STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (13:40): I rise to speak about rabbits. There are hundreds of rabbits on the lawns around Parliament House. Colleagues may have seen them on the way in and out of this building.

What's happening here in Canberra is mirrored across the country. We're seeing a huge build-up of the rabbit population. For every person in Australia, we now have seven to 10 rabbits, and these populations are growing fast.

Back in 2021, ABARES put the cost to agriculture at an estimated $197 million. It's likely far higher now, given the numbers. It's becoming much worse, damaging agriculture and decimating native species.

Rabbits are a key threat to 322 threatened species in this great country, more than any other invasive species. We should have seen this coming. As a country, we should have learnt from the past and seen what happens.

By the 1920s, there was a rabbit plague of an estimated 10 billion rabbits—10 billion rabbits! With planning and investments, scientists were able to knock them down, first with myxomatosis and then with calicivirus. But we've become complacent as a country.

We've seen R&D investment decline, and we haven't been spending enough on the next biocontrol. We've only invested $12 million over the past decade, and researchers are now saying that we're at least 10 years away from being able to deploy a new control—10 years! This is what happens when we don't have long-term thinking, when we don't have constant investment in controlling invasive species and when we don't have planning for the future and for the next biocontrol and the next breakthrough in this important area.