Jack Gough

Great to be with you.

This is a really serious development in Australia.

We know that the H5N1 strain of bird flu has been circulating in the northern hemisphere and causing absolute devastation to wildlife wherever it's gone.

It's also meant hundreds of millions of poultry have either died or had to be slaughtered, and unfortunately it is very virulent and spreads very quickly.

So it was always going to probably turn up in Australia,

But that theoretical risk is now a real, absolutely real risk.

And whether or not this particular outbreak is contained, we can be sure it will turn up here again, whether it's from migratory seabirds coming from the north of Australia or it's coming up, as this one seems to have, from Australia.

Birds that have been in contact with other species in Antarctic waters and particularly from those herd and McDonald Islands.

So this is, you know, worst case scenario for a wildlife massacre.

That's really what we're looking at in Australia.

Once it takes hold, that's been the experience everywhere around the world.

And the chances are this could be worse in Australia than it has been in the Northern Hemisphere because we haven't had other varieties of high pathogenicity avian influenza circulating before in this country.

Yeah, so the government should really be praised for the response.

And the reason it's been very effective is because there's been two years of really dedicated preparatory work.

We understand that this was initially a great scour found by a vet on a remote southern WA beach near Esperance.

they were very quickly able to determine that this was actually this H5N1 variety of bird flu.

Since then, there's been a huge response from governments all around the country.

So I've been on calls with hundreds of people from different agencies all around the country, industry groups, as well as environment groups coming together.

And that's really unprecedented.

Oh, look, it may be possible that we can contain it.