Charles Pakana (Victorian Aboriginal News): On the 24th of September 2024, on the recommendation of the Victorian Minister for Environment, Steve Dimopoulos and Minister for Agriculture, Ros Spence, the government released an order in council that declared the dingo, except when kept in captivity, to be unprotected wildlife on private land across much of Victoria and on public land within three kilometres of the boundaries of that private land.

Heralded by the Allan Labor government as “setting out the future of dingo conservation and management in Victoria”, the order extends through to the 1st of January 2028 and has been widely condemned by Traditional Owners, environmentalists, ecologists and animal welfare groups. On top of that, even the Victorian Farmers Federation has cast serious doubt on the integrity of the government’s consultation leading up to its decision. 

Over the course of the past two months, Victorian Aboriginal News, after being contacted initially by the Taungurung Land and Waters Council in early October, has investigated this matter, which, according to sources, including inside the bureaucracy of the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), is claimed to be based more on politics, self-interests and electoral pressure rather than science and fact.

On both sides of the argument, for and against the Order in Council, one of the common criticisms levied at the Department and its ministers, Ros Spence and Steve Dimopoulos was a lack of substantive consultation with key stakeholders.

According to the Federation of Victorian Owner Corporations CEO, Paul Paton, the government’s reassurance that it was working with Traditional Owners, the reality proved to be quite different:

Paul Paton (CEO, Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations): Once we’d learned of the impending decision, we spoke with departmental representatives and sought to gain further information as to what consultation was occurring and provided a perspective and a viewpoint on the requirement to work in partnership with Traditional Owners on this. And we were reassured by the department that they were working in partnership with Traditional Owners on this.

Charles Pakana: It’s not really what many of the Traditional Owners are saying though.

Paul Paton: Absolutely and our experience on consultation on this issue only occurred at the 11th hour.

From what I understand, there was some discussions directly with some Traditional Owner groups those who were more vocal such as Barengi Gadgin Land Council, but there wasn’t a comprehensive statewide consultation or even partnership with Traditional Owners to undertake the process and review towards the ultimate decision that’s recently been made.

Charles Pakana: From the perspective of the Taungurung Land and Waters Council, engagement from the Department to seek meaningful input from that traditional owner group came very late in the process. According to the Council’s Executive Manager of Biocultural Landscapes, Matthew Shanks it was actually pretty much at the 12th hour.

Matthew Shanks (Taungurung Land and Waters Council):  So the government, through DECA, has attempted to engage with traditional owners. They asked a number of questions like, how important is Dingo, and what would you like to see done, and these sorts of things, right at the 12th hour.

Charles Pakana: When you’re saying at the 12th hour, when was this, given that the order in council was announced on the 24th of September, when did that briefing come to you?

Matthew Shanks:  Approximately a month before. We’d been in conversation for some time in advance of that, and we’ve been trying to build the case and the evidence around the importance of dingo as a ecosystem service as well as the cultural significance of dingo and what that can mean for the health of country by having an apex predator in place.

We’ve seen as well just a lack of real kind of nuanced discussion and understanding publicly about the role of dingo and the actual impacts of dingo, both in terms of negatively to a small number of livestock losses, but also the positive impact, again, that dingo has on country by maintaining balance.

Charles Pakana: On the day Ministers Spence and Dimopoulos announced the extended order in council, the Victorian Farmers Federation, not surprisingly, released a statement that said: “The Victorian Government’s decision to extend the unprotection order for dingoes is a common sense move that will ensure farmers are equipped with the tools needed to protect their livestock.”

What was a surprise was that when I spoke with the president of the Federation, Emma Germano, barely two months later, she was clear in her suspicion of “sham” consultation on the part of the Department.

Emma Germano (President, Victorian Farmers Federation): And I guess part of the issue is the notion that these unprotection orders last for a particular period of time and then we go back into having all of the same kind of conversations and never really moving the conversation forward in regards to long-term outcomes I think. So consultation was problematic. We’re trying to get in and have a decent conversation with government and they really left it down to about, I think it was about three weeks before the unprotection order was to be lifted or to be renewed before they went out and did consultation, which at the time I thought that’s going to be sham consultation and they’ve probably already made a decision.

Charles Pakana: It’s well worth noting that no less than four separate requests, each consisting of multiple communications, were made in an attempt to seek an interview with either Minister Ros Spence or Minister Steve Dimopolous, both of whom are responsible for the order in council. 

