The treatment of these dedicated and hard working individuals by government staff in Australia can be abhorrent and the trends describing changing government conduct appear to be converging.

State governments are now talking to each other because of the growing resistance to their cruel and devious policies.

We should remember two things, Australian wildlife is protected under law, and secondly, that most carers and rescuers, unless they are lucky, fund their own operations, using their own resources, sometimes with the help of donors.

Someone is always going to have to clean up the damage, the joeys without mothers that have to be rescued, wounded Kangaroos that have managed to escape and on it goes.

So the impact on wildlife rescuers and carers from the commercial exploitation of Kangaroos, let’s take the case of South Australia (all states are similar) include having to deal with wounded (terrible wounds of indescribable horror) of mis-shot animals which may have suffered terribly over the days before they were found and sadly most, will be euthanised.

Rescuers put months of care in rehabilitating these wonderful animals so seeing the carnage of illegal shooting or shooting for commercial gain nearby their wildlife shelters is always deeply distressing.

In the recent period mass poisoning of Kangaroos has been occurring in the Adelaide Hills and surrounds and the poison Pindone is suspected.

“All the bait active ingredients sold by Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu are regulated by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. To limit the potential for off-target impacts we dye the pindone treated carrots green. We strongly encourage you to pre-feed with unbaited carrots”. Landscape Board, South Australia, Hills and Fleurieu

What is happening in South Australia as Kangaroo populations decline in rural areas is a mirror of what has occurred in Victoria, commercial Kangaroo shooters are getting ever closer to human populations, sometimes as occurs in Victoria, shooting within a few metres of houses or tourism businesses.

Kangaroo populations cannot sustain the relentless killings and the decline in the number of rescues is testament to that.

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While a blind eye is turned by ‘environment departments’ to acts of cruelty and a host of violations from those doing the killing of protected Australian wildlife, for recreation, for commercial gain or the all too often dubious claims that allow for the killing of protected wildlife for purposes of mitigation.

In contrast wildlife carers and rescuers are treated very differently. Extraordinarily so, as most do not receive funding from government and all work under a strict regime where minor infractions (or even perceived infractions) of paperwork requirements result in letters threatening fines, prosecution in the criminal jurisdiction and loss of carers permit.

This is a process of criminalisation, the exact same process that confronts property and business owners who object to the slaughter of wildlife on their doorstep. The threatening processes from the department of environment staff include phone calls that aim to cause stress and anxiety, increasing the constant worry of losing their licence and having the animals they are caring for taken away or euthanised. It is in this environment of induced fear that carers and rescuers succumb to the harassment and bullying.

Politicians know precisely what goes on and do nothing.

What is as evident in South Australia, as it is in Victoria, is the lack of concern by government staff about the welfare of the animals being targeted by their policies and permits. The paperwork matters, not much else does.

If we were wrong about this none of it would happen.

The spin of course is just how humane it all is, and how they are helping the animals by killing them.

Just in the last few weeks rescuers, and carers who applied to renew their retain, sell and keep permits, received an email congratulating them on gaining their hunting permits.

A feature here is the continuous game play that surrounds the rescue and release of protected Australian wildlife, designed to make life as difficult as possible. Here are some examples:

• As there is nowhere safe to release the Kangaroos and directly so because of government policy, changes in the already very silly rules, that still differ from state by state and territory, are clearly a source of opportunity for policy changes that attempt to complicate life for wildlife carers. The possibility of a change in direction in South Australia, from not being allowed to release a rehabilitated joey back to the wild, to a policy of release or kill the animal, would have created major problems for wildlife carers in South Australia. As it turned out this issue did see the light of day in the local media and to date these changes have not occurred.
• Poor governance standards and record keeping by the state governments are commonplace, as is the lack of transparency. Poorly designed computer based systems meant to streamline access to permits cause even greater confusion. It is important that governments understand the impact of their policies beyond the endless spin that enables and tries to justify the killing.
• What we think of as sinister conduct is the element of control and censorship environment departments try to exert on wildlife carers and regional residents, for example the Victorian Government was trying to stop wildlife shelters from showing images of their rescue animals on social media, an essential tool to try and raise funds for rescue and rehabilitation. This is no longer the case.
• In South Australia, the environment department does not like donors visiting the places to which they donate, the requirement is for the carers to purchase a display permit which is costly. The reasons for this behaviour are again obvious (and odious) and have nothing to do with the welfare of the animals being rescued.

Following in Victoria’s footsteps and during the terrible floods in the Murray lands and beyond, the South Australia Government, bar one small exception that we know of, blocked the rescue of Kangaroos, nor were carers allowed to deliver the starving and stranded animals food.

