ENVIRONMENT, NATURAL RESOURCES AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE Subcommittee Inquiry into the control of invasive animals on Crown land Sale — 7 October 2016 Members Ms Bronwyn Halfpenny — Chair Mr Bill Tilley Mr Tim McCurdy — Deputy Chair Ms Vicki Ward Mr Simon Ramsay Mr Daniel Young Mr Tim Richardson Staff Executive officer: Dr Christopher Gribbin Witnesses Ms Jenny Bland, secretary, and Mr Paul Hamlett, member, Snake Island Cattlemen’s Association. 7 October 2016 Environment, Natural Resources and Regional Development Committee 1 The CHAIR — Welcome, Mr Paul Hamlett, who is a member of the Snake Island Cattlemen’s Association, and Ms Jenny Bland, the secretary of the Snake Island Cattlemen’s Association, and thank you for coming to present at this public hearing today. Just a couple of things to note before we start. First off under the parliamentary committees legislation what you say and present today in this public hearing is protected by parliamentary privilege; however, that is not the case once the hearing is over. Also, the information here today is being recorded, and you will receive a transcript of your submissions and your presentation, and you have a chance to look at that and fix up any inaccuracies prior to it becoming public. On that note, if we pass it over to you, I understand you will provide a PowerPoint presentation for 10 minutes or so and then we will get the opportunity to ask you lots of questions. So thank you again for coming, and over to you. Visual presentation. Mr HAMLETT — Firstly, thank you for inviting us to present what we will cover today, and I will try to get through this as quickly as possible. There are a few things here that might look a bit out of left field. Firstly, it really is a privilege to address the committee, because the issues you are considering are really important. All I hope is that the experiences and insights that we bring will be of some value. That is all I can hope. So the next question is: why are we talking about koalas? We are talking about koalas because in the context of Snake Island they are an invasive species, because they were introduced onto the island, so they are an invasive species. And there are some lessons, we think, to learn. Here is what the koalas used to look like on Snake Island in that manna gum tree, and that is one of our members who was a koala spotter for 15 years, not in an eradication program but in a control program. I will just give you a little bit of history. Koalas were hunted for their skins, and they were hunted to near extinction by 1927. Actually in 1926 there were a million koala skins exported from Australia to America. Because they became almost extinct in Victoria, 133 were introduced onto Snake Island by well-intentioned people because they were at severe risk. There was no monitoring done. So in 1943 they were introduced; by 1997 there were 5000 koalas on Snake Island — Snake Island is 3500 hectares — but there had been no monitoring work. So it has almost come like a bolt out of the blue that we have got to do something, because they are starving to death and they are killing all the trees on the island. So in 1997 there was a program put into place. Now, it was decided at that time not to shoot them, and the reason they did not shoot them is that public expectation would not allow them to be shot. You could imagine the uproar with a species that was nearly extinct from shooting, for shooting to then become the solution, and that is why it was not done. I am not saying it was not right, but that is why it was not done. So they went through a sterilisation program. So they actually catch the koalas and sterilise the males and the females. They were originally released back onto the mainland but they did not do well, and in the latter years they were released back onto the island basically so they could not breed. The population now is down below 200. So that program went for 15 years, and they sterilised 3500 koalas through that program — hugely expensive, a hugely expensive program. That finished in 2012. There has not been monitoring of the population that now exists on the island since 2012. We are now talking four years, so we do not really know what the population is doing, whether it is going up or down. We know there are still breeding pairs of koalas on the island, but there is no ongoing monitoring. I have put here a quote because it is one of the other points we would like to make. The point really is that there are learnt behaviours. When you interact with animals in any sort of program, in any sort of way, they will react to that and their behaviours will change. So the koalas became not scared of a person on a horse, because they just saw that as another animal, but if they hear a motorbike or a vehicle, then they just move around to the other side of the tree, and you can watch them doing it. They are still doing that behaviour four years later. They have never been taken out of a tree in four years, but the population has learnt if it hears a noise like that, a foreign noise, they will actually move around the back of the tree and they will hide. So that behaviour has been learnt by that remaining population. 7 October 2016 Environment, Natural Resources and Regional Development Committee 2 Ms BLAND — I can attest to that, because I was a spotter for four years with Parks Vic, subcontracting, so yes, I can attest to that happening. Even now, a vehicle goes past and you will see a tagged koala, and he will make himself quite invisible by moving around the tree away from spotters. Mr HAMLETT — So what we really want to highlight from that program is that major changes to the ecosystem need to be managed. The introduction of the koalas had a significant impact on the island, on the amount of manna gums that were left, and they were starving. There were 14 koalas by the way in that tree, in that one branch — 14. Interventions must take into account public expectation about how it is going to be dealt with, and there are a wide variety of options. We can involve community groups into the management of public land. So it was not just the cattlemen; there were tree planting programs, there was the actual capture program, there was the sterilisation program and there were interactions with the koalas. Management plans must consider the impacts and the implications across the entire ecosystem. That is one of the issues, I guess, with this inquiry; it is really quite narrow in dealing with invasive animals, but the invasive animals exist in ecosystems and they impact on the other animals. So in dealing with one species then it is really necessary. Otherwise you will not get what you wish for. You might get an explosion of another population or you get a weed invasion or a whole range of other things. The other thing that we are talking about is the opportunities for a wide range of community groups to deal with that issue. That is enough about koalas. One of the things that has been really clear in our background information is the modelling around how to go about this. This is just really any project management model. There are a number of stages in that, and all I have done there is put six in. So there is plan, set objectives, implement, monitor, evaluate and review, and that is a constant process. That is a circular process. Then I have put a line across it because what I wanted to try to do is highlight the difference between community engagement and the difference with community involvement. So the community engagement stages of that process are around the planning and setting of objectives. So the communities and the stakeholders actually agree with what the objectives are, and that is done up-front as part of the planning process. Then community involvement really sits with the implementation and actually doing the job. There is the monitoring and then the evaluation of that, and then you get back into the review process. You go back into community engagement again, and then that cycle simply continues on and should be a continuous process as an integrated flora and fauna management plan. So it is not just one — it is not just looking at deer or dogs; it is looking at the interaction between deer and dogs in that environment. And you have heard a lot from different people about that. Then I put the red line through it as where I think the system is actually breaking down with our existing public land managers — that is, they seem to spend a fair bit of time planning and they spend a fair bit of time setting objectives, and they do some implementation. I probably could have put that little cross maybe through the middle of implementation as well, but they do very little monitoring and evaluation, and they do very little review as to whether it is working or not working. It is almost like crisis management. They only react to when things get out of hand.