Opinion: Time to get tough on selfie-obsessed on K’gari

Despite the warnings and the evidence we still have people who think they are smarter than the experts and the average dingo, writes Robert Schwarten.

As a kid growing up in a then-developing Rocky suburb, it was common to come into contact with big brown snakes.

These turned out to be mostly king browns which, within striking distance, were dispatched with a fit-for-purpose shotgun, long-handled shovel or plaited wire.

No sympathy for the hapless snake whose habitat was destroyed thus forcing it to take up residence in a more human, albeit totally inhumane, location.

These days we have dedicated snake catchers and sensible people keep their distance and consult their mobile phone.

I was never bitten by a snake and neither were any of my mates when we played in the vacant brigalow blocks which abounded, mainly because we knew how and where to avoid them.

We sometimes came across the odd one sunning itself, which apart from an urgent departure from the scene by both reptile and human, the latter sometimes an equally urgent search of an outhouse, that was about it.

It appears that modern phones are now also used in the interaction with potentially deadly native species but only for bragging rights so the subject can bore others with their holiday snaps.

Surely a selfie with a dingo has to rate up there with attempting to kiss a king brown!

But despite the warnings and the evidence we still have people who think they are smarter than the experts and the average dingo.

I have had the great fortune to visit national parks all over the world. Many have animals that make a dingo look like a vegetarian.

The only time any human gets killed, eaten or maimed is when they get out of their car or try to pat a hippopotamus – which, by the way, kills more people than king browns do, despite all those cuddly kiddie stories.

There is zero tolerance and sympathy for those who fall victim to such prey. It is rare that such animals are destroyed as a result.

A woman was fined for taking a selfie with sleeping dingo pups on K’gari.

Despite our Aussie reputation as having more deadly snakes than anywhere else in the world, we are at the bottom of the class when it comes to man-eaters.

Those beautiful polar bears and the magnificent grizzly bear are two species that come to mind.

The lion, tiger, leopard and cheetah most people would steer well clear of too.

Tourists ignore the warnings about these sorts of animals at their own peril, with fatal consequences, so it is rare to find someone so dim that they want to chance their footwork against a big cat.

But if that happens the public verdict is overwhelmingly on the side of the wild beast.

Recent calls for culling of dingoes is at odds with the attitude others have to wild animals in national parks outside Australia.

Aussies and tourists alike seem to think that our national parks are actually amusement venues.

It seems over the years we have enticed nature’s instinctive killers to become bed mates if the photo in this newspaper of a woman nodding off with dingo pups is any indication.

Can anyone seriously believe such irresponsibility would be tolerated in Kruger National Park with lion cubs?

We are clearly at the crossroads here. Authorised killing of “offending” dingoes is now almost routine and cheered on by shock jocks and other sensationalists.

It seems we expect the dingoes to learn lessons from seeing one of their mates killed, while we continue to behave as though we were staying in a motel in the middle of Brisbane.

We are, after all, the more important of the two, yet it is not us that visitors crave to see. It’s the wild native dog that they come for, not the company of us superior beings.

So it’s high time that more stringent regulations were applied and enforced.

For a start, the selfie-obsessed should not only be fined but banned from every national park in the country.

Clearly there need to be no-go zones. The prod sticks seem sensible too.

Other restrictions need to be made and supported too.

Either that or just destroy all the dingoes and turn the island into a suburb of Hervey Bay and borrow the phrase from Rocky of the ’50s and ’60s: “The only good snake/dingo is a dead one.”

Robert Schwarten was a minister in the Beattie Labor government

Originally published as Opinion: Time to get tough on selfie-obsessed on K’gari