Once the Kangaroos looked as if they could no longer survive in the flooded conditions, they were shot from boats by government staff or their outsourced shooters. The distress this would have caused to the carer community and beyond was enormous, impacting mental health and wellbeing.

Reasons for blocking rescues included the usual silly excuses, and in the case of South Australia, one of the silly excuses not to rescue these poor animals was the government did not want drug impacted Kangaroos being shot for commercial gain immediately after rescue, and subsequently entering the food chain. They do not appear to be applying that logic to the Adelaide Hills, given the poisoning going on there.

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It is now 55 years ago that Arthur Quirepel, the founder of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council , began complaining about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's misleading reporting on Kangaroos in Australia, we followed shortly afterwards and that behaviour from the ABC continues today.

“A news release issued by Mr Arthur Queripel refuting the supervision claim was not broadcast by the ABC. This led to the matter being referred to the Media Minister, Senator D McClelland with certain allegations as to the reasons for the broadcast and these are now being investigated".

In August 1970, Arthur Queripel again objected to the misleading reports on the ABC concerning numbers of Kangaroos and an undertaking was given by the ABC that in future all matters concerning the number of Kangaroos would be proven authentic before being broadcast.

Shortly after the ABC’s commitment Arthur had this to say:

"I do not believe this undertaking is being observed”.

Similar undertakings were given to us about 20 years ago.

Two recent examples, there are many, was that as the then President of an Australian wildlife charity, Peter was asked to appear on an ABC Radio Melbourne Conversation Hour only to be rung before the program by its host:

“I don’t want you on my program, I am interested in meat not facts”.

What followed was certainly free of facts.

That call was witnessed by others and how people working in the public employ can imagine they can be so rude to members of the public is hard to understand.

In Perth, claims were being made by the ABC Breakfast Program, WA Morning, that the Kangaroo population estimate in Australia (commercial species) was 50 million, at the time the current Federal Government  estimate was 30.5 million. After I had spoken to the ABC and supplied the government’s data table (from the Australian Commonwealth Government’s website) they did agree they were wrong, but instead of using the correct number, the text accompanying the broadcast (which was not corrected) still says this, while they continued to claim, well actually they are far more than that:

“Back in 2009 there were around 27 million Kangaroos in Australia and now it is estimated there are 42.7 million, according to the Commonwealth Government”.  

The list of these things go ever on and the ABC repeats the same kind of misleading information year in and year out in all states, while ABC  journalists now promote the idea that everything they broadcast is verified. Do not believe it and as the ABC has less and less capacity to do its job in an increasingly complex world, the risk of manipulation grows ever stronger. Again Kangaroos are the indicator of what is to come.

I would politely suggest to the ABC that verification might actually mean trying to think about the claims being made and analysing the claims against the data, rather than just going back to those making the misleading claims, often individuals working in the public service.

The results from proper verification would glaringly obvious, but it seems that the ABC are so invested in their decades old propaganda that no alternative path is possible.

A recent radio program on the South Australian Country hour was interesting.

Here are my comments to the presenter (the presenter was cautious about not escalating or encouraging the claims, but nonetheless there was no one on the program who was not promoting the idea of a future boom in populations and to challenge some of the silly claims being made by contributors to the program, mostly public servants).

Here are my comments to the presenter:

"The obvious question to ask, the same organisations claim an imminent boom in population every year, is why is the take against quota is so low if this is such a major problem?

The answers, if you understand numbers, are obvious. You should also know we go and look at these landscapes.

Under oath at the NSW Gov Kangaroo Inquiry this statement was made by an individual deeply involved in enabling the killing of Kangaroos in South Australia and elsewhere:

"Most shooters will shoot for body size, but it depends on the density of the population. I did some work years ago in the north-west of the South Australian pastoral zone where shooters would shoot anything that moved because the density of the populations were so low and, really, it was almost an uneconomical activity”.

Here is a small sample of the history:

The commercial quota for 2022 was 455,800, what actually occurred was that 100,896 Kangaroos were killed in South Australia that year for commercial gain, just 22 per cent of quota. For the Red Kangaroo it was 21 per cent of that species’ quota, with the largest number of animals actually killed for any species at 49,379 which was 49 per cent of all Kangaroos killed for commercial gain in South Australia in 2022.

In 2022, 1123 permits were issued to kill Kangaroos for purposes other than exploitation. The total number of Kangaroos on these permits was 61,489. This consisted of 5,862 Red Kangaroos; 46,161 Western Grey Kangaroos; 2,766 Euros; 1,030 Eastern Grey Kangaroos and (I assume on Kangaroo Island) 5,670 Tammar Wallabies.

