IN late 2006 the lower House of the Parliament of Western Australia was debating the Biosecurity and Agricultural Management Bill, which would become law a year later after passing the Upper House in mid 2007.
The Opposition's focus in the debate in the Lower House, led by the then Liberal agriculture spokesman Gary Snook and myself, as environment spokesman, was to ensure that government departments remained accountable for controlling pests on the lands they managed and that then and future governments could be held to account for overall biosecurity across WA.
This important piece of legislation was a focus for me, because I had long felt that the management of pests had lost its government imperative and was at real risk of being abandoned altogether.
There was once a government body set up to oversee and manage biosecurity in WA, called the Agriculture Protection Board (APB).
Set up under its own 1950 Act, the APB became the bastion of biosecurity in WA because it was empowered by the act to control, prohibit and regulate declared plants and animals.
It had its own board and own employees, who were tasked with doing just that and was support by the WA Department of Agriculture.
While it was not a perfect solution to the risks of invasive species, it was at least a serious attempt to manage those risks.
Of course, the Department of Agriculture never liked having an independent body competing in the administration of agriculture and long nurtured a desire to remove it.
Using their influence over successive agriculture ministers, the Department of Agriculture succeeded in gutting the powers and capacity of the APB from the 1990s until 2010 when the APB Act was repealed and the unit lost for ever.
The Biosecurity and Agricultural Management Act 2007 was integral in the takeover of the then Department of Agriculture and Food of all the State's biosecurity functions and when we were in opposition in the Lower House, we determined to make sure those functions were not ignored.
In the debate, it was the disparity between public and private land owners and managers which drew our ire.
Private land owners including farmers faced fines of $20,000 to $50,000 for failing to control pest species, while a government department that was found wanting faced only the chance that it would have that failure reported in the Department of Agriculture's annual report, a document almost nobody reads.
This inadequate measure prompted me to say this in 2006: "If the Department of Agriculture and Food is to take the lead in biosecurity, it should do so. It should be able to hold to account the greatest enemy of biosecurity in this State; that is, the government and its crown land."
Little did we know that even this tiny measure of accountability for government managed land - being referenced in a future annual report - would be scrapped by the Upper House in 2007, so that when it became law, there was zero government accountability left.
Instead the law now allows government to abandon the biosecurity ship, putting all the responsibility on community groups, called Recognised Biosecurity Groups (RBGs).
These well-meaning groups raise funds through a tax on landholders, with the State's now sole contribution of matching that funding.
This has allowed the State of WA to ignore the pests that impact local communities and focus solely on the glamorous part - exotic diseases that are not here yet.
So the net result of these changes is a poor outcome for biosecurity.
Where previously a dedicated State government authority funded mostly by the State, but partly through industry levies, acted to manage invasive species, today local community groups have had to take responsibility for them.
There is also an enormous paradox in charging all landowners and managers the new biosecurity tax.
Obviously it is a way for the government to get out of contributing adequately to biosecurity costs, especially in areas where more than half of the land is crown land.
Some South West shires for example are 70 per cent to 80pc crown land, yet private landholders are paying 50pc of the funds.
More importantly, most private land managers including farmers undertake significant pest control on their own lands, managing weeds and feral animals.
Those private landholders now pay for their own biosecurity and also pay the new biosecurity tax so that a volunteer community group can attempt with very limited resources to manage the biosecurity on the land of those who don't bother, including lands managed by the government itself.
It is this paradox, the result of a decade's long lack of interest by government in real biosecurity, that has outraged farmers and private landowners in WA.
So much so that local governments have been refusing to provide land ownership details to the Department of Agriculture so the new tax can be levied.
Of course, in short time the State government will overcome this protest action, but it is a measure of the anger in the community that local governments have stood their ground.
Perhaps the greatest insult however is the response from government that points to some action on the ground through RBGs in regional areas and a comment along the lines of "without the BAM Act and the RBGs you would not be seeing any action at all".
Which in my view is an arrogant but accurate translation of "we your government have abandoned local endemic biosecurity and if you want any action you'll have to do it yourself."
But what about those private landowners who do not manage pests and weeds?
There we find another example of government and departmental inaction.
For years the department has refused to prosecute anyone for failing to abide by the rules and manage pest species and their political managers have refused to make the department do that which is their job under the act.
This collective bureaucratic failure means that even though legislation exists it is not being enforced.
The government thinks it's too hard to manage weeds and pests on its own State land and DPIRD won't make and isn't forced by government into making, recalcitrant landowners manage them on theirs.
That just leaves private property owners who are doing the right thing off their own bat and at their own expense to carry the biosecurity load.
This is not good enough.
