Northern Victoria Region
Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (12:37): (1397) My constituency question is for the Minister for Agriculture. A new strain of avian influenza has been detected at two Euroa poultry farms just this month. At one farm alone, all 76,000 chickens will be killed as a result. In 2024 the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action spent almost $8 million of taxpayer money on responding to avian influenza in Victoria, killing 1.3 million birds, only for it to resurface a few months later. Thirty thousand of these birds were suffocated to death by toxic foam, experiencing a horrifically slow and agonising death. Yet nothing is being done to address the problem where it starts. It is factory farming, with its high density and extreme confinement of animals, that is responsible for zoonotic diseases like avian influenza, and ultimately the further spread of them. My constituents want to know what method will be used to kill the chickens on both northern Victorian farms with avian influenza outbreaks.