Endangered wildlife in limbo

Go to Perth Zoo and traipse up the hill to their enclosure and you just might spot one. But, then again, you might not.

Numbats — the bushy-tailed and distinctively striped critters that just happen to be WA’s official mammal emblem — are remarkably elusive.

Once widespread across the State’s south, numbats have disappeared from most of their former range and are now considered endangered.

By some estimates as few as 1000 are in the wild, sparking fears about whether the species can survive outside the protected and controlled environments of a zoo.

Although numbats are not alone among WA animals under pressure from threats ranging from cats to habitat loss, their plight is emblematic (so to speak) of the difficulties facing the Barnett Government as it moves to update the State’s wildlife protection laws.

Promised as a “matter of priority” before the March 2013 State election, the laws are supposed to replace the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950, legislation so antiquated its primary focus was to preserve game for hunting.

Yet despite the supposed priority, the new laws are languishing in WA’s bureaucracy more than halfway through the Government’s second term in office.

At a press conference to condemn the evils of native animal poaching last month, Environment Minister Albert Jacob was quick to talk up how tougher new penalties to be included in the proposed laws would crack down on that kind of skulduggery.

But when pressed on when the laws would be introduced to Parliament, Mr Jacob would say only it was his aim to do so some time “in this term of government”.

The less-than-emphatic answer came against a backdrop of revelations at the end of last year that the Government did not have a Bill ready to be introduced.

In fact, it didn’t even have a draft Bill at all.

The glacial progress has raised doubts about whether( the laws can be passed before the next State election in 2017, after which all bets may as( well be off.

Failure would add another sorry chapter to a book that started in the 1980s with the first government to promise and not deliver an overhaul of the Wildlife Conservation Act.

It is a book jointly written by both major parties ever since.

Regardless of when the Government gets its act together, however, the Bill’s credibility rests on more than just the toughness of the penalties for animal smugglers.

The laws loom as a major test of Mr Jacob’s ability to design and then shepherd through Parliament difficult changes that will materially improve protection of native and often threatened wildlife.

John Bailey, an associate professor at Murdoch University and one of WA’s foremost experts on conservation law, said harsher penalties for animal trafficking were worthy and a good start but merely a fraction of what was needed. For example, Professor Bailey said under current arrangements the State itself was mostly exempt from provisions around clearing the habitat of threatened wildlife.

He said the exemption was a major loophole that needed to be closed to “bind the crown” to the same rules as everybody else.

“That’s a whacking great gap given the level of activity of the State is so much more than it was in 1950,” Professor Bailey said.

“The State is a major developer in many ways.”

Professor Bailey said so-called recovery plans for endangered species were not enforceable but rather instruments of government policy.

Nor, he said, were there clear “abatement” plans to deal with specific threats, whether they were feral animals, pathogens such as dieback or fire management practices.

And he said that as they stood the laws were only able to declare individual species as threatened or endangered — not the ecosystems or habitats in which they lived.

Professor Bailey said this effectively meant that while it would be illegal to kill or harm a threatened animal, it was relatively easy to bulldoze the area around it.

“We need to get to a situation in which the crown is actively managing not just endangered species but the habitat of endangered species using this legislation,” he said.

“That converts what is basically a piece of legislation to regulate hunting into one which is potentially much more proactive because there’s a lot more covered.”

Professor Bailey suggested there could be merit in creating wildlife offences that carried civil penalties, noting that criminal cases were invariably harder to prosecute successfully.

He said this might mean correspondingly lower penalties for civil matters but it was a compromise worth considering in certain circumstances.

All of which leads back to Mr Jacob and the scale of the task facing the rookie minister. According to Professor Bailey, the changes that would be needed to make the new laws meaningful would be contentious and fraught with pitfalls.

He said anything that had implications for private landholders — such as protecting remnant vegetation — would also need to be handled with a deft touch.

Compensation might need to be considered, he said.

Crucially, beefed up laws would cost money — a hard ask in a tough fiscal environment.

Whatever the case, Mr Jacob should not be under any illusions about the urgency behind the push for new wildlife laws.

WA has the inglorious distinction of having one of the world’s worst extinction rates for its native species.

The precarious state of( the numbat is testament( to that.