember what's at stake here: the places we love, the species that have evolved here over millions of years and have just as much right to be here as we do. The damage goes well beyond extinction. Introduced species are making Australia look more like everywhere else. This hollowing out, this removal of so much biodiversity from our landscape, is a tragedy. We're seeing buffelgrass fires killing river red gums in central Australia, and we've got 200 million carp, which are now 90 per cent of the fish biomass in parts of the Murray-Darling Basin. Yet I don't think, from what I've seen, we've had the political will to tackle this. This is not the environment that I think we want our kids to experience. We can and must do something about this.

It's bad, and we're hearing from experts that it could get worse. We've got bird flu here in Australia now. This poses a new and significant threat, and it really hammers home just how important it is to get on top of things like cats and foxes, to be doing more on islands. There's a huge opportunity in Australia to be working on the eradication of cats, foxes, mice, rats and rabbits on islands and creating safe havens, just as we've seen on the mainland with groups like Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage and many others making very important contributions to conservation through fenced-area conservation efforts.

The cost is huge. We all pay for it. Australia suffers the cost of invasive species to the tune of $25 billion every year. I think this is something that should be a rallying call to politicians, to be working with groups that are already working on this—to be working with farmers, to be working with hunters, to be working with everyone who actually wants to get involved in turning this around and going in a direction that has more biodiversity, more life in our landscapes, and connects people to the places that they live. It's a huge opportunity. I would urge the Senate to send a message to the government that this is important for us and our country.

Andrew Bragg

I indicate that the coalition will be supporting this important motion from Senator Pocock, and I want to acknowledge him for his genuine interest in these issues of invasive species. What we're talking about here is protecting Australia. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about protecting this country, protecting it from the threat of erasure, which we have seen, sadly, over the last couple of 100 years, where we have lost too many of our own species and unique flora and fauna as a result of different invasive species penetrating our biosecurity. What could be more important than protecting Australia? I'd say that, when I was growing up in northern Victoria, you could see the difference between where invasive species had penetrated parts of the day-to-day landscape and where they hadn't. You could see the material difference it made. I think about the impact of European carp in the Goulburn and Murray river channels in the system and the fact that, in other parts of western Victoria, there were no European carp and, therefore, the fish sector and the environmental sector were radically improved for everyone.

This is a very serious matter. We see the rural vista. We see the deer, the goats and the pigs. These are very serious threats to agriculture and very serious threats to our native species. This is a regional problem which threatens our economy. It threatens our sustainability. In the cities, though, we have a terrible problem with feral cats. So it's not just a rural and regional issue. And then we have weeds, which can destroy parts of the natural habitat. At the moment, there has been a big focus on the fire ants, but there are also the varroa mites, which have been detected at the Port of Newcastle. These mites can destroy European honeybees, which is a very significant threat to our honey industry. That's just one that has come up recently. But the pigs are a big problem. The goats are a big problem. The camels are a big problem, actually. So these are longstanding issues.

The government has been in place now for many years, and the industry is very, very worried. In the farming sector, anyone that has any exposure is focused on this: 'Can we get better program certainty from the government?' These are long-run campaigns that are needed. You need to have the funding certainty. Stakeholders, including the Invasive Species Council, are identifying that the yellow crazy ants, the gamba grass eradication, the Kangaroo Island feral cat eradication and the Tasmanian feral deer on Bruny Island are some things that are happening right now where there isn't funding certainty; there isn't program certainty. The government have, in their words, 'reallocated'—but have, we would say, cut—funding from these programs in the last budget.

What we want to see is a serious whole-of-government endeavour to eradicate these invasive species. That, in some cases, will take up to a decade. You can't just run the program for one year or two years and re-announce things and rebadge things in the budget. This is a serious problem that we're fighting on a number of fronts. As I say, there's a problem in the city. There's a problem in the bush. There are the weeds. There are so many different invasive species in different forms.

If we take it back to first principles, we are all committed to protecting Australia regardless of our political differences. This is one of the most basic things we can do to protect our environmental heritage but also to protect our economy, our livelihoods and our health. That is why the ask from the industry that is most exposed to the invasive species mismanagement is simply for funding certainty and program certainty. I think that's something that we should all try and work together on. Everyone wants to protect our native habitat, because that is what is sustaining us here on this continent.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah

I'd like to thank Senator Pocock for bringing forward this very important motion. Australians' identity as a people is very much intertwined with the natural world. From our rivers to our reefs to our river red gums, we are rooted to our country, and we are deeply committed to protecting our country—all Australians are. But that country of ours is under threat. It's under threat from human habitation, from land clearing, from invasive species and, of course, from climate change. We all recall the State of the _e nvironment report_ from a few years ago which laid it out, writ large, that our environment was under pressure and deteriorating at an alarming rate.

The Invasive Species Council has reported that invasive species cost this country around $25 billion a year. We know what they are. They're the usual suspects: feral cats, feral deer, foxes, rabbits—all these sorts of introduced species. There are weeds and yellow crazy ants. They're all basically eating away at our native habitat and our flora and fauna. That is contributing to this death by a thousand cuts.

We, as a government, have put more than $800 million since 2022 into threatened species and into protecting ecological communities, and more than $2 billion into extra biosecurity. We agree with the motion on the threat posed by invasive species, and we are doing something about it. This was also best seen, I think, in regard to our response to H5 bird flu. We knew this was coming. It wasn't a question of if but of when, and it has now appeared on our shores. But we did the work; we did the groundwork in preparing this country for what could potentially be an extinction event for some species in our land.

We've contributed more than $270 million into strengthening our preparedness and our response. Over $67 million of that has gone towards biodiversity protection, to help our native animals withstand and recover, and a further $20 million has gone into emergency funding for on-ground action and for Commonwealth-managed national parks. And, of course, it's all aided by our citizen scientists. We are backing the next generation of rabbit biocontrol. You see them in their thousands here in Canberra. While they may look cute, they are devastating to our natural habitat, to our native species and of course to our farmers. This year's budget puts over $110 million into extending the Saving Native Species program and continuing our H5 bird flu preparedness.

In terms of wins, there are some wins. There are some gains. We've seen, with respect to feral cat eradication, some gains on Kangaroo Island. These cats threaten a number of species, including the Kangaroo Island dunnart, which is a type of marsupial. It looks a little bit like a rodent. They also threaten the bandicoot, the echidna and the whipbird. Since 2019-20, the government has committed more than $9.7 million towards eradicating these feral cats on the Dudley Peninsula. We've seen more than 1,800 feral cats removed. The remaining population is now less than 150.

The key message here is that there needs to be sustained effort over a long period of time and there needs to be commitment to these programs. We cannot have governments chopping and changing over time. Labor has a very proud legacy of environmental stewardship. It was Whitlam who created the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It was Hawke who stopped, along with the Greens political party, the damming of the Franklin and protected the Daintree. He also led the push to ban mining in Antarctica and established Landcare, which could do with a bit of a glow-up, I think! It was Keating who ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it was Gillard who ratified the Kyoto protocol, the precursor to the Paris Agreement. She also established the green bank, the CEFC, as well as ARENA The coalition attempted to disband that a number of times. She also finalised the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and it was under the Albanese government that we have delivered, with the aid of the Greens political party, landmark environmental laws, passed last year, and the establishment of the National Environmental Protection Authority, which, as of a few days ago, issued its first environmental protection order to prevent a huge amount of land clearing in Far North Queensland that was going to adversely impact the Great Barrier Reef. This happened also thanks to the activities and the work of citizen scientists in Australia. So we are trying to— (Time expired)

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