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Stopping new invasive species – we need your voice

The Senate is looking at how to better protect Australia from new invasive species. Use this guide to join our calls for stronger biosecurity to protect our precious natural environmental from yet more invasive species. Late submissions due 22 August.
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The Senate is looking at how to better protect Australia from new invasive species. It has established an inquiry into the ‘adequacy of arrangements to prevent the entry and establishment of invasive species likely to harm Australia’s natural environment’.

This is your chance to be part of a ground-swell calling for change. Please make a submission to the inquiry and ask others to do so as well.

Why an inquiry?

The Australian environment already has a terrible burden of weeds, pests and diseases that have caused extinctions and massive declines in biodiversity. Despite this, new deadly invasive species keep arriving at a high rate.

These failures show that Australia’s biosecurity system is poorly prepared for new environmental invaders.

Serious environmental incursions detected since 2000 include:

  • Myrtle rust: a deadly fungus first found in 2010 in a NSW plant nursery now infecting hundreds of Myrtaceae species (our dominant plant family), including several threatened species.
  • Asian black-spined toad: found this year on Melbourne’s outskirts and likely, if it has established, to have similar impacts to the cane toad but with the capacity to inhabit cooler areas.
  • Red imported fire ant: one of the world’s worst invasive species with an an intense sting that kills small mammals, birds and reptiles. A recent repeat incursion could have put at risk the $400m spent since 2001 trying to eradicate it.
  • Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima): a highly invasive ornamental grass that has the potential to dominate large areas of woodlands and grasslands. Despite it being illegal, it is still in gardens and easy to buy online.
  • Smooth newt: found this year in Melbourne, it preys on and competes with native frogs, fish and other species. Its skin is toxic to predators.
  • Pigeon paramyxovirus: a disease that arrived in Victoria three years ago that could infect a wide range of native bird species with a high rate of mortality.

Write a submission

Please write a submission to the Senate inquiry to call for stronger biosecurity to protect our precious natural environmental from yet more invasive species. Submissions are due 12 August. UPDATE: The committee secretariat informed us that if you request an extension via email ec.sen@aph.gov.au before 12 August, you can make a submission up to Fri 22 August. 

If you have information on particular biosecurity weaknesses that have resulted or are likely to result in new invasive species please make a submission or pass the information onto the Invasive Species Council. (Note: submissions can be made to the inquiry in confidence.)

In your own words, make the following points in your submission, especially point 5. See our detailed submission guide for more information on these points:

  1. Highlight the importance of this inquiry to the future of Australian biodiversity. Preventing new invasive species should be one of the government’s highest environmental priorities. Issues:
    • Devastating impacts of invasive species
    • High rate of new incursions
    • Environmental biosecurity lags that for agriculture.
  1. Note the high economic costs of failures to keep out environmental invaders. Issues:
    • Puts existing eradication programs at risk
    • Late detection wastes eradication funds
    • Greatly increases costs to save threatened species and protect national parks
    • Costs to industry, including tourism
  1. Note examples of incursions detected since 2000 that are likely to have serious impacts on the environment.

Examples: Myrtle rust, Asian black-spined toad, red-imported fire ant, Mexican feather grass, smooth newt, pigeon paramyxovirus, yellow crazy ant, electric ant, Asian honeybee

  1. Highlight the major systematic biosecurity gaps and flaws. Examples:
    • Insufficient risk analysis
    • Lack of contingency planning
    • Insufficient surveillance
    • Poor responses to incursions
    • Failure to learn from failures
    • Lack of transparency and reporting
  1. Support major recommendations to stop new invasive species that harm the environment:
    • Establish Environment Health Australia, a collaborative body to prioritise risks, better prepare for environmental invaders and monitor progress
    • Improve contingency planning
    • Improve responses to incursions
    • Improve surveillance
    • Setup a public incursions database
    • Review failures
    • Improve enforcement

Send your submission to the Environment and Communications References Committee via email at ec.sen@aph.gov.au. Provide your name and contact details. Submissions are due 12 August 2014. UPDATE: The committee secretariat informed us that if you request an extension via email ec.sen@aph.gov.au before 12 August, you can make a submission up to Fri 22 August. 

More info

Submission resources
Senate inquiry

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Your support to protect critically endangered and vulnerable species from extinction is vital. Together, we can ensure governments prioritise action on invasive species and protect our wildlife and iconic places.

The Invasive Species Council was formed in 2002 to seek stronger laws, policies and programs to protect nature from harmful pests, weeds and diseases.

The Invasive Species Council acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia and their connections to land and sea. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

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Our protected areas are being trashed, trampled, choked and polluted by an onslaught of invaders. Invasive species are already the overwhelming driver of our animal extinction rate, and are expected to cause 75 of the next 100 extinctions.

But you can help to turn this around and create a wildlife revival in Australia.

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A silent crisis is unfolding across Australia. Every year, billions of native animals are hunted and killed by cats and foxes. Fire ants continue to spread and threaten human health. And the deadly strain of bird flu looms on the horizon. Your donation today will be used to put the invasive species threat in the media, make invasive species a government priority, ensure governments take rapid action to protect nature and our remarkable native wildlife from invasives-led extinction, death and destruction.

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    Dear Project Team,

    [YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

    I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

    The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

    The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

    This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

    Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

    Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

    Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

    I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

    Kind regards,
    [Your name]
    [Your email address]
    [Your postcode]


    Dear Project Team,

    [YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

    I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

    The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

    The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

    This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

    Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

    Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

    Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

    I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

    Kind regards,
    [Your name]
    [Your email address]
    [Your postcode]