Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (16:55): I rise in support of this motion moved by my colleague Ms Lovell and supported by Ms Bath, which calls for an immediate halt to Parks Victoria’s imminent shoot of brumbies in our national parks. It is an arrogant, ill-thought-out and potentially inhumane strategy which has rightly provoked the fury of a huge number of Victorians. A truly remarkable coalition has come together to oppose it. The variety of reasons that each group has really illustrates just how misguided this shoot is on so many grounds. I have to say that the opposition to this is not just in Victoria and not just in the High Country; it is all around Australia. And the world is watching the government on this very issue.

The minister talked about a plan. There is only one plan, and that is to shoot the horses. Colleen O’Brien from the Victorian Brumby Association said yesterday, at the COVID-compliant rally, that their services were offered but rejected by Parks Victoria. They offered to rehome these animals.

But I want to stress this is not just a sentimental case about animal welfare or an argument that culling animal populations can never be right. It is about an attack on the culture and identity of the people of the High Country and our history as Australians. It is a decision based on flawed numbers, dishonest consultation and an arrogant, we-know-best attitude from government bureaucracy. It is about an inappropriate and unachievable environmental ideology which unquestionably demands pristine, presettlement purity at the cost of any other consideration. It is a choice which fails to address the biggest causes of environmental damage in the Alps. And, yes, finally it is about choosing, as first resort, a shoot likely to be clumsy, cruel and impossible to implement while ignoring the opportunity to manage the wild horse population, as happens in so many other countries around the world.

Brumbies first arrived in the Victorian Alps in the 1830s as pastoralists moved south from New South Wales. We know that grazing began around Omeo in 1836, and it has slowly expanded to the higher country. Huts were built for shelter and storage. The population expanded considerably from the 1850s as people arrived to seek gold, and with them too came horses, the only form of transport and the only help settlers had to work the land and build their livelihoods. The Clydesdales, thoroughbreds, stockhorses and Timor ponies were working horses and family horses. They were an essential part of the life and work of the settlers.

They have become in turn an essential part of the cultural heritage of this area, a link to our state’s great pioneering past, a living feature of the rich landscape of the Australian Alps. They are captured in literature too as the animals of the iconic Man from Snowy River and the Silver Brumby books. People from all over the country will often visit our alpine region to, in the words of Banjo Paterson, ‘catch a glimpse of brown and black / Dim shadows on the grass’—a moment they remember for the rest of their lives. They fought with us too. Thousands left Australia to serve in the Middle East in World War I and never returned. They stood loyally by our ancestors on the battlefields—service which we should surely honour today instead of shooting them.

How then have we gone in 20 years from this recognition to the plight that Victoria’s brumbies face today? What has changed in two decades to alter our view of 200 years of history? My answer, you may be unsurprised to hear, is the ideological attitude and managerial incompetence of Parks Victoria and its government backers. Brumbies have become scapegoats for Parks Victoria’s inability to manage the land they are responsible for and the targets of a mindset which considers recreating a pristine presettlement landscape as a single and overriding object of land management. Yet their record on land management is appalling.

Fuel loads have built up in forests and on roadsides, creating the perfect conditions for intense bushfires. Parks Victoria have failed to eradicate the non-indigenous vegetation. Pigs and deer are breeding in huge numbers, while wild dogs and cats are feeding off native animals. And this is a key part of the argument in question here: the real environmental damage is done by feral animals, including pigs, wild dogs and cats, but especially deer, which outnumber the brumbies by 100 to 1 at least. Parks Victoria, so clearly incapable of managing these populations, should be encouraging professional, licensed and skilled hunters to deal with them, at no cost to the taxpayer, rather than targeting wild horses.

Nor do I accept that these horses do not belong because they are not native. As a constituent wrote to me, neither are deer, pigs, cats, dogs, foxes, rabbits, goats, hares, mice, rats, European wasps, honey bees, earwigs, blackbirds, starlings, sparrows, myna birds, trout, carp, snails, slugs, blackberries, briars, thistles, broom, willow dock, St John’s wort, ski resorts, treated pine poles, rubber mats on walking tracks, signs, bitumen roads, dirt roads, man-made dams, aqueducts, powerlines, bike tracks, cement and plastic culverts, steel gates and white men. That is what a constituent wrote to me. None of those are native either.

We cannot now return to some presettlement utopia, nor should we. Instead I argue we should seek to properly manage and protect our historic wild horse population as happens in Europe, the USA and South America. The mustangs of the western United States and the Exmoor and New Forest ponies in the UK—these populations—are recognised for their iconic status and cultural value, and managed. It is ecologically possible, but my worry is Parks Victoria object to this approach on ideological grounds. Horses represent everything this government does not like about our history.

Finally I come to the shoot itself—undesirable for the reasons I have outlined, unlikely to achieve its objectives, as I have mentioned, and unnecessary given the alternatives which exist. Indeed who is going to do the shooting? I am reliably informed there are no licensed semiautomatic shooters available in Victoria. They would actually have to come from New Zealand; I hope they are compliant with all our COVID quarantine restrictions. And how can night shooting, if this is the plan, be compliant with existing national codes? This shoot absolutely has to stop. It is a shame that the minister and Ms Shing took so long, because we need other people to speak, but it is very important that we end this shoot because it is wrong for all of the reasons we have outlined.