Wednesday, 9 September 2026

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (10:23): I move:

That this house:

(1)   notes that:

(a) the government commissioned a $850,000 report on the health, abundance, and distribution of koalas in Victoria;

(b) the report was completed in June 2025 but has not been released;

(c) the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action has refused to answer questions about its findings or when the report will be made public;

(d) the expert authors of the report have expressed frustration that their work has seemingly been buried;

(e) many Victorians are concerned about the government’s management of koalas after an aerial shooting operation was undertaken at Budj Bim;

(2)   in accordance with standing order 10.01, requires the Leader of the Government to table in the Council, within four weeks of the house agreeing to this resolution, the report titled The Status of Victoria’s Koala Population: Surveys to Estimate Abundance, Genetic Diversity and Koala Health.

This is a bit of an odd experience because I am moving a motion requesting documents that the Minister for Environment tabled this morning before we actually got to the debate. My motion requested just one document in our plans to try and request documents that are easier to locate and can be delivered in quick time, so we are very grateful for that.

That document is titled The Status of Victoria’s Koala Population: Surveys to Estimate Abundance, Genetic Diversity and Koala Health. This is a document that we knew could be critical to the future of one of our nation’s most iconic native animals, and this report does not simply count koalas, although that is very important; it examines the abundance, distribution, genetic diversity, health, habitat status and threats facing their populations. It is precisely the kind of evidence we need to understand whether Victoria’s koala populations are secure or not.

This is a document that we knew existed and had actually asked for before, but it had never been released – that is, until this morning, when the minister tabled it in Parliament before the debate, a day after I introduced this motion. That is something that is pretty amazing and something we do not often see in this place, so I really want to thank the minister and thank the government for acting with speed in this instance and delivering something that has been incredibly sought after by the wildlife community for over a year now. This report was commissioned by the Victorian government through the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action and cost approximately $150,000, which is why it is so important that we thought the public should see it. We did not want this to be another review, another report, another taskforce that costs taxpayers and does not see the light of day, just as we saw with the review into the Wildlife Act 1975 and the expert panel, where $3 million was spent, a documents motion passed and a redacted version released only for the government to turn around some time later, release it with their response and still not put those laws that they committed to in their response through the Parliament. It is obviously incredibly doubtful that we will see that at all this term.

This report was completed in June 2025. We already know when it comes to koalas that there has been a transparency problem, and it certainly did not help that sentiment when this document had not been released. We saw it when there was a sign-off on the shooting of over a thousand koalas from helicopters following a bushfire at Budj Bim. Of course, I tabled a petition in the Parliament that met the criteria for debate for the government to respond to that decision, which only left more questions from the community and from Victorians who care for our incredible koalas. Despite being an unprecedented method of koala management in Australia, this decision happened in secrecy, with requests from the public for information continuously denied. There was no way for the public to know whether this was the most humane approach, particularly given the well-documented risks associated with shooting programs, particularly aerial shooting programs, and their effectiveness, even more so on small animals and animals with young, including missed shots leading to prolonged animal suffering in areas that are hard to access. What we do know for sure is the events at Budj Bim risk setting a dangerous precedent for how koalas and other wildlife could be managed in the future.

This is something that is so important for our state to consider, as koalas are endangered in New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT. Given the threats that are facing koalas here in Victoria, it is essential that we do everything we can to monitor and protect every surviving population so we do not end up in the same place. People across our state have a right to know when decisions are made that determine whether protected animals live or die. The government’s answer has consistently been that decisions are made on science, expert advice and animal welfare, and it is very rare that we actually get to see the reasoning behind the decision-making, as is documented in this report today. I am hopeful, with the swift release of this report under the new environment minister, that we may see a shift and a willingness from the government to be transparent about our wildlife.

This research, from what I have had a chance to read in the short time since it was tabled, has provided some really valuable insights. It monitored 182 sites across Victoria over 2023–24 and estimated that Victoria’s full statewide population of koalas is between 217,000 and 225,000. It found the South Gippsland population has the highest genetic diversity and is the most demographically stable, while populations in Mallacoota have the highest inbreeding and lowest diversity. A smaller sample size of koalas found that 43 per cent were in poor health and needed to be euthanised, and 59 per cent carried some sort of infectious disease.

