The new Tasmanian Liberal government has reversed a ban on the use of 1080 poison by farmers, but the Greens have warned that this will reopen divisions and trash the brand of the state’s products.



The former state Labor government had put in place a timetable to ban the controversial poison from next year, but the new government on Friday announced it would abandon the plan because there was no alternative for farmers to use against animals such as possums and wallabies that were destroying their crops.

Greens leader Kim Booth described the decision as an “unnecessary and regressive” kneejerk reaction.

“The community stood up against 1080 poison during the Tasmania Together process, we’ve had millions of public dollars invested in reviews which recommended alternatives be developed, which is still the only viable and appropriate way forward,” Booth said.

“Tasmanians stated clearly then that it is unacceptable to indiscriminately poison animals.”

“Forestry have been able to do away with it for a number of years,” he told Guardian Australia.

“If they can do it, so can farmers, and then they won't suffer brand damage and we won't suffer a loss of market access to discriminating consumers.”

Booth said the use of 1080 was the “complete antithesis of what you’d expect in a modern society”.

“There are other measures [farmers] can take like fencing and targeted removal of the problem animals rather than indiscriminately poisoning,” he said.

Primary industries minister Jeremy Rockliff told ABC news on Friday that the regulation of 1080 would remain “essentially … the same as it is now”.

He described the previous ban as “arbitrary” and “retrograde”.

“Many people would have thought there may well have been a viable alternative,” he said.

However, “there are no cost-effective viable alternatives. It would be, in my view, very detrimental to the farming industry, those people that do suffer seriously from browsing animals on their crops, pastures and the like”.

He said no farmer liked to use 1080 but “it’s a management tool that they absolutely do need to use, particularly in areas of high concentration of browsing animals”.

In response to conservationists’ views that 1080 went against the “clean and green” image of Tasmania and that there were alternatives, Rockliff said: “Well, they would say that.” He suggested they do more research and “get out and about”.

The chief executive of the Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association (TFGA), Jan Davis, said the government’s decision was “pragmatic”, since no viable alternative had proved itself “despite the best will in the world”.

“Animal rights campaigners have suggested fencing is the solution. However, it is enormously expensive and, in many areas, physically impractical. Furthermore, fencing out wildlife is not a solution in itself: it simply condenses the population and pushes it into another area,” she said.

Davis told Guardian Australia 1080 was simply “a bottom border piece of the larger puzzle”.

“We faced the challenge in Tasmania of the fact that over half the state’s land mass is owned by the government and they are not controlling their pests,” she said.

“Every landowner has the responsibility, but they are not meeting their responsibility. Farmers can’t afford to fence all of their property.”

She said Tasmanian farmers were careful with their use of the poison.

“They don’t want their farm dogs, kids or pets being caught up so they take a lot of care to make sure that doesn’t happen. You can’t protect everybody from everything, but farmers do their best to do that.”

The overpopulation of wallabies and other pests costs millions of dollars in regions of Tasmania. On King Island the wallaby population has exploded, with 2012 estimates of 500 of the animals per square kilometre at a cost of $20m a year in production losses.

Davis said the state desperately needed to bring the number of browsing and pest animals under control, and the government needed to be involved in the discussions as “an engaged landowner”.

She suggested the government could pay agistment for the wallabies if it did not want to fence in and control the population on its land.

“Let’s have a real conversation about how we deal with it,” she said.