Yet, all we heard back from the government on the matter of consultation was from a larger statement from DEECA, buried as the last line the comment: 

“Through consultation with Traditional Owners, farmers, scientists and local communities, we’ve gained valuable insights and knowledge that have shaped our review into dingo conservation and management.”

Not satsfied and Following several weeks of  attempts to obtain an interview and discover more about this consultation,, I happened across Minister Dimopoulos on the 21st of October.

It occurred, quite by chance, in Darebin Parklands at an event commemorating the initiation of statewide treaty negotiations between the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria and the Victorian State Government. 

Yes, we clearly recognise the irony.

When I explained to the minister my work in covering this matter and the frustrated attempts to gain an interview, he provided me with the most appropriate email and assured me that it would be actioned.

Unfortunately, and hardly surprisingly, another refusal was given, proving to be yet one more instance where the Victorian Government’s commitment to open communications with First Nations was demonstrated to be sorely lacking.

It is clear that the decision to bring about the Order in Council is to appease the agriculture industry and its various claims that dingoes are a prime cause of livestock loss across Victoria. 

And There can be no doubt that predation by wild dogs, foxes, birds of prey, feral pigs and, yes, dingoes, contribute to livestock losses. According to the Victorian Farmers Federation’s Emma Germano:

Emma Germano: One of the farmers that’s been particularly impacted, his daughter has taken over the kind of sheep operations in their farm and she went to him and said, “Dad, I can’t go and check the sheep every morning and rock up to 30 dead animals.” Or worse, you rock up to two dead animals and 10 that you’ve got to shoot yourself. They don’t seem to heal from dog attacks. There’s something in the saliva that seems to get those wounds infected, and they’ll often, if they’re not killed immediately, they’ll die in another week’s time. So there is an animal welfare consideration here as well.

The fact that dingoes play a definite part in livestock loss is echoed by Professor Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife, ecology and conservation at Deakin University.

Professor Euan Ritchie (Deakin University):  They’re particularly a problem for sheep graziers and goats. So cattle, bigger animals, more able to defend themselves. That’s not to say that dingoes don’t occasionally attack cattle and they can obviously harm calves, but cattle generally are less affected. But yes, sheep and goats, absolutely.

o obviously when dingoes do kill livestock, you can see the outcome of that in the paddock, and that might be quite distressing scenes of what happens to the sheep or the calves, whatever it might be. So I understand why people have a really emotional response to that.  

Charles Pakana: And, as said by Taungurung’s Matt Shanks, [it] is well-accepted by Traditional Owner groups.

Matthew Shanks: And to be clear, I’m not denying that dingo eat livestock. Of course, I agree that that is a problem. I don’t think it’s a problem to the extent that maybe is being perpetuated.

Charles Pakana: Yet, While there is no doubting from any sector that the dingo contributes to livestock losses, the question remains: “is the dingo being demonised in order to distract from other more significant causes.” According to Professor Ritchie: 

Professor Ritchie: But the very fact of the matter is that if you think about things like sheep, we know that by far and away, the biggest cost in terms of lambs and lambs dying is weather. In particular, so really extreme like cold weather. And in some cases, bad genetics as well.

So we’re not denying that dingoes don’t kill livestock, they absolutely do. But if you look at the whole picture in terms of how much livestock they’re killing as opposed to losses that are occurring for other reasons, it’s a tiny fraction of the losses in particular. So I think we need to maintain perspective on this issue. 

Charles Pakana: In fact, according to research we obtained during the course of this investigation, and prepared by the Arthur Rylah Institute, the Victorian Government’s own biodiversity research organisation, barely 0.08 of a percent of Victorian livestock is lost to predation; and bear in mind that predation is not specifically the dingo.

According to Animals Australia, for example, across Australia, stressing this is not just Victoria, estimates that that as many as 10 million lambs die every single year in Australia, and that 80% of these deaths are the result of preventable farm management practices, such as:

• The provision of adequate shelter
• Stop breeding for multiple births
• Breed for seasonality

This is where Professor Ritchie’s comment on loss to extreme weather factors in. 

According to Four Paws, a global animal welfare organisation for animals under direct human influence, sheep are usually impregnated to give birth in winter, so by the time lambs switch from drinking their mother’s milk to eating grass it’s springtime and the pastures are most fertile. 