This report made several recommendations, and with the announcement alongside this today that the government has dedicated $2.6 million to restore habitats, support koala populations and back new research into their health, we are really hopeful that those recommendations will be acted on, and I really want to thank the minister and her office for making this announcement that, again, means so much to my community, the wildlife community, wildlife rescuers and those who love and care for our koalas. We have seen so many circumstances where this has not been the outcome. In fact we were incredibly surprised to see this happen today, and we are grateful for the willingness to act quickly in releasing this report. Hopefully it is the commencement of more action that is meaningful to koalas beyond today.

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (10:29): I am very pleased to rise to speak on Ms Purcell’s documents motion seeking a report which, as was indicated, was tabled by the Minister for Environment this morning. I have been having a quick read, and I will go to the report itself in a minute. I will just say that koalas are really important to Victoria and to Victorians. As one of the most recognised native species in our country, we know that their conservation and preservation is an exceptionally important part of environmental management here in the state of Victoria. The decisions about the long-term conservation, welfare and sustainability of koala populations have to be driven by science, evidence and responsible environmental management. That is the critical reason why the government continues to invest in the sort of science that is included in this report, which is designed to understand the koala population and seeks to provide detailed scientific evidence as to the current population densities and their characteristics.

I think it is useful to understand what the report itself did and what it found. The report is of sampling surveys of the koala population undertaken in 2023 and 2024. The estimate provided in the report uses monitoring data collected at sites using a statistically robust sampling design. The sites from which they were collected were based on sampling probabilities in concert with the methodology used in the national koala monitoring program. Surveys were undertaken at various sites in both 2023 and 2024. 139 sites were chosen across public land in 2023, including 107 sites in native forests chosen for the probability of koala existence or habitation and an additional 32 sites selected randomly from eucalypt hardwood plantation estate. In 2024, 141 sites were monitored, including 133 of the sites that had been previously sampled during 2023, and new sites were selected in locations where sampling coverage was poor or where the site intended to be sampled was inaccessible due to plantation harvesting. This gave a total of 182 unique sites for sampling across the two years.

At each of the sites, koalas were monitored using two different methods. In the first method koalas were monitored from the ground by two observers walking transects during the day using double observer distance-sampling methods, involving two individuals walking those transects 10 to 15 minutes apart and searching trees on either side, with observations made. Interestingly, dependent young were treated as a single individual with their parent koala in these analyses. Those walks were done multiple times, and distances were measured. The second monitoring method used passive acoustic detection methods by placing acoustic recorders at each site, attached to trees about 1.5 metres above the ground and left in place for several weeks during the breeding period when koala bellowing frequency was expected to be at its highest. Combining nights from both recorders, the maximum total recording nights were developed. It is very sophisticated science.

The report finds that the total koala population across Victoria was estimated at around 217,000 in 2023 and about 224,000 in 2024. I note there is no evidence that the difference in abundance between the survey years is a real change, with the estimated population change having confidence intervals overlapping zero. Statistical probability means the population is probably about the same. The report contains further details. I think what this demonstrates is the importance of environmental science to environmental management in the state of Victoria. The government is pleased to release this report today. The only other thing I will say is that it is science and evidence supporting environmental management like this that is at risk if the Liberal and One Nation parties form government and enact $40 billion worth of cuts across the state of Victoria.

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (10:34): I am pleased to rise on what would be considered an outlier day in terms of short-form documents motions, because there are so many that we have debated in this house legitimately, from the Greens to the Legalise Cannabis Party to the Liberals and Nationals. We have called for documents in short-form documents motions, the motions have passed this house, and then we have had, some weeks later, the Clerk standing up to say – doing their job exemplarily – that the government have said there has not been enough time for them to find these documents. It has happened time and time again during this session of Parliament. So this is an outlier in the stream of statistics. We have heard the statistics from this document – this document that was only tabled less than an hour ago – and I have asked the table office to print it. I have not had the opportunity to digest it, but the statistic is that it is an outlier because it was actually presented to the Parliament before the motion had passed. It is from the Arthur Rylah Institute, a respected institute doing scientific analysis.

