Page 3511 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 23 November 2021
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into contact with animals, we should ensure the highest standards of care. Practical changes, the ones that are not big asks, can make life or death differences to our native wildlife. As my colleague Jo Clay MLA has described, the Labor-Greens government have made a lot of progress here in the ACT to protect both our domestic and our native animals.
One of the accomplishments that I would also like to highlight is leading the nation in 2019 to ban opera-house traps in all ACT waterways. These traps posed a high risk to our native animals such as freshwater turtles, water rats and our iconic platypus. So we absolutely are getting on with the job of protecting our native wildlife.
As Minister for the Environment, I would like to focus for a moment on the impact that fruit tree netting entanglement has had on the grey-headed flying foxes. Grey-headed flying foxes are, as we have talked about already, listed as vulnerable under the EPBC Act 1999 and, in the ACT, under the Nature Conservation Act 2014. While other threats in the ACT include climate change, leading to increased heat stress events, protecting these creatures by changing to animal-friendly netting is one that we would refer to as low-hanging fruit.
In 2020, ACT Wildlife rescued a total of 71 grey-headed flying foxes from fruit tree netting, of which 11 died. Sadly, this is just a sliver of the impact. The figure does not include birds trapped in netting, animals that have either freed themselves or died in netting or animals removed by the owner of the netting. ACT Wildlife, as we have all acknowledged here, do an incredible but what must be an exhausting and stressful job, responding to calls for help from the community to cut native animals out of fruit tree netting. While I was delighted that in this budget I was able to secure long-term funding for ACT Wildlife so that they can focus on their important work, this change will help both native wildlife and our wildlife carers by preventing many of these incidents.
It was earlier this year that Victoria amended their Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Regulations 2019 to introduce a requirement that netting used to protect household fruit trees, vegetable gardens and other fruit plants must have a mesh size of five millimetres by five millimetres or less at full stretch.
Education needs to be a core part of the solution, too. I am really pleased to report that the ACT government has already been working in collaboration with ACT Wildlife on community education. We are starting to work on the strategies outlined in this motion already. This motion provides a wonderful opportunity to build on the foundation that we have started.
We warmly welcome the leadership of major retailers who have already made the decision to sell only animal-friendly netting. I look forward to learning from and building on the work of the Victorian government to restrict the use of fruit tree netting that poses a risk of entanglement to our native wildlife. I can really assure the opposition that we are working right now to ensure that we implement the details of this motion as soon as we possibly can.
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