These numbers, which given claims of booming Kangaroo populations and silly population estimates in South Australia, are a clear indicator that the situation is very different from that claimed by the South Australian Government, particularly so when just 22 per cent of the commercial quota was shot in that year.

Kangaroo population estimates in South Australia need to be audited.

In 2019, the commercial Kangaroo kill in South Australia for all species was 99,289. This figure was 13 per cent of the approved quota of 752,100 (including the Special Land Management Quota).

The highest recorded annual take against quotas achieved are 555,000 for Red Kangaroos (1997), 280,000 for Western Grey Kangaroos (1997), and 103,000 for Euros (1997).

Kangaroo populations in South Australia have never recovered from this killing spree.

I hope you and your colleagues at the ABC find this information useful”.

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Not answering questions, or not clearly answering the questions asked, but obfuscating  instead, is now commonplace from state governments conducting mass exterminations of Australian wildlife.

The current Victorian Government is probably the worst when it comes to spin and obfuscation, the South Australian Government does not cover itself with glory either.

What was evident from the ABC’s most recent interview is that, when it comes to the abuse of Australian wildlife and the spin that surrounds it, these two governments now work in tandem as trends in the types of conduct and associated ‘PR’ merge across the states.

I have also asked the South Australian Government questions following a senior public servant’s appearance on the media. There has been no response.

• QUESTION ONE: Can you please tell me if the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, Animals Australia, Kangaroos Alive and the International Kangaroo Protection Alliance, as Australian leaders in Macropod welfare, as well as being extremely knowledgeable about what is happening to Kangaroos in Australia, including South Australia of course, were invited to contribute to the Independent Review and its survey. I have not spoken to anyone, Kangaroo experts, who knew the review was taking place.

I think we all know the answer to my question. NO.

• QUESTION TWO: Can you also please send me the actual figure for the commercial take of Kangaroos in South Australia for 2023. This figure has now been supplied and is 100,594, just 17.4 per cent of that year's quota.

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A couple of observations for the Minister's information, as Eastern Greys are being wiped out in South Australia, so are Western Greys in Victoria - another reduction in range for these Macropod species. We are also seeing an uptick in violence on public lands in Victoria (which is serious) as the general public react to the protected Australian wildlife being slaughter around them.

2025 in Victoria will be far worse than anything that went before it.

I would remind you of the debacle when South Australia thought it could mix duck shooting with tourists visiting wetlands in South Australia.

Locking the gate is not the answer and represents a capture (semi-privatisation) of public lands by a few individuals, in this case for commercial gain, Victoria is not the model for this disgraceful conduct.

The other side of this issue is that individuals caught up in the front line of the shooting are too frightened to speak out, if they do the consequences can be very bad. Carers too expose themselves to retribution if they speak out and this means opportunities for any form of improvement in the circumstances for carers do not exist.

So the silence can now be deafening and the prejudice profound. It is certainly not what a healthy democracy looks like.

Our relationship with South Australia has been a long one. First trips to South Australia were in 1975, bang in the middle of Don Dunstan’s period as Premier. Our posting to Australia was for two years and South Australia seemed the most progressive of all Australian States at that time. So we would drive over for the weekend, stay with friends in a stone house on the hill above Hahndorf, visit our favourite wineries, Henschke was on the top of the list and we would drive away with a boot full of wine bottles. Deep pockets would be required to do that today. On one trip we purchased a Toyota Land Cruiser in which we intended to drive back to Europe, the year 1977. As it turned out the Land Cruiser sat in our garage at the time in South Yarra, rarely to see the light of day until we sold it a couple of years later. Our trans Asia drive postponed because of the rapidly growing businesses we were associated with in the region. It seemed inappropriate to go back. Later still we would frequent Don Dunstan’s Restaurant.

Sometimes our work could be risky, sinking in mid-Pacific Ocean in a huge storm was just one of those stories and by some miracle we did manage to swim to a small island. We were welcomed there even though we were unexpected guests.

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There were numerous visits to the Museum and Art Gallery in Adelaide. This early period was the beginning of our relationships with Australia’s Indigenous worlds and the deep friendships which were to come. You can look at our Art and Culture Channel to see some of that story.

This was one of the periods when there were direct flights from Tokyo to Adelaide, so we would be shovelling snow one day and be in the piercing summer light of South Australia the next. These were the days of the Multi-Function Polis and we are likely to be of the very few to be invited to both launches of this ill fated project. Might have been good if it had happened, but things were already changing.