From a fiscal perspective this makes sense as it reduces feed costs, but the harsh reality is that newborn lambs are exposed to harsh weather conditions during winter, resulting in a lamb mortality rate of 10-20 per cent due to extreme weather.

And the Arthur Rylah Institute’s estimate of 0.08 per cent losses due to predation parallels the findings of a 2020 study undertaken by the NSW Department of Primary Industry and Charles Sturt University. 

Contained within that report was a finding that only 0.12% of lamb mortalities were primary predation deaths, demonstrating that predation is generally a secondary cause of death, with predators preying upon already compromised lambs.

There is of course conflicting research, just as any cause can point to any report in order to justify its choice of actions. For the Victorian Government, though, its own biodiversity research seems to indicate a wrong choice of action.

If we put aside for a while the facts and figures, what then of the Traditional Owners and their cultural connection to the dingo?

An important interview I conducted recently on this matter was with Uncle Rodney Carter, a Dja Dja Wurrung Elder and CEO of DJAARA, the organisation representing the DJA Dja Wurrung Clans. His comments sum up beautifully – and emotionally – the connection that exists between the dingo – or Gal Gal in language – and the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples:

Charles Pakan: First of all, when we talk about the dingo, I’d like to understand the cultural and spiritual connection that exists between the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans people, and I believe you call it the Gal Gal. Is that correct? The dingo.

Uncle Rodney Carter (CEO, DJAARA and Dja Dja Wurrung Elder): Yeah. So, in our language it’s Gal Gal. I think it’s really important maybe at the start for me to describe the cultural association. But use some examples that maybe your listeners can use as threads around connection.

So, we describe it as an ancestor. So it’s somebody then that has come before us. We have that familial connection, as opposed to genealogical. Where it rests in terms of the story, the creation, the origin. It’s an ancestral spirit. So, it takes place in geological forms. It takes form in a sense through song, dance and astronomy. And that creates a greater world connection to something that we know as a physical being that we’re connected to.

And as we’ve seen, as I think, probably a new visitor, if we look at the biology, the ancestry in a sense of the dingo, we understand that it’s new in terms of our timeline as a people.

Charles Pakana: And it’s still about five, five and a half thousand years, which is a hell of a long time.

Uncle Rodney Carter:  It is a very long time. And they’re all really good stories. They’re personal, and they’re constructive. And guess what we’ve done? The Gal Gal is our companion. And so, now, it’s something from a world that is really close to us as a people and would be at our homes, at our camps, would be part of our life ways.

And I think pet’s an unusual word when we describe things that we love as animals in a sense. It’s not immediately a pet. But for your listeners, Unk, what does it feel like when something tragic, traumatic happens to one of your loved ones as your pet? As your companion?

Wherever we go now in our discussion sort of around, I just want people to understand. We love this animal and it’s part of our family, and how does it feel to you? And for me, I liken this to murder.

Charles Pakana: That’s a pretty heavy comment.

Uncle Rodney Carter:  I know. I know it is. But put yourself in my situation. Think if this happened to you and your pet, your companion, your loved one. This is the type of emotional trauma that we’re facing. Actually, I don’t want to get too upset, but set that aside.

Sentiments such as those from Uncle Rodney are not unique to the Dja Dja Wurrung people. I heard similar stories from other traditional owners groups – traditional owners who were given scant time to respond to the Government’s “consultation”, yet were claimed by the Government to have influenced its decision to extend the order in Council.

Ultimately, There are options. Options that have been proven effective for years. Actually, millennia. According to Professor Ritchie, the use of guardian animals to protect livestock is a practice that goes back thousands of years and is more than feasible for use in Victoria to protect livestock from many predators.

Professor Ritchie: The Greeks actually wrote about it. And so Professor Chris Johnson, who’s at University of Tasmania and Dr. Linda Van Bommel, who’s at ANU, they’ve done a lot of terrific research, particularly looking at the use of Maremmas, which is an Italian breed of dog. People might know the movie Oddball, that’s the Maremma. And so these dogs… And there’s multiple breeds of these dogs. There’s Anatolian Shepherds, there’s Ovcharkas. And they all have different characteristics. So some are a bit more aggressive, so you might use them in certain situations. Some are a bit more passive. They’ve been used in Africa against leopards. So if you can defend against… To protect goats against leopards… Bear in mind that a dingo is 15 kilos, maybe up to 20 kilos or so-

Charles Pakana: A bit different to a leopard, isn’t it?

