Kangaroo cull call: Allow farmers to swap drop permits for harvest tags

Fewer Victorian kangaroos would be left to rot if farmers were able to swap their authority to control wildlife permits for tags they could hand to professional harvesters.

More roos could be processed for meat, if Victoria’s culling permit system was made more flexible.

VICTORIA’S kangaroo population has surged by 40 per cent since 2018, reaching almost two million today.

The boom has allowed the Andrews Government to sign off on culling about 200,000 roos this year, with half allocated for pet food processing and human consumption, while the remainder are shot and dropped in paddocks by farmers who’ve gained authority to control wildlife permits.

Under the quota Victoria’s Game Management Authority will hand professional harvesters 95,680 tags this year, which must be attached to each kangaroo they shoot for processing.

But the similar number culled by farmers under the ATCW system are simply buried or left to rot.

Central Victorian professional shooter and registered harvester Glenn Cole said he appreciated the quota being lifted to 95,680 for 2021, but said the Government could do far more by giving landholders the opportunity to turn their ATCW permits into tags they could hand to harvesters.

“So, the farmer could go to the GMA and say: ‘I want to swap my ATCW permit to cull 200 roos for tags that I can hand to a professional harvester, so they go to meat processor rather than me just dropping them in the paddock’,” Mr Cole said.

“Those tags could then only be used on that property, linked to the PIC (property identification code).

The ATCW permit system is currently under review, due to concerns over the lack of auditing and oversight of a system managed by under-resourced Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning bureaucrats.

As it stands DELWP hands out ATCW permits for a fixed number of roos, but does little to check how many are actually shot by farmers.

Mr Cole said the ATCW quota was nothing more than a “paper number”.

Trentham beef producer Ian Edney, who has written to DELWP with a similar proposal, said allowing farmers to trade in their ATCW permits for tags they could hand to harvesters was simply more efficient for everyone.

“I’m not a good shot and this would lift the productivity of my paddocks and expand the supply (of kangaroo meat),” Mr Edney said.