Page 3718 - Week 12 - Thursday, 21 October 1993
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at a public hearing. An enormous amount of work and effort went into the production of that evidence, and in a lot of cases they put effort into making sure that fairly scientific information was presented at a level easily understood. It is no secret that I am not a scientist, yet I found the information presented to the committee on those subjects of enormous interest. I want to thank again those people who went to the trouble of presenting that material in the fashion they did.
The production of this paper followed meetings by the committee, study of the submissions received, a visit by the committee to the Sherbrooke Shire in Victoria, to which I think Mr Moore alluded in his first presentation on this subject, public hearings, and then further consideration. The reason we decided to visit Sherbrooke Shire, I think, is deserving of some explanation. For those who are not aware, Sherbrooke Shire is an area of outer, unfortunately now urban, Melbourne; in my childhood it was outer bush Melbourne, but urban development has sprawled to reach within that shire. The Sherbrooke Forest, which is a national park, if I recall correctly, sits fairly much in the middle of the shire. It is a very valued piece of forest and is home to an ever dwindling but still very important community of lyre birds, amongst other very important flora and fauna.
As the urban development sprawled in tentacle fashion around the perimeter of the Sherbrooke Forest, the control of feral animals and feral plants became an enormous problem. The action the Sherbrooke Shire took two or three years ago in relation to cats was the headline grabber in a large number of changes they incorporated into their by-laws. The cat one, obviously, was the most controversial because they introduced a law that cats in the shire had to be contained inside at night and had to be registered. They said that they would introduce, through their rangers and park staff, a system of trapping domestic cats if they were found within that area. As I said, it was a most controversial issue at the time. When it was introduced, I remember as an observer out there in TV land seeing this reported on the news at night.
By the time our committee visited Sherbrooke Shire and received briefings from officials there, these actions had been in place for some two years or more, and they were able to report to us that to some degree success was starting to be seen. I believe that they may already have had a method of cat registration, but the number of cat registrations since that by-law came in had risen fairly dramatically and was continuing to rise. The trapping of domestic cats was successful in that it is a safe and secure method of trapping. With the registration of cats, in more cases than not the cat is returned to its happy home and family, justifying the decision to register cats. The observations and countings by the park staff within Sherbrooke Forest had indicated a decrease in the damage being done to the flora and fauna, not at a dramatic level on any graph but definitely worth noting and monitoring, and they are continuing down that track.
The other issue that I personally found of great interest - and I say this with Namadgi and, more particularly, our nature park system in the ACT in mind - was the invasion of what are termed feral plants around the regions of the forest. Sherbrooke Shire is in a more awkward position than we are in some senses. We were able to see narrow peninsulas of urban development reaching a very long way into the border of the forest because of the shape of the boundary.
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