Hands off our little Aussie wombattlers

Polliticians and influencers at war over how to handle wombats and other native wildlife. Photo: WWF-Australia Chris Crerar

With a federal election almost upon us, we’ll soon have to endure the usual devious messages, crafted by overpaid, advertising-agency frauds in a quest to sell competing blends of lies and nonsense. Buckets of mis- and disinformation will be tipped into the pork barrels, while the parliamentary drones rehearse talking points workshopped to hollow perfection by other tin-eared apparatchiks.

Normally I sigh and put up with the tedious charade, until glancing through the North Shore Times last week an ad for a local plumber caught my eye. It featured a working bloke dressed in toilet-appropriate overalls and wielding a gigantic spanner, his persuasive competence backed by this bold declaration: “No job too big or too small!”

My thoughts leapt immediately to our government, whose ministers live by that motto and should weave it into their campaign slogans. Fresh from the big job of impotently watching the Chinese navy’s reconnaissance force circumnavigate our continent, the Prime Minister switched with mountain-goat agility to address a crisis more appropriate to his standing: Sam Jones, the American tourist “influencer” who had – steady yourselves, please – picked up a young wombat for a minute or two, then gently put it back down.

“An outrage”, said the PM, putting on his stern, statesman face to defend wombats as “gentle, lovely creatures”. Then he issued a scary challenge to the hapless young woman: “Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there,” he said. “Take another animal that can fight back, rather than stealing a baby wombat from its mother.”

US influencer Sam Jones with the baby wombat. Picture: Instagram

I’m no expert, but I’m not sure that the woman’s actions quite meet the legal definition of “stealing”, nor that wombats have property rights; and I’ve never understood the maternal instincts of a mummy crocodile to extend very far beyond guarding the nest and carrying the hatchlings down to the water in her mouth. But I’m not prime minister and don’t have the same obligation to be across these weighty matters.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, demonstrating once again his finely tuned sense of who deserves to be admitted to this country, said: “Given the level of scrutiny that will happen if she ever applies for a visa again, I’ll be surprised if she even bothers.”

Thanks for keeping us all safe, Minister, and not just the baby wombats.

Then in a rare display of bipartisanship, the Opposition Leader described Jones’s illegal wombat juggling as a “cruel act”, saying he was glad she’s now gone. Wouldn’t it be fun if, just once, a senior politician, questioned about the stupid thought-bubble of the day, said to the reporter, “I can’t believe you’ve got nothing better to ask me about than this. Who’s next?”

The attacks felt puzzlingly familiar, though, then it hit me: almost 20 years ago, in response to the death of exuberant TV wildlife enthusiast Steve Irwin, his heart pierced by a stingray’s barb while filming on the Great Barrier Reef, expat Australian pseudo-intellectual Germaine Greer wrote a column for The Guardian more venomous than any of the snakes Irwin wrangled.

“The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin,” she gloated, ignoring the millions of dollars the “Crocodile Hunter” had spent buying up and conserving natural habitat in Australia, the US, Fiji and Vanuatu.

“Whenever we get enough cash,” Irwin once told the ABC, “and a chunk of land we’re passionate about, bang, we buy it.”

Not good enough for Greer, though.

“There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle,” she wrote of the man who did more than anyone to drive a generation’s interest in our native fauna.

“Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress,” she declared, an omniscient combination of Dr Dolittle and Saint Francis of Assisi, even though these traumatised animals seemed to slither or waddle contentedly back into the bush when released – as did the baby wombat du jour, thank heavens.

Still, after the global social-media kicking Jones has received, I suspect Burke is right and, thoroughly chastised, she will never attempt to return. If only someone had warned her before her visit that in Australia you’re not allowed to touch wombats, except with your car.