The feral pig emergency

If a mob of feral pigs came charging across the Opera House forecourt the way they do in the photo above, it would be a national emergency before lunchtime. Helicopters overhead, every news channel live on the scene, a minister at a podium promising whatever it takes to make it stop.

Out here, a mob like that is just another Tuesday.

There are somewhere between 13 and 24 million feral pigs in this country now, spread across nearly half the continent, and they cost our farmers more than $156 million a year. They tear through rice and wheat crops overnight, they kill newborn lambs in the paddock, and they foul the same rivers our towns and our stock rely on. Families across the Murray have been fighting this on their own for years, while the people who set the budgets have never had to so much as step around one.

And there is a reason this should worry every family in the city too. Feral pigs are the perfect carrier for foot and mouth disease and African swine fever, and a major foot and mouth outbreak is an $80 billion hit to the national economy that would slam our export markets shut overnight. The pigs trampling a crop in the bush are exactly the same biosecurity threat whether anyone in Sydney is watching or not.

So let's treat it like the emergency it already is. We need a properly funded, coordinated national feral pig program, not another glossy action plan that sits on a shelf while the herd breeds faster than anyone can cull it. The bush should not have to wait for the pigs to reach the Opera House steps before the rest of the country decides this matters.