Imagine you’re that US tourist in Australia. You make the mistake of taking a wombat from its mother for a moment, and you post footage of this to your social media accounts. The footage shows wombat mumma and bub in distress — and tens of thousands of Australians rightly condemn you, pointing out that it’s cruel and illegal for unauthorised people to scoop up wild animals, let alone steal a baby from its mother.
You apologise for your poor judgement, but you face death threats and you’re hounded out of the country by saturation media coverage, a foreign minister who calls you “dreadful”, and an immigration minister who threatens to permanently cancel your visa. More than 40,000 signatures call for your deportation.
As if public shamings and international media pile-ons aren’t punishment enough, Australia’s prime minister suggests you deserve to be savaged by an apex predator: “Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there,” said Anthony Albanese, adding: “Take another animal that can actually fight back…”
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Similar violent ideations by a politician were imposed on Alix Livingstone, founding director of Defend The Wild. When The Project broadcast Defend The Wild’s whistleblower footage exposing allegedly cruel conditions suffered by 130,000 wild crocs warehoused in factory farms in 2021, Queensland MP Bob Katter insinuated that Livingstone should be killed by one: “I would say [to the whistleblower] get a lot closer [to the crocs]… You get close-up shots… Get the hell out of our lives and leave us alone.”
To young voters especially, Katter’s and Albanese’s bullying tactics against each woman are indistinguishable. When politicians invoke the jaws of a predator instead of firearms or blunt instruments, it doesn’t make their messaging any less violent. And when they weaponise wildlife, they’re hiding hypocrisies.
Let’s start with the very recent development that Albanese vetoed his own minister’s hard-won “nature positive” laws. The bill to introduce a national environment protection authority and an information-gathering agency was pushed into next year, after Albanese overruled the deal that Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek had struck with both the Greens and the independent Senator David Pocock. The veto came after WA Premier Roger Cook had personally protested vociferously to the PM.
If Albanese really cared about wild animals, he’d shame his state colleagues who issued pastoral and public land tenure licenses to kill 4.5 million native animals between 2021–2023, according to the International Humane Society’s Licence to Kill report. Add this to the million animals killed by bushfires — partly enabled by government inaction on climate heating.
In rural Australia, work by Farmers For Climate Action, Farm Transitions Australia, Firesticks Alliance and Defend The Wild shows that many farmers — broadacre and small-scale — care profoundly about protecting wildlife. But instead of heeding rural organisations that work to ensure that food production and wildlife protection synergise, and instead of heeding farmers’ own accounts of “ecological service” benefits from rewilding sections of pasture, major parties are wedging citizens by pushing a false binary: wildlife versus farming.
Funnelling farmers into reductive choices fuels political justification for mass killing of wild animals, purportedly to protect graziers. It’s an outdated, colonial approach to land stewardship that ignores Indigenous relationships with wild animals and time-honoured First Nations methods of caring for Country. It’s a divisive, unimaginative, no-win scenario without any holistic evidential basis.
These scenarios result in longstanding laws that expressly encourage abuse of farmed animals and lead to abuse of wild ones. One example: agribusiness laws permit one million Australian newborn “bobby calves” to be snatched from their distressed mothers every year and killed, so greater milk volumes can be extracted more profitably from lactating cows.
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In turn, Big Ag abuses wildlife through land clearing for industrialised farming, which remains the biggest threat to wild animal habitat. Agricultural netting and fencing cause prolonged wild animal deaths, and threats from factory farms include zoonotic disease (such as bird flu) that can infect their wild cousins. Then there’s legally sanctioned wildlife culling to “protect” graziers.
If the PM cared about wild animal mistreatment, he’d stop his state colleagues issuing pastoral licenses to kill more than half a million birds — black ducks, wood ducks, corellas, cockatoos, lorikeets, grey teals and swallows. And nearly half a million kangaroos and wallabies, 3,558 wombats and 2,050 brushtail possums.
He’d be outraged that dingoes across Australia are indiscriminately poisoned, trapped and shot, despite the magnitude of documentation about dingoes’ essential role in Sovereign Custodian Culture, Story and Songlines, and the evidence that dingoes maintain ecosystems (including curbing kangaroo populations), positively impacting natural environments and farm management.
In NSW, remaining koala habitat is being aggressively logged, and Victoria has extended an order for the killing of threatened dingoes in the state’s east until 2028, at a time when populations have already dwindled to 2,640 — and despite dingoes being Indigenous Cultural totems and ecosystem engineers.
Australians are outraged about wild animal abuse, but media outlets let us down by tolerating major party politicians who’d have us believe they share our outrage. Their track record suggests otherwise.
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