Tassie 'hoodwinked'
Robert Goltl
Sue Neales
April 19, 2007
A SENIOR Tasmanian politician fears the public has been hoodwinked, evidence fabricated and sightings faked in the obsession to prove foxes now live and breed in Tasmania.
Independent Upper House politician, Launceston mayor and former regional police commander Ivan Dean believes the claimed presence of foxes in Tasmania is one of greatest financial and political scandals of the decade.
Mr Dean told State Parliament he could no longer sit silent and see millions of dollars of taxpayers' funds wrongly diverted into programs to rid Tasmania of foxes, when they could be better used in cash-strapped hospitals and health programs.
"Are there foxes in Tasmania? I do not know," Mr Dean told the Legislative Council this week. "Is there evidence of hoax reporting, hoax sightings and hoax finding of foxes in Tasmania . . . evidence being fabricated and many inconsistencies, discrepancies and irregularities regarding the alleged existence of foxes in Tasmania?
"Yes is the answer to all those questions."
Mr Dean said he did not believe the authenticity of most recent fox sightings in Tasmania could be proved or adequately verified, or that most of the "evidence" for the existence of breeding foxes in Tasmania would measure up to a proper police investigation.
Instead, he said the obsession with the presence of foxes in Tasmania was driven by people trying to become rich on generous government funding, the forestry industry wanting to retain the use of 1080 poison in forests and bureaucrats trying to justify their own fiefdoms.
In the past five years, the State Government has paid $5.1 million to set up the Fox Free Task Force and to pay for fox detection programs, while the Federal Government has contributed $1.3 million.
The Government recently pledged another $28 million over 10 years, likely to be matched with federal funding.
Yet Mr Dean believes all three key discoveries of fox carcases or blood in the past 14 months at sites as diverse as Lillico Beach near Devonport, in a chook shed at Old Beach in suburban Hobart and at Cleveland near Conara junction in the Northern Midlands, are "spurious to say the least".
"There is clear evidence that demonstrates a lot of the information about the presence of foxes that the Government is providing to the public is not right," Mr Dean said.
"Instead, once you investigate it all, it is easy to see it is a mixture of exaggeration, propaganda, mistruths, fairytales and downright lies."
Mr Dean said it was no coincidence that Forestry Tasmania yesterday said it was about to lay 1080 poison baits in state forests, just 18 months after the use of all 1080 in public forests was banned.
"How convenient that Forestry Tasmania was able to put 1080 baits back into its forests this week and say they were doing it to combat foxes," he said.
Mr Dean fears one of the reasons the fox threat in Tasmania may have been been deliberately falsified and exaggerated is because Forestry Tasmania was desperate to use 1080 poison again in its forests and plantations, to stop wallabies and other grazing animals eating seedlings.
But Primary Industries minister David Llewellyn dismissed the call for a new inquiry into the presence of foxes here as a "distraction".
Mr Llewellyn said Mr Dean was speaking a "load of rubbish", especially in relation to the claim about the forestry industry wanting to reintroduce 1080 baits.
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,21582109-5007221,00.html