I want to put on record some other information from the Arthur Rylah Institute, which I think pertains very seriously to koala population, koala sustainability and koala habitat, and that is an Arthur Rylah Institute report on the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires in which Arthur Rylah stated that because of the 1.5 million hectares of incinerated forest and landscape, 244 faunal species – whether they were goannas, other reptiles, mammals or birds – lost 50 per cent of their habitat. If we want to put a lens over the scientific analysis of our iconic emblems, of which koalas are one, the first thing the government should be doing is all that it can to stop out-of-control bushfires. 1.5 million hectares burnt in 2019–‍20.

Going back to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, there is a very significant sculpture in the fantastic town of Mirboo North of an iconic koala. They christened her ‘Sam’. She came out of the forest and was sitting on the ground, and a very famous and well-loved identity in Mirboo North called David Tree, funnily enough, a CFA volunteer of many years – and you will remember it made the papers – was giving Sam, as she was christened, water at the end of that fire incident there.

We know that our landscapes will have fires in them. We saw that this was the case at Budj Bim. Indeed I was shocked and annoyed that the government’s port of call was to aerially cull those koalas. I really want to understand, and I do not think it has been forensically analysed – maybe it has been in this document that we have just had delivered – why the choices were made around expert advice on aerial culling, what alternatives were considered and what safeguards were in place. Well, clearly they were not for the koalas that were culled. Humane removal and euthanasia are highly important and preferable, but I am not sure that shooting them out of a helicopter is necessarily the way.

I would just finish by saying that this species is very interesting, because if you go back in time – and we can only rely on documents from the past – Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth speaks about the fact that there were a lot of different landscapes when white settlement occurred. Our Indigenous Australians, our traditional owners, managed the landscapes, and there was lots of green pasture with native grasses. The argument is that in actual fact some of those koala populations were not as abundant back then as they were later. They do have a boom-and-bust cycle, but there needs to be active management of both our forests and our koala populations for the best outcomes.

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (10:40): I too would like to thank Ms Purcell for bringing this documents motion to Parliament. As others have noted, given all the dramas that we have had in this chamber regarding the failure to produce documents, often under the guise of apparently not having enough time, we have, in the second-last week of this Parliament, seen the most timely production of documents you could imagine, where it was tabled before we even had time to get to this motion. But I am really pleased that this motion has been able to prompt this kind of response, because clearly that document had been sitting there. There does not appear to have been a good reason for it not to have been released. There have been calls for it to be released for some time now, and I think this motion is worthwhile if only because it has prompted this long-awaited document to now be out in public.

For a long time there have been serious concerns about the estimates of koala populations and their health in Victoria, and this is something I have heard from many constituents in my region of Western Victoria, where a lot of these concerns are borne out. The issues around the koala populations numbers have perpetuated harmful myths that Victoria has an abundance of koalas, and in some areas, like the south-west in my electorate, it has been characterised as overpopulation. Not only has there been a lack of robust evidence to support many of these claims, it has also miscast the threats that are facing our precious koalas, which in turn has led to misguided policy responses.

With respect to the data itself, I have heard repeated concerns from dedicated forest and wildlife advocates that the numbers that had historically been reported simply did not match what they were seeing every day. There are pockets of Victoria where historic government modelling claims there are healthy and abundant koala populations, whereas the local wildlife carers and other locals are able to count the number of koalas on one hand. These are areas like the Gordon plantation near Ballarat, which I have spoken about in this place before. A few road strike incidents is all it would take for them to become locally extinct in an area like this. There are also claims of overpopulation in the south-west, and this is misleading because the mirage of overpopulation is actually the result of habitat loss. It is driving remaining koalas onto ever-shrinking habitat where they face starvation, inbreeding and disease, and their concentration on this increasingly small amount of habitat means all it would take is one big bushfire to wipe out this population.

The alternative is that they are being forced onto dangerous blue gum plantations where they are at risk of being injured and killed during harvesting. The mass killing of koalas during blue gum plantation harvesting several years ago down in the far south-west and the devastating aerial culls following bushfires in Budj Bim National Park, which have been discussed already, are perhaps some of the more horrific and high profile results of this. I have spoken about both of these things before in this place. I am conscious I am about to run out of time, but I thank Ms Purcell for bringing this motion and look forward to reading the report.

Motion agreed to.

Members interjecting.

Melina Bath: On a point of order, Acting President, that was unparliamentary, and I ask the member to withdraw.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Michael Galea): As you know, Ms Bath, if offence is taken, the member who has personally been offended needs to be the one to request the withdrawal.