Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about an important community conversation I was invited to and attended with my colleague, Ms Burnet, the member for Clark, in Taroona a week or so ago. The event focused on wildlife champions, specifically what is called Road Kill Warriors.
I thank Suzanne King for hosting this event and the Taroona Community Association – Anne and Jill in particular – for promoting and pulling it together, and Ruth at St Luke’s Church. This was a very important conversation about how we, as individuals, can take responsibility for our own driving behaviour to reduce what is a catastrophic toll on our roads every year.
It is estimated, Honourable Speaker, that 400,000 animals a year are killed on Tasmania’s roads. That is threatened species, common species, birds, marsupials – a whole raft of native wildlife killed.
This event on Wednesday night focused on a really quite sweet, if not challenging film called Roadkill Warriors. It was made by filmmaker Lara van Raay. It is a 10‑minute doco and I am sure you can find it somewhere along the road. It focused on Ruth Waterhouse, an artist from Kingston and a wildlife lover. She combined both of those attributes to highlight the challenge of roadkill on our roads.
The film tells the story of Ruth wanting to take small steps of activism and awareness‑raising in her street, appalled at the nightly toll on the street she had to drive along just outside Kingston, in a peri-urban fringe. She decided to make some small crosses, paint them pink and put them on the road verge alongside the corpse of every single animal. She ultimately took the sensitive decision to cut off the top of the cross so it turned out to be a ‘T’, so it was not a cross, so it did not offend anybody who may have been offended by crosses. She continued this action and, over time, even when the bodies of those animals had either decomposed or been removed, highlighted exactly how big an impact our driving behaviour has on native wildlife.
She then went on to design and print a whole raft of signs that basically featured wildlife that had been injured, that had been rescued and rehabilitated. These were photographs of individual animals on signs that people bought and put on their fence: ‘Slow down, my life is in your hands’. She had worked out a whole raft of different slogans. This film told the story about these signs. These signs were available to buy on the night and they told of the impact.
They also told of the change in driver behaviour, which is what is critically important here. As Lara says in some promotion about the film, the film is not about solutions as much as about using art and personal activism to raise awareness and ask questions. I commend Lara and Ruth for their activism and advocacy in this space because it is a problem statewide.
We have all heard and been appalled by the situation in the north west of the state, Woolnorth Rd. Alice Carson up there has estimated that over 240 Tasmanian devils have been hit on the Woolnorth Rd -114 in one year, 240 in total. The north west is a critical habitat for Tasmanian devils, being, to date, disease-free. We simply cannot afford to lose this number of devils in this kind of environment because it is where they need to be.
Alice teamed up with Simon Plowright and made a beautiful film, Living with Devils, that told the story and really humanised the character of Tasmanian devils and how important and special they are. One thing from talking to Lara tonight, with an impending footy team in Tasmania called the Devils, we cannot afford the devil to go extinct, to be lost on the roads in this fashion.
I pay tribute to the carers as well because, on the evening, there were carers there. They spoke about their personal experiences of having to go out every night, usually, to pick up something out of a pouch on the road, to look after it in the short term and then take it to someone who could care for that animal longer term. I am going to be catching up with Jed and Kim later in the week to talk about their efforts in caring for possums. They specialise in brushtail and ringtail possums. I want to give a shout-out to carers because there is an incredible network of carers around the state who will go out at all hours of night, an absolutely unedifying experience of looking through pouches, looking for survivors and then handing them on. Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary needs a good shout-out too because they have an impeccable and incredible wildlife hospital and rehabilitation program.
I want to leave a message here. The fate of our wildlife on our roads is in our hands. It is really simple: between dusk and dawn slow down, drop 20 km off whatever the speed limit is. If it is safe, stop and remove carcases from the road because if you leave carcases on the road, they inevitably attract the carnivores, be they raptors, birds of prey, or devils and quolls come and then get hit. This is an issue that is not going away. We have faster and faster cars, we have better and better roads. We need to be doing more from a regulation perspective to reduce speeds at night. We need to be doing more to educate drivers about their behaviour, about what they can do to protect these animals. Having 400 000 native animals a year being killed on our roads is utterly unacceptable.
I commend Lara and Ruth for their activism. I took the opportunity to raise this important issue here tonight because it is something that we all, as individual drivers, need to take responsibility for.
