George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Seriously, this issue is one which has plagued communities throughout North Queensland. I have been involved with many cases to do with flying foxes dating back to the times when I was a local government councillor in Mackay city council. It was only very shortly into that stint as a councillor that I was asked by the department of the environment to come along to a meeting with a group that had a very long acronym, as these groups have. It was the NEFFCRWG, I remember, which stood for the 'North Eton flying fox colony relocation working group'. They immediately tried to handball the issue onto the council, unfortunately successfully. It was left to us to come up with a way that we could relocate these flying foxes from the township of North Eton.

The flying foxes had perched themselves in the mango trees that were right beside the local bowls club, which was almost like the centre of this town; it was the community hall for this little town. They made a mess, they defecated everywhere, and people could not use that facility because of it. Every little thing that we tried to do and every little thing that the residents tried to do would be frustrated by these department of environment officials, who just seemed to be saying, 'No, the bats have to be protected at all costs.' The things that the member for Flynn talked about before, whether it was smoking them out, playing loud music or some other activity, were not allowed because it was upsetting the flying foxes. It was almost that we were fighting this bureaucracy in state government that were saying: 'No way can you do anything. You've got to work out a way that these creatures will naturally relocate.' I can remember one environmental official telling me that what council needed to do was to gradually build up a little oasis where there were fruit trees and all these other things that the flying foxes would naturally drift over to of their own accord. I said: 'Are we going to send them letters to tell them that we have a new residence for them? How are they going to know this?' This is how ridiculous this comes down to.

I laughed before at something the member for Hunter said, because it showed the same sort of attitude that we were getting from the environment department officials: these creatures play this important part in the local ecosphere, so we cannot upset them. I have to tell you: there are that many flying foxes where I come from that it is the people who should be protected, not the flying foxes. All of the efforts to try and make them go away somewhere else failed because of bureaucracy. What happened in this instance was the one local greenie in that town went on holidays for a week, and the boys came out with shotguns, and they took care of the problem themselves. They turned law-abiding citizens into criminals. They were that frustrated that nothing could be done that they felt that, as soon as the one person in the community that had a concern for the flying foxes turned away, they would go and deal with it themselves, and boy did they deal with it. There were dead flying foxes everywhere.

The same thing is going to happen in so many other locations. The member for Capricornia talked about Eungella, which is right on my doorstep in my electorate. I have been up there with her. I have seen it—these disgusting, foul creatures urinating all over the school rainwater tank, which is what the kids got their water from. They cannot use that now. They cannot even go out onto their school oval, as it is that overpopulated with these bats.

I go to the member for Kennedy—you want to talk about the impact that these bats have—and that young boy, Lincoln Boucher, that he was talking about. I think he was eight years old. He and his parents, Colin Boucher and Michelle Flynn, came from the Whitsundays. Their young boy, a fair few years ago—I think it was back in 2013—was bitten and scratched by one of these bats. He was not tormenting it. He was not doing anything. He was just walking down the road and a bat happened to attack him, and he died. He died of lyssavirus. He died and it sent shockwaves throughout the community that this could happen, because these flying foxes are everywhere. In 2015 a bloke who happened to be jogging down the road was attacked by a bat in Mackay, in the northern beaches. It was only because of the heightened awareness that resulted from the death of that young fellow that this guy had all the injections and everything to stop him from catching whatever this flying fox might have imparted.

We have got to this ridiculous stage where the flying fox seems to have more rights than the human beings that are in that area and are under attack, literally, from being bitten and scratched. They are under attack from the smell, the defecation and the urination—all that goes on from these vile creatures. I have to say, enough is enough. We need to empower communities and individual people to be able to deal with relocating these creatures, or else they are just going to come out and start shooting them when the law turns away and when there is no-one there looking. It will turn law-abiding citizens into criminals unless we can find a way forward.

I think that a lot of it is going to have to fall upon the federal environment minister, and the department here, making certain recommendations around what can be done in terms of relocating these creatures, because they are a so-called protected species. Again, I say: come up my way. There are so many of them. You hear them every night. You will see them in just about every tree. I come from a little town called Te Kowai just outside of Mackay. You walk outside and you can hear them. It is like this cacophony of flying foxes. They are everywhere. So they might be an endangered species in terms of their spread across all of Australia, but not in north Queensland.

Debate adjourned.

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