We take our responsibilities and leadership seriously and have worked incredibly hard at international scale. One way of contributing to the region was to work with UNESCO programs helping to train people from the Pacific Islands and Indonesia and so on and have them work in the businesses we were associated with. We took our guests on journeys to South Australia. Later it was staff from businesses in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, of which we were very fond and later still, when Paul Keating was Prime Minister, Peter was asked to be a mentor for business people from former Soviet Union Countries, so some of the individuals on this Australian Government Program (a good idea) worked with us and stayed with us and travelled with us in Australia.

The circles of death, we had also begun to look at the impact of atomic bomb testing on Aboriginal people in South Australia and what followed, Project Sunshine, on everybody else. This also connected to our lives in Japan.

On one occasion, Andrea had an exhibition at the Art Gallery in Adelaide, we drove over for the opening from our country home in Victoria. During the opening some locals had decided Andrea’s car might be a good one to vandalise (Victorian plates) so the windows were smashed out and sadly some Chinese jewellery was also stolen. Because of the type of car it was we could not get replacement windows in Adelaide within the time we had to spend there, so we drove back with no windows to our home in Victoria. We did not know it then but some years later our long term home and wildlife property in Victoria was to go the same way as Andrea’s car. A story for another time.

What was done to us in Victoria and the codes of silence that followed, are why we care and why we do not want the same to happen to others. The conduct now occurring from at least some state governments enables precisely that.

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The real classic in exposing poor bookkeeping, it means that the New South Wales Government has absolutely no control over what is going on, followed the New South Wales Government's inquiry The Health and wellbeing of Kangaroos and other Macropods in New South Wales (the inquiry was self-referred on 15 March 2021). Its environment department was made to release the harms permit data, this was in the form of a spreadsheet dump, the public register of harms,  listing thousands of individual permits across multiple years and species.

The public register of harms is a list of permits issued. Using individual permit records - there are many thousands, doing what the government should be doing, we have added and sorted this list into species and time periods (years). This analysis is very revealing.

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In the period from August 2017 to February 2023 the New South Wales Government issued 16,989 permits to kill 1,887,072 Kangaroos (6 species) and 2,552 permits to kill 204,646 Australian birds and mammals. Lethal control of Flying-foxes (not included in the numbers given previously) was ended in 2021. 2018 was a particularly bad year for Australian wildlife in New South Wales with killing occurring, at what can only be described as catastrophic scale.

“Rainfall to the end of September 2018 in NSW was the third lowest ever recorded at 190.9 mm. Rainfall to date (2018) across Australia is as poor as any period in the last 20 years. However, the extent of rainfall deficiencies is currently smaller than in previous droughts”. Australian Government, DAFF 2018

A climax of the killing occurred in 2018 and during drought conditions, a time when wildlife should be protected and assisted. The 2018 killing spree includes permits issued to kill 887,993 Kangaroos and Wallabies and 8,274 Emus. Remember this does not include commercial permits, which for Kangaroos in New South Wales in 2018 targeted an additional 2,253,914 animals excluding the special quota. That is a total of 3,141,907 Kangaroos in 2018 alone.

In addition to the animals killed under this licence type, 1080 aerial poison bait drops, which are indiscriminate and lethal, often using Kangaroo meat as the vector, are used extensively across New South Wales. Illegal killing of Kangaroos continues and encouraged by general attitudes towards these animals.

Excuses used for not providing information include, we do not have the data for actual animals killed at this time but will request it.

As a general comment, given that the actual kill data is collected by NPWS, it should be published and importantly, in a form that enables both government and the public to have a detailed understanding of what has actually happened. All too often in these matters there will be excuses which include, the data is collected by regional managers and staff, we don’t have time to deal with the information and our computer software and systems can’t cope with this type of information and so on.

The very point of collecting the information is to understand and properly ‘manage’ what is occurring. Not to publish the information is indeed a sign of poor standards of governance that are all too often pervasive around wildlife killing actives in Australia. Confusion equals concealment and this digital incompetence is then used as an excuse not to answer questions, including under FOI.

According to the NSW Government, Kangaroo populations increase if it rains, and they increase if it doesn’t rain, and drought makes populations decline, and rain makes populations decline. So governments say anything to support reported numbers going up or down, even if they have just said the opposite thing to what they had said a few weeks ago. This same nonsense was repeated in South Australia via the ABC just a few days ago.

