Wednesday, 6 March 2024

Wildlife Act 1975 reform

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (18:21): (761) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Environment, and the action I seek is for an update on the government’s promised but still not yet delivered reform of the Wildlife Act 1975, which was supposed to increase penalties. In 2019–20 Victorian farmer James Troeth ordered the clearing of a former bluegum plantation in Cape Bridgewater at the expense of bulldozing and massacring 21 koalas to their deaths, with 49 koalas needing to be euthanised due to their irreparable injuries and more than 200 koalas left injured, dehydrated and starving with nowhere to go, as Mr Troeth had trapped them in by building a 2.2-metre-high fence around the gum trees when the bulldozers came in. Can you guess who assisted these koalas? Not our government, but Vets for Compassion, who were flown in by Animals Australia. They received no aid from our government but were entirely self-funded in their rescue mission. It is almost fitting that the very purpose of the land clearing was to build a site for livestock farming, which will now exist on top of the gravesite of all these koalas to further stain this land with cruelty and death.

For the displacement and suffering of more than 200 koalas, Mr Troeth was sentenced without conviction to pay a fine of $34,000 for his breaches of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1986. Despite it being a wildlife crime, he was ultimately not charged under the Wildlife Act. Mr Troeth himself said that 70 koalas was ‘not the big hoo-ha it’s been made out to be’ and was busy labelling the world and wildlife authorities ‘fascists’ for their outcry for the koalas. This is whom our native wildlife is in the hands of. This is the message our animal legislation is sending – that deliberate and mass cruelty is not a big deal.

We now have the opportunity to ensure this never happens again, with the new Animal Care and Protection Bill and the promised overhaul of the Wildlife Act the government promised in 2021 in response to this very atrocity. This government loves deterrence and increasing penalties for animal activists. How about it now increases penalties for those that bulldoze our native species to their deaths, like it promised to? The deliberate habitat clearing and the fatal impalement of a koala by a stick was priced at a fine of $170. The fines were an embarrassment to our nation and an insult to our national symbol, and to openly butcher and crush hundreds of koalas was a devastatingly wicked act of cruelty. I call for the minister to remember these deaths and his government’s promise three years ago to modernise the Wildlife Act and to finally increase penalties in its prospective bills to deter and punish those who inflict cruelty on our animals.