By Callum Ludwig
Kangaroos were the topic of a lengthy discussion during the Tuesday 11 February Yarra Ranges Council meeting.
During a councillor motion brought by Walling Ward Councillor Len Cox, Cr Cox and Woori Yallock resident Peter Preuss put forward a plea for Yarra Ranges Council to formally request to be removed from the Gippsland Harvest Zone under the Kangaroo Harvesting Program (KHP).
Mr Preuss said 10 other councils in what used to be the Central shooting zone have asked for and been given an exemption and he’s calling on Yarra Ranges Council to do the same.
“The reality is, if you pass the motion, the minister will probably say ‘ No, you’re too late, you should have done it last year’, you’re now in the Gippsland shooting zone and there’s a quota of 120,000, and the shooters that get tags for that region can start shooting them from here all the way through to Mallacoota,” he said.
“You’re not going to be able to control that, and it’s happening all over the place already, but if he says yes, what’s happens is our farmers, and there’s only a few of them that might want to shoot, they can still do it under the old system and at least our kangaroos will be safe.”
Commercial kangaroo harvesting was reintroduced in Victoria in 2019 through the KHP, which sets a limit on the number of kangaroos which can be killed by harvesters.
Cr Cox, having joined Mr Preuss for a ‘Walk and Talk’ he held at the Yarra Valley Living Centre in late 2024, asked Mr Preuss a couple of questions about the wellbeing of the kangaroos at the centre and the reports of kangaroo populations increasing.
Mr Preuss said those kangaroos aren’t doing well and he fears for them after not being able to find one of the over 200 kangaroos for over 20 minutes on Australia Day.
“Finally when we found one she was as skittish as anything but in an indirect way, she led us to the rest of the mob that was left and they were so frightened that they just took off, you (CR Cox) know how calm they were just standing there, but they had been shot at,” he said.
“I’m afraid I might not do any more of those ‘Walk and Talks’ because I think the kangaroo shooters can read too, it was advertised and they knew where they were so I feel really bad about opening that up,”
“Counting kangaroos is just really quite difficult, you can go to that property on a rainy day like you were and see 250 of them and extrapolate that across all the paddocks…the real telling thing is the number of carcasses coming in has gone down, in 2023 the shortfall was 57 percent so in other words they only got 43 per cent of the kangaroos that they were allowed to kill so it doesn’t make sense.”
The KHP quota for 2025 has been set at 106,750 kangaroos throughout Victoria (combined eastern and western grey kangaroos), including 11,900 eastern grey kangaroos in the Gippsland harvest zone which includes the Yarra Ranges.
Cr Cox said the Yarra Ranges is an obvious one for shooters to concentrate on because they take the bodies to Coldstream and so it’s easy, it’s quick and it’s convenient for them to shoot here.
“The trouble with the shooting too, not only is it killing kangaroos is that a lot of them get shot but don’t get killed so you’ve got this awful issue where you’ve got kangaroos laying and dying on the land, eventually they die, but they die in agony,” he said.
“You’ve also got the problem too with joeys, because mum gets shot and the joey is left, and a lot of the shooters solve that problem, they just club the joeys to death which is killing a lot more than what some of the figures we’ve got would tell you,”
“We’ve got a prosperous tourist industry in Yarra Ranges, and a lot of people coming from overseas, and a lot of those people, I would suggest a large percentage of them, want to see some of our wildlife, the obvious wildlife for them to see during the day is a kangaroo, and they need to be able to see those kangaroos but the way things are going, they won’t be able to see them if this shooting continues long-term.”
Councillors Tim Heenan and Fiona McAllister both spoke in support of the motion.
“I’ve always been sceptical about figures that come out of a particular department that obviously has an interest in another way and I’ve been appalled to read substantially on how the kangaroos are killed, and the appalling way that they’re left to die,” Cr Heenan said.
“It feels this isn’t an intellectual or analytical decision, even if we look at the facts and the data, it doesn’t stack up, it doesn’t make sense and we can delay and ask for more data and it’s still not going to stack up, but it’s not an intellectual or an analytical decision, it’s a moral one,” Cr McAllister said.
Councillors Jeff Marriott, Richard Higgins, Mitch Mazzarella, Peter McIlwain spoke against the motion, with a view to deferring any decision.
“I’m still wondering whether we need to get some more information, just purely from due diligence, I’m not saying this is from a point of view of saying we’re saying yes or no, but I just want to make sure that we’ve got everything lined up,” Cr Marriott said.
“We’ve asked twice, sent questions off to the State Government to find out some more detail so we can make an informed decision, I appreciate that their heart is very strong and I appreciate that very strongly in myself, however, I ask for the details,” Cr Higgins said.
“The evidence that’s been presented through the state government is serious peer-reviewed research and I want to make it clear that process is the science by which we make important decisions about how to protect our environment,” Cr McIlwain said.
“I want to hear exactly why the Minister thinks that we should be in this harvest site, once we have that information, then I am comfortable in making a decision on this matter, until that time, I don’t believe that we’ve done the due diligence in hearing from the Minister,” Cr Mazzarella said.
Cr Gareth Ward did not speak to the motion and Cr Jim Child was excused from the chamber due to a conflict of interest.
The Council took a break to check with the governance team whether a procedural motion to defer the decision could be introduced and it was allowed.
When the new motion went to vote, Cr McIlwain, Cr Mazzarella, Cr Marriott and Cr Higgins voted in favour of the deferral motion, with Cr Cox, Cr Heenan, Cr McAllister and Cr Ward voting against.
The split vote took it to a casting vote, to be made by the acting chair for the item (in the absence of Cr Child) Cr Higgins, who voted in favour of the motion, deferring it to the 8 April 2025 Council meeting. This marks the second occasion Yarra Ranges Council has heard the issue in a Council meeting, following a first submission by Mr Preuss in July 2023 and a subsequent councillor forum in October 2023, though now there are four new councillors in the chamber.