Note that we conducted our own population survey over six days in January 2023 in the Broken Hill and Lower Darling shooting zones. The New South Wales Government claimed a population of around 3 million Kangaroos (commercially exploited species in those two zones in that year) on which the commercial quotas are based. Over the period of the survey, covering extensive distances in both zones, we were able to find just one living Kangaroo (when we should have seen at least 20,000). A similar story applies in Victoria and particularly its Mallee shooting zone, the zone will magically disappear in 2025 under the planned rezoning, integrated into a zone that still has remanent populations of Kangaroos.

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Authority to control wildlife permits (ATCWs) are the Victorian equivalent of New South Wales harms permits. These permits do not include commercial exploitation or the recreational killing of Australian duck and quail species.

Our investigations in the Australian State of Victoria showed that, despite its government claiming the opposite, that in 2021 just 2.6 per cent of all non-commercial permits issued to harm (in Victoria they are called ATCWs) were for non-lethal control. New South Wales is no different in this regard with most permits for most species issued for lethal control.

Victoria’s data for 2023  describes an alarming increase in the number of native Australian animals being killed in Victoria in 2023 using ATCWs. The ATCW statistics for Victoria in 2023 (all Australian species) are as follows:

For lethal control, 2,482 permits were issued to kill 119,367 native animals covering 57 native species. The number of native animals targeted for lethal control is significantly higher than in 2021 and 2022; and

For non-lethal control, 81 permits were issued to ‘move on’ 15,847 native animals covering 39 native species.

The actual number of Australian native animals killed or ‘moved on’ is unknown as records are not kept. It appears that the number of native animals killed on public lands, National and State parks etc, is monitored and the data is held by the Victorian Government. Some Australian species have been 'unprotected' while others are killed off the books, secretly, Koalas are the main target.

What was particularly shocking given the level of commercial exploitation of Kangaroos already occurring and just to ensure this slaughter is as unsustainable as possible the quota for Grey Kangaroos (non-commercial ATCWs) in 2023 was supposed to be 69,600, instead the Victorian Government issued permits to kill 74,450 of these wonderful animals. For those animals subject to lethal control 83,056 were Kangaroos or Wallabies. That is 69.5 per cent of all Australian native animals targeted in Victoria (the list of protected Australian species which can be killed using ATCWs  includes around 100 native species. Given the shockingly inaccurate population estimates for Kangaroos in Victoria (hyper-inflated), it is most unlikely that this number of animals was actually killed in 2023.

When I raised this with the state’s environment minister I did get a response, the usual non-answer resulting in no remedial action:

“Thank you for your correspondence to Steve Dimopoulos MP, Minister for Environment regarding Authorities to Control Wildlife (ATCWs). As this matter is in my area of responsibility, the Minister has asked that I respond on his behalf.

Wildlife protection and management are regulated through the Wildlife Act 1975, which provides the legal framework for the issue of ATCWs. ATCWs authorise the control of wildlife in circumstances including where there is damage to property, crops or other wildlife habitat.

In some areas of Victoria, wildlife can damage property, farmland or the environment. Wildlife can also threaten human safety or itself be exposed to harm where the species is over-abundant. As a result, wildlife management may be needed to manage these issues.

The Conservation Regulator undertakes a rigorous assessment of all ATCW applications to ensure that claims of damage are substantiated and that all practical non-lethal control measures have been exhausted prior to any lethal control being authorised.

The Wildlife Act 1975 requires that wildlife control is undertaken with consideration of animal welfare and environmental values. All ATCWs include strict conditions to ensure that animals are controlled humanely”.

The Victorian Government does not know how many animals were actually killed when ATCW permits are used because nobody checks. Nor do they know if the animals were killed ‘humanely’. Methods are shoot, trap and gas, other to be specified, egg and nest destruction and trap and shoot (ie. Dingoes which are unprotected are killed using leg traps, then shot, or baited with 1080, these are terrible deaths), again because nobody checks. Most staggering of all is that the required method for killing young animals (joeys) is by beating them to death or decapitation and they still continue to claim this is humane. I guess if you say something often enough, people might begin to believe it. It is however a lie.

Nor were they able to confirm how many, if any, ATCW permit requests are rejected.

NOTE: In March 2024, the Victorian Government remade the Dingo unprotection order in north-west Victoria due to new scientific information about the local Dingo population’s imminent risk of extinction.

One of these dangerous and destructive 100 or so protected species in the firing line of the Victorian Government is a diminutive and gorgeous little bird, the Welcome Swallow. While it seems an odd word on which to end this story, why have they issued 75 ATCW permits to kill 5,027 of these little birds since 2009?

Well the answer is poo.

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