An unpublished government report has found that Australia is failing to contain one of its fastest-growing invasive pests, and that feral deer now cost more than $91m a year in lost production and management time.
The report card assesses the five years from 2020 to 2025, the period covered by the national feral deer action plan. It describes deer as one of the country's “most rapidly increasing invasive pests”, and finds that they have grown both in numbers and in the territory they occupy.
The document was produced by the National Vertebrate Pest Coordinators and marks each state and territory under a traffic light system across four categories. It was leaked to the Invasive Species Council.
Every jurisdiction but one is failing or floundering. New South Wales and Tasmania were given reds in all four categories. Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory each received three reds and a yellow. No jurisdiction other than South Australia received a single green pass mark.
South Australia, which launched a statewide eradication plan in 2022, received a green in all four categories. The report found, with high confidence, that the state had reduced the abundance and distribution of deer and their environmental and agricultural impacts.
Six species of feral deer are established in Australia: chital, fallow, hog, red, rusa and sambar. Populations are well established across the south-east, where densities are highest, with smaller and more localised groups in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Deakin University's Prof Euan Ritchie, president of the Australian Mammal Society, said he was “not at all” surprised by the findings. “This report shows that governments are failing miserably to invest enough to control deer populations and the severe impacts that they can have on agriculture, native wildlife and the environment, road safety and culturally significant sites,” he said.
Reece Pianta, advocacy manager at the Invasive Species Council, said the report pointed to “a long-term systemic underfunding of deer control”, and that deer lacked the recognition of Australia's more notorious invasive animals. “Deer are the next feral pig,” he said. “The difference with deer is that an intervention now could make a significant difference to the population numbers and contain, or even reverse, that spread.”
Pianta said deer “probably can't be eradicated” from the whole continent, but that South Australia's result showed eradication was achievable in some states and territories, while others would need a long-term effort to contain the spread and mitigate the impacts. Prof Andrew Lowe, director of the Adelaide University Environment Institute, called the report a “good news story” for his state.
The succession, however, has been announced without a vacancy. Deer are the next feral pig. The feral pig is still here.
This newspaper has looked for a mechanism and cannot find one. Nothing in the national action plan provides for the orderly transfer of pest status, and the incumbent has given no indication of standing down. On the available evidence Australia is about to have two next feral pigs, one of which is the feral pig.
The field is also crowded. Six species are established, which means six candidates for a position that is currently occupied, assessed annually across four categories under a traffic light system that none of them has been shown.
South Australia's performance introduces a further difficulty. Its deer were marked green in all four categories, which in the language of the report card is a pass. Read as a performance review of the animals, it is the worst result on the continent: a green for the state is a failure to spread, a failure to increase in abundance and a failure to have any impact at all.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has one question for the National Vertebrate Pest Coordinators before next year's assessment. If deer are the next feral pig, the paperwork should say what the feral pig becomes.