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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-03-10 Daily Xml
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Adjournment Debate

DINGOES

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (16:33): I am grateful for this opportunity to talk about a very important and very topical problem in outback South Australia, which I hope does not become a problem in closer country South Australia, and that is of dingoes breeding up inside the dog fence.

As I am sure most members of this house would know, we have a dog-proof fence, affectionately known as the dog fence, in South Australia. It runs about 5,500 kilometres and it is actually a pretty good barrier. It is not perfect, and I have no doubt that a few dogs do get through every now and again, but certainly pastoralists and people who work in this area tell me that generally they are satisfied with the quality of the fence.

The problem we have with regard to dingoes, specifically inside the dog fence, is that they are breeding up very rapidly in number, and have been doing so for many years—and this has been a problem for probably the last 10 or 15 years—but the difficulty is that, inside the fence, they are breeding up and there are very, very, few resources going to the problem of trying to stop it.

Let me make it very clear. Dingoes are beautiful animals and are tremendous native animals but, inside the dog fence, they are a prescribed pest. Landowners are legally bound to cull dingoes, by whatever legal means are available to them, inside the dog fence. It is not a choice, it is not an option, they are legally meant to do this. So, make no mistake, while they are a wonderful native animals inside the dog fence, they are just not meant to be there.

Dingoes can kill hundreds of sheep in a night. They do it obviously for food, but when they are not hungry they do not stop. People who are not in country or outback areas may not realise that a dingo just does not go and grab sheep, work on that sheep, eat that sheep and say, 'Good, there's my meal for the next few days.' They do unfortunately kill for sport, and a few dingoes can get through 100 or more sheep in a night if they are in the mood, which is absolutely devastating.

The very sad fact of it is that they will just often maim and injure sheep, and then move onto the next one; whether they just rip out their throats, hindquarters, or sometimes just a tongue, and then move on, for them, when they are not hungry, it is still sport. That is their natural instinct, but it is incredibly devastating for the owners of that stock.

We have this problem at the moment for a few reasons, and I will work through them. The number one reason is funding. As people would understand, this is a problem that has built up over many years, so it requires a solution over many years. I estimate that it would probably take up to five years to get on top of this problem; so, understandably, we need about five years worth of funding.

Five years worth of funding is what is required to sort this problem out. The difficulty is that not only is the government not providing any funding for this problem but it is leaving it up to the industry, and the sheep industry and NRM board (the South Australian Arid Lands NRM Board) are contributing money. If the people who work in this area—and they do the very best they can, I have to say, and do very good work—only have funding for a year or two or three at a time, and it is scant funding and they are not sure how long it is going to go for, then they can only put a program in place in line with their funding.

So, if you have only a year's funding, you put a one-year program into place. Even if you get funding again the next year, you can only get one more year's funding and you get one more year's worth of program, as opposed to putting together a good three, four, five, six-year program in place to do the job.

Another big contributing factor, in my opinion and in that of most pastoralists, is the use of pastoral leases (again inside the dog fence) for non-pastoral purposes. Those non-pastoral purposes include things like mining companies having them so that they can access the water rights. They include people taking on leases so that the land in the area can be used for cultural pursuits and people who use of the tourism businesses, and they certainly include people who acquire the leases for environmental use and conservation. There are other uses as well.

I am happy to say on record that I do not object to any of those uses. I do not mind if any group, company or person wants to purchase a pastoral lease—with their own money, not with taxpayers' money, as often happens—and use it for non-pastoral purposes like the ones I have listed; I am quite comfortable with that. Where the problem arises, though, is if they are not running stock, if they are not running sheep, they do not have a strong personal interest in culling dingoes on their property.

If they do not have a strong personal interest and if they are not doing it (even if they are not running sheep) as they are still legally obliged to do, all their neighbours suffer. You can imagine a situation where you have a pastoral lease where they are not culling for dingoes—every surrounding neighbours suffers. It is very easy for the dingoes to just sit there, breed up, enjoy themselves, have a great old time, jump the fence, eat the neighbour's sheep and then come back, lie under a tree all day long and do the same again the next night. Strongly enforcing everyone's obligation to cull dingoes, whether or not they really have a personal interest for their own stock, is a very important part of this problem.

Another issue is aerial baiting. Pastoralists are allowed to distribute poison baits on their stations by land-based vehicles (typically, throwing them out the back of the ute as you go down your station tracks), but they are not allowed to distribute them by planes. Quite obviously, then, people can only get to the sections of their property by the roads. Understandably, the dingoes do not necessarily live by the roads. The ability for pastoralists to distribute bait from their aeroplanes would be a very important help to this.

With respect to seasonal impacts, we have had great seasons. I have to say that wonderful seasons cause difficulties for roads, as well as all sorts of other difficulties, but there is far more good than bad. In the last 18 months in outback South Australia we have had very good rains. That is terrific, but it causes a great deal of problems with the No. 1 issue, namely, the dingoes breed up. It is a good time to breed up.

Everything is growing, whether it is rabbits, sheep, lizards or whatever it happens to be, everything is going strongly in our outback environment at the moment. The dingoes are breeding up. Over the last 18 months they have had a whole 12 months of their breeding season. Typically, dingoes pair up around March-April, and around the following March-April is when they are kicking out their pups and they are on their own to fend for themselves. Over the last 18 months we have had that complete 12-month cycle of wonderful breeding.

The other thing is that baits do not work when times are good. Members can imagine the old dingo running along down the road in drought times, nearly starving to death. It finds a poison bait, he gobbles it straight up. In good times they are just not interested. In good times a lump of meat on the side of the road or out in the scrub somewhere is not nearly as attractive as chasing that sheep. In good times they are not hungry. In good times the dingo thinks, 'Eat this piece of dead meat here or chase that sheep?' For a dingo, it is a very, very easy choice. Unfortunately, baiting does not work nearly as well in the good times that we have at the moment.

Madam Deputy Speaker, 60 per cent of pastoral leases within the dog fence in South Australia in the last few years have seen dingoes or proven signs of dingoes, such as mauled sheep or dog tracks. It is conservatively estimated that we have in the low hundreds of dingoes in South Australia below the dog fence at the moment.

Just last week I came across a dingo only 50 kilometres from Port Augusta. I managed to take a photo of it. To many in this house, 50 kilometres from Port Augusta may not seem that close. That is an astounding 300 kilometres inside the dog fence. Fifty kilometres from Port Augusta is one night's travel for a dingo into the country areas, into freehold farming land.

I urge the government for support and to do whatever it can to rectify this problem before it gets worse. It will not be long before we have dingoes mauling sheep in our normal country areas. People think that this is a pastoral problem, but, if left unchecked, it will be a problem for all of South Australia.

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