Tuesday, 14 October 2025


Adjournment

Koala management


Georgie PURCELL

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Koala management

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (18:39): (1986) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Environment. The state government has produced a range of policy documents, such as the Victorian Koala Management Strategy of 2023 and the French Island koala management plan 2015–2030. Yet over the break my office was contacted by concerned former government staff who have witnessed the devastating collapse of koala health and habitat on French Island. They report koalas starving to death in trees with deceased joeys still in their pouches as the island’s canopy continues to disappear. These firsthand accounts describe a crisis unfolding in real time, a preventable one that was long anticipated by the government’s own management plans. The 2015–2030 plan explicitly warns that without sustained fertility control, habitat restoration and expert-led translocation the island’s population will exceed its ecological limits, leading to widespread starvation and defoliation. By 2025 the plan envisioned ongoing management at sustainable densities, supported by continued monitoring and targeted intervention. Instead, what we are seeing now is ecological collapse.

What makes this particularly distressing is that French Island’s koalas were once considered a chlamydia-free insurance population, or a genetic safeguard for mainland koalas if the species ever faced extinction. The loss of this population would be not only a tragedy for animal welfare but an absolute failure of conservation policy and this government. I therefore ask that the minister ensure the French Island koalas receive more ongoing management and fertility control through humane contraceptive programs and that expert-led translocation be prioritised over the unprecedented, cruel and secretive aerial culling such as occurred at Budj Bim earlier this year. The action that I seek is immediate and ongoing rescue operations and for translocation to occur. French Island’s koalas are part of our state’s natural heritage and a huge tourism drawcard. Allowing them to continue to starve, suffer or be cruelly killed from the air is absolutely unconscionable. Immediate action, transparency and compassion are needed to restore public trust and uphold Victoria’s responsibility to protect one of our most iconic species before it is too late.