National Threatened Species Day

The majority voted against a motion introduced by Greens Senator Janet Rice, which:

calls on the Government to take decisive action to properly fund and support biodiversity research and conservation, and stop the trajectory of animal and plant extinctions in Australia.

Motion text

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) National Threatened Species Day is marked today, 7 September 2017, the anniversary of the day that the last Thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger) went extinct in 1936 in a Hobart zoo,

(ii) in Australia, we have one of the world's worst extinction rates for our native mammals, with 29 species going extinct since European settlement and that number representing a third of all global mammalian extinctions in the last 600 years,

(iii) 20 per cent of Australia's remaining mammal species are classified as threatened, including iconic species like koalas, wombats, bilbies and Tasmanian devils,

(iv) globally, we are living through what scientists are calling the Holocene extinction, which is the sixth greatest extinction event since life began on earth and is being caused by human activity, and

(v) there is good work being done in our community to save our native wildlife, but that more needs to be done by our governments to address the biodiversity crisis, including by tackling threatening processes, including land clearing, logging and pest animal and plant species; and

(b) calls on the Government to take decisive action to properly fund and support biodiversity research and conservation, and stop the trajectory of animal and plant extinctions in Australia.