Media Release

Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has spoken out against the latest calls for a tourism attraction to be made of the bursting flying fox population that resides in the Cairns CBD.

“Bats aren’t an exciting tourist attraction, they stink and they carry disease. They need to be removed.”

“Flying foxes as part of the Cairns tourism experience will all be over when we get two or three tourists who die or fall ill from Lyssavirus, Nipah disease, Hendra virus and Leptospirosis, all of which are carried by flying foxes.”

“If you can’t walk under a tree in Cairns CBD because of the bats, we have a problem.”

Two weeks prior, Mr Katter in a speech to Parliament House, issued a challenge to the Queensland Minister of Health to get rid of flying foxes from dense urban areas.

In his speech, the Member for Kennedy focused on the environmental devastation and health issues caused by the proliferation of flying foxes in some areas of North Queensland.

Mr Katter described how the animal had become as pest in towns in his electorate, including his home town, Charters Towers.

“In Charters Towers some 50,000 of them harbor fairly regularly in a beautiful park that was on the best-selling Christmas card in Australia one year—the old Boer War memorial band rotunda in the middle of the park, with magnificent trees, some of them 130 or 140 years old, towering up some 100 feet.

“They are all destroyed, all gone. No-one is game to set foot in the park, because the ground is covered by the flying foxes' droppings, and they are in the trees, so they can drop their droppings on you while you are walking around.”