Jack Gough

I must say, three years ago, we saw a huge amount of complacency in governments around this issue.

And we started to raise the alarm in the media as well as behind the scenes.

And I must say, it was a couple of people within the Prime Minister's office and a couple of bureaucrats within the Department of Agriculture federally who went, actually,

this is serious, we do need to prepare for it.

And a lot of good work went on behind the scenes to put together that $100 million package.

And that's meant that vets are trained, that the diagnostic capacity is there, that there's already been scenario planning and scenario testing go on.

But on the flip side,

The second part of this is the wildlife resilience side of things.

And unfortunately, we have had a declining environmental spend when it comes to on-ground programs.

It's nowhere near the scale of responding just to the existing threats that we have.

And if there isn't a huge scale-up in the funding for on-ground work to protect wildlife populations from other threats, then we can say that the biosecurity response is going well, but the impact is not actually being mitigated by the government.

So this is something that Murray Watt, the Environment Minister, I know is taking seriously, but he's going to have a job of work to do convincing Treasury and Finance that this needs to be a priority and it needs to be an urgent priority.

Absolutely.

That's been the experience overseas.

And unfortunately, we know that when it comes to wildlife populations, it's the accumulation of threats that tends to lead to extinctions.

Extinctions tend to happen quite slowly until they happen very quickly.

I'm very concerned that when you add the pressures of already having introduced predators like cats and foxes, you've got climate change impacts, habitat destruction.

all these things together, already putting a huge level of pressure on so many species, adding bird flu on top of that could absolutely be the straw that breaks the camel's back or that sends the Tasmanian devil extinct.

That's something I know Australians don't want, and it's going to come down to, can we slow the spread of this virus?

And also, can governments invest in the other things that they can do so that we can have the best, healthiest populations of our wildlife for when this virus rips through those populations and causes devastation?