Call for camel cull to continue post election

ABC Rural

Caddie Brain

Tue 3 Sep 2013

Audio: Call for camel cull to continue post election (ABC Rural)

 

The Country Liberals candidate for the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari is advocating using a collar monitoring system to manage feral camels in central Australia, if elected on Saturday.

As many as 750,000 camels roam Australia's outback.
But with limited water sources in the desert, many landholders say they do a lot of damage to communities, pastoral infrastructure and to important sites for Aboriginal people.
Federal funding of $19 million has seen nearly 150,000 camels removed from Central Australia over the last four years, through aerial and ground culling and mustering for commercial use.
The money, however, runs out at the end of this year and many landholders, like Lyndee Severin from Curtin Springs Station, south-west of Alice Springs, fear it won't be long before the population bounces back.
"I think there's a lot of positives that have come out of it, but it's not going to take very long for numbers to get back to exactly where they were," she said.
"Is the best answer just to throw more cold hard cash at it? That could be an option.
"But we need to make sure that the money that has been spent in Aboriginal communities, on training and skills and infrastructure, is going to be used into the future in the way that's been intended.
"But saying all of that, sometimes the issues are bigger. Sometimes they're things that we can't deal with on our own."
Ninti One Limited has run the Australian Feral Camel Management project for the Federal Government, and the company agrees there is more work to be done.
It says it can get the population density down to one animal for every ten square kilometres within ten years, a total of about 300,000, provided landholders and governments agree on the best mix of removal methods and are adequately resourced.

A team places a satellite collar on a feral camel as part of the Australia
Feral Camel Management Project. (Matthew Paterson)

       

The Country Liberals candidate Tina MacFarlane says the Coalition has a targeted approach to culling camels using 'Judas' collars to track the animals for commercial harvesting.
"I'm not going to get down to specific dollars," she said.
"The Coalition, they want to be more efficient and they have a targeted approach to culling with the Judas collars."
The technique involves collaring a small number of animals, using them to locate and monitor larger groups.
"There's a commitment for the collars and then you know you can obviously monitor it and bringing in the commercial aspect of it and that will run in also to the training," she said.
Federal Minister Warren Snowdon, and Labor member for Lingiari, says he supports further funding for the current camel management program.
"We're already putting in enormous resources working with Ninti One, I think we should continue with that, continue working with those people and acting on the right advice," he said.
"I'm sure that there'll be a proposal put to government to make sure funding it ongoing and I'm sure it will be approved.
"I had discussion with people in the Middle East about the possibility of exporting Australian camels five or six years ago.
"There's a great deal of interest in how we can get a viable camel industry operating.
"If the industry can be developed it will be developed, but the first thing we've got to do is to control there numbers."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-03/feral-camel-management-election/4930956