Save Canberra's Kangaroos

The ACT 2024 election is just under 6 months away. This is an important opportunity to tell the sitting MLAs that if they are wanting to be re-elected they must end their support for the annual kangaroo cull. It's time to end this brutal and unnecessary killing of our kangaroos.

The ACT 2024 election is just under 6 months away. This is an important opportunity to tell the sitting MLAs that if they are wanting to be re-elected they must end their support for the annual kangaroo cull. It's time to end this brutal and unnecessary killing of our kangaroos.

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Subject:

I am writing to express my dismay that, since 2008, across 28,000 acres (11,400 ha), over 30,000 kangaroos have been shot by government shooters on ACT reserves. Uncounted pouch joeys have been bludgeoned to death or decapitated. Untold numbers of at-foot joeys have been orphaned to die of dehydration, hunger, exposure, myopathy, car strike or fox predation.

This is not a “conservation cull”, nor any other kind of cull. A cull, by definition, takes out the weak, the sick, the injured. The ACT government’s slaughter is totally indiscriminate.

The positions of the major parties on the kangaroo issue will be critical to my vote in the 2024 election. Here is how things stand at the moment.

The Canberra Liberals are the only major party that appears to have grasped the seriousness of the animal, human and environmental harm being done by the killing program. The Liberals have promised, if elected in 2024, a moratorium on the kangaroo slaughter and a fully independent review of the program. I am especially grateful to Nicole Lawder, a retiring MLA, who was the only politician of any party to assist with the independent counting of kangaroos on Farrer Ridge Nature Reserve.

Despite the intransigence of the Labor members of the ACT Legislative Assembly, the membership of the ACT Labor Party itself does not support their position. A Resolution of the 2022 ACT Labor Annual Conference supported an independent review of the Labor government’s kangaroo killing program. Of 260 delegates, only two voted against this Resolution. The continuation of the killing program under the Labor government reveals an arrogant disregard for the Party membership.

The position of the ACT Greens in unbelievable. Since 2008, the ACT Green MLAs, in coalition with Labor, seem to have been selling Canberra’s kangaroos for Ministries. The ACT Greens are now known nationally and internationally as “the Phoney Greens”. Due to the government’s misinformation campaign, many actual members of the local Greens Party seem to have been deluded into believing that this annual slaughter of native animals is somehow good for the environment. It is not. It is an unmitigated disaster.

There has never been any scientific evidence that kangaroo grazing has ever harmed any native plant or animal population. Ongoing domestic livestock grazing, rampant urban and industrial development, climate change factors, and the absence of enough kangaroos to manage the biomass are the culprits in the continuing degradation of the ACT’s nature reserves.

Even if the science supported some measure of control of kangaroo numbers, nothing could justify this scale of cruelty. But the science does not support it. What the science shows, and

what the evidence of our own eyes confirms is that, most of the reserves since the killing began, are now waist-high in grass and weeds which are smothering the native plants and killing the native animals that depend on them.

Among other consequences of this, at least one local reptile species has joined the critically endangered list. And where are all the kangaroos whose ecological role, for millions of years, has been to manage these grasslands?

I urge you, if you are seeking re-election, to support:

· a moratorium and a genuinely independent review of all aspects of the government’s kangaroo killing program; and

· repeal of all legislation that permits or mandates this environmental, animal and human disaster.

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