Professor Ritchie: A little bit different to a leopard. That’s a whole other level of large carnivore to deal with. So these dogs are actually really effective. They’ve been used against wolves, against bears for thousands of years. And what happened was that in many parts of the world, we killed all the large predators, and then we sort of forgot about the fact that we needed guardian dogs because there was no need anymore. All these large predators were dead. And so we’ve been doing these really draconian things like putting out lots of poison, leg hole traps. But it turns out that these guardian animals, including dogs, but also donkeys can be really successful. So people-

Charles Pakana: Tell me about the donkeys.

Professor Ritchie: Yeah, so donkeys… We love donkeys. I’m sure many people have loved Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore. Eeyore was my favorite character in Winnie the Pooh. As lovable as they are, they can actually be quite aggressive towards dogs. And it’s not uncommon for large herbivores to have a bit of a hatred, if you like for a large carnivore because they see them as a threat. And so they chase them away. And so a big donkey in a paddock, much bigger than a dingo, they can actually deter dingoes in the landscape. And that’s been shown.

Charles Pakana: Research into other non-lethal measures have proven just as effective and it took us only a few minutes to discover numerous landholders across Victoria and New South Wales that were experiencing significant success in protecting their livestock from predators, one landholder claiming to use a female dingo on her property to protect her cattle, sheep and poultry from other dingo packs.

And, while the State Government announced an additional $2 million investment into non-lethal dingo controls and population research, more is needed if it is to take this matter as seriously as it claims.

According to the Victorian Farmers Federation’s Emma Germano, significant investments need to be made:

Emma Germano: Non-lethal control measures are expensive, and I think that’s primarily why farmers often will say that it’s not possible to use non-lethal control methods. But if we want to start moving in that direction, well, we need to see the government investing there. It’s probably, I would say it’s going to be tens of millions of dollars.

If we’re to find some good news amongst all this, then an announcement made by Animals Australia on the 22nd of November sheds light in that direction. According to the announcement, the organisation’s legal team has filed proceedings in the Victorian Supreme Court against the Government’s order in council.

This is not the first time Animals Australia has gone down this path with the Victorian Government and its ongoing efforts to kill dingoes. In March 2024, just eight days out from trial, the government backed down, announcing that it would reduce the scope of legalised dingo killing. Unfortunately, as we now know, only six months later Ministers Dimoploulos and Spence have once again called open season on this important animal.

In conversations I’ve had with Animals Australia, it appears that this new supreme court action will seek to quash the order in council, arguing on grounds of it being legally unreasonable in light of facts and figures to which the government had access at the time of the order in council being gazetted. Of note in this is research and evidence pointing to the near extinction of the dingo – evidence supported by Professor Ritchie.

Professor Ritchie: But in Eastern Victoria, there’s probably a few thousand left, and that’s dispersed over different locations. So East Gippsland, parts of the Alpine area and so forth. But we also know that their genetics is declining, so they’re losing diversity in their genetics. So the North West population of Victoria is already highly inbred, like really, really inbred, which basically means they’re well on their way to extinction. Because once you become really inbred, you basically can’t reproduce successfully. And that’s the path that they’re on in Victoria. And yet we’ve got this order that’s continuing to kill dingoes, which seems to be counter to the fact that they’re a threatened species.

Charles Pakana: Are we at risk of extinction of dingoes in Victoria?

Professor Ritchie: Yeah. If we keep going down this path, yes. Because populations are not… It’s not just one population across the whole state. They’re actually isolated into little patches because of the fact that habitat has been heavily cleared. So Victoria is the most cleared state in Australia. So since European colonisation, more of this state has been cleared as a proportion than anywhere else, so available habitat is limited already. And so you’ve got these patches of habitat, national parks, etc, that dingoes are living in, and you’re still killing them. 

Charles Pakana: With the court case not scheduled for several months, across much of Victoria, the legalised killing of dingoes will continue; and our commitment at Victorian Aboriginal News is to maintain our investigation into this matter and advocate for meaningful consultation with all stakeholders.

All the interviews from which you’ve heard during this program are carried, in their entirety on the Victorian Aboriginal News website – vicaboriginalnews.com.au. They are also accompanied by full transcripts and we encourage you to share this work and help call the Victorian government to account.