Wednesday, 29 October 2025

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:42): I will speak on the letter from the Attorney-General the Honourable Sonya Kilkenny MP, dated 31 January 2025 and tabled here concerning the government’s response to this Council’s order for production of documents on the dingo unprotection order. Members will recall that on 13 November 2024 a motion passed here which required the government to produce within 10 weeks all documents relating to the dingo order in Council, including on consultation with traditional owners, scientific and population reviews, the reasoning behind the decision to protect dingoes in Victoria’s north-west, the end of the wild dog bounty and the program’s cost and compliance.

The Attorney-General’s letter advised that the government could not meet the timeframe, saying ‘that the date for production of documents does not allow for sufficient time’, that thorough searches were still being conducted and that a response would be provided as soon as possible. This kind of approach is seriously telling of the government’s attitude generally, as well as on the specific subject of dingoes or wild dogs. That attitude matters because while the paperwork was still being searched for in Melbourne, the consequences of this policy were already being felt hundreds of kilometres away.

The ABC’s report of 5 September 2025 sets out the situation plainly. Since lethal control of dingoes was banned in 2024 across the Big Desert region, farmers have been suffering devastating losses. One grazier told the ABC he had lost as many as 1000 sheep and lambs, with hundreds confirmed dead and many others maimed or missing. Another described the psychological toll, the exhaustion, frustration and despair of watching years of breeding and hard work wiped out almost overnight. When asked how widespread the problem was, Agriculture Victoria could not say. The agency admitted that no figures on livestock deaths had been released. So even as farmers struggle to contain the damage, the public has no clear information about the scale of what is happening. The government claims to be following the science, yet the data informing these decisions is at best uncertain and at worst absent. Instead of effective assistance, landholders have been told to rely on so-called non-lethal controls – that is, fencing, guardian animals and water points on public land. In practice these are expensive, patchy and often ineffective in vast open country. Many farmers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fencing, with minimal help from the state and no compensation for their losses.

Just when those families might hope for a hint of understanding, what do they hear from the Minister for Environment? In an interview reported by the Weekly Times on 3 September 2025 Minister Dimopoulos suggested that dingoes could be a tourist attraction. He described them as important to First Nations people and said they might feature in a First Peoples tourism plan. That comment has gone down in the Mallee and Wimmera like a lead balloon – and indeed across Victoria. Farmers who have watched their stock torn apart are told that the very predators doing it might soon be promoted as a tourism opportunity. It is simply insulting. It shows how completely detached this government has become from the realities of life in regional Victoria.

Many landholders now fear that this is not just about the Big Desert but that the next step will be dingo reintroduction across wider parts of the state under the guise of rewilding or ecological restoration. The same ideological mindset that banned lethal control will, if left unchecked, push to spread dingoes further, with devastating consequences for sheep and cattle producers across Victoria. This whole policy is not based on balance or evidence, it is based on ideology. It elevates symbolism above practicality, and it sacrifices rural livelihoods to satisfy metropolitan sentiment. The people who are paying the cost are the men and women who actually live with the consequences, not the activists or bureaucrats who designed the policy.