ABA has written to the Minister of Environment, Land, Water and Planning regarding the recent findings of the Auditor General’s report into protecting Victoria’s declining biodiversity.
The report’s findings concur with ABA’s long held position that the Department and Parks Victoria have lacked sound and rigorous scientific evidence regarding the impacts of Brumbies in the environment.
Excerpts from ABA’s letter are below
Dear Minister D’Ambrosio,
….The Auditor-General provided a report, Protecting Victoria’s Biodiversity, in October 2021[1] to Parliament on whether the decline of threatened species in Victoria can be halted.
The Auditor General report to Parliament found that that Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), and its partner Parks Victoria (PV), cannot demonstrate if, or how well, it is halting further decline in Victoria’s threatened species populations. Nor can it demonstrate the benefit or effectiveness of current pest population management strategies, including proposed plans to shoot Brumbies.
The report also found the Department “has no effective monitoring tools in place to track the effectiveness of its strategies” to protect biodiversity and native populations. The report also acknowledged that the Department has “poor financial accountability” in the allocation of tax payer resources to these strategies and was “repeatedly unable to demonstrate that the spending of public resources was efficient or even successful to achieve its aim”….
….The ABA has consistently held the position that the department is deficient in its application of ‘scientific rigour’ when it comes to strategies to understand the actual, on-ground interaction from 200 years of Brumby population living alongside native species….
…….The ABA is grateful for the comprehensive review undertaken by the Victorian Auditor General Office and the recommendations it has made, as they are consistent with the long term position held by the ABA that PV lack on-ground real evidence to justify their hostile management strategies of Brumbies…..
…. PV relies on current literature which selects words from the Dyring 1990 rigorous study, to infer the damage Dyring found covers the whole study area.
Dying 1990 state soil on horse tracks was compacted (<1%) of study area, not the whole area as environmentalists subsequently claimed, leaving 99% of study soil not compacted.
In other words, Drying’s on-ground data that 99% of soil in horse areas was NOT compacted, meaning that PV ignored the finding of Dyring 1990 scientific evidence and manipulated the study findings to suit their own agenda.
Given PV is a statutory body using tax payer funds, the ABA has repeatedly highlighted this inconsistency in approach by PV and that by their own evidence, there is no justification.
PV response was to use tax payer funds to initiate lethal population management strategies on the remaining 3 Brumby populations despite no scientific foundation nor financial justification to do so.[2]
The ABA urges the Hon. Lily D’Ambrosio, Minister for DELWP and Parks Victoria (PV), to immediately halt proposed plans to shoot Brumbies given the fundamental absence of evidence and monitoring tools to measure the effectiveness of such plans.
The ABA has always and will continue to support an “on-ground” evidence-based approach to humane population management strategies of Brumbies.
Yours sincerely
Jill Pickering
President, Australian Brumby Alliance Inc.
On behalf of the committee of management
ADDENDUM
VAGO – Victorian Auditor General’s Office – Protecting Victoria’s biodiversity report (2021)
Will the management of Victoria’s biodiversity loss halt the decline of threatened species?
Link – https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/protecting-victorias-biodiversity?section=
Examples of the Victorian Auditor-General’s finding that Parks Victoria’s actions only measure the quantity of activities undertaken, not the quality or cost-effectiveness
Auditor-Gen Report Concluded that DELWP
- Cannot demonstrate that it is halting the decline of threatened species.
- Reporting is not comprehensive due to gaps & flaws in its performance data.
- Cannot determine if its management interventions have adequately controlled key threats and are halting further threatened species population declines.
- Because of flaws in its KPIs and its lack of a targeted monitoring program to assess the on-ground impact of its prioritised management interventions on threatened species populations…..…….DELWP’s monitoring and reporting programs focus on the amount of threat management, with very limited monitoring and reporting around threat intensity and on-ground changes to threatened species populations.
DELWP’s processes for choosing which individual critically threatened species to protect with the available funding lack:
- transparency—“decisions are not clearly justified and communicated to all stakeholders and the community”,
- objectivity—“decisions and priorities are not based on consistently applying an evidence-based approach, but rather a disparate set of decision-making factors”,
Scientific rigour—“the collection, analysis a
[1] https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/protecting-victorias-biodiversity?section=
