14th Feb 2018, 3:54 PM – Senate Motions - Kangaroos - Make data available

The majority voted against this motion, which means it failed.

Motion text

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) Australian Government management of kangaroos tends to be structured to service commercial shooting and farming industries,

(ii) in 2015, between 65 000 and 650 000 kangaroos suffered non-lethal body-shots and a further 110 000 joeys died from commercial shooting alone, with pouch joeys decapitated or their skulls crushed,

(iii) kangaroos are slow-growing and are shot beyond their low reproductive capacity, with long-term government raw data illustrating kangaroo absence and decline, yet this is not reflected in the published population estimates from which an impossibly high commercial shooting quota is extracted, and

(iv) kangaroo is a wild-shot bushmeat and is butchered and transported on open unrefrigerated trucks in the field and, in 2014, Russia banned kangaroo meat imports for a third time due to contamination, with rapid food security alerts in the European Union about kangaroo meat since then; and

(b) calls on the Commonwealth and all states to make available all historical and current kangaroo survey data and methodologies, and commercial and non-commercial shooting and demographics data for all shooting zones across Australia.