Media Release

Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter spoke yesterday in Parliament House on the devastation and health hazards caused by flying foxes, focusing on the fatal diseases carried by the bats and pointing out how the proliferation of the pests are affecting towns in his electorate, including his home town, Charters Towers.

“Every person who has ever contracted lyssavirus in Australia has died,” Mr Katter said, also naming the Nipah disease in the Malaysian isthmus which has killed 116 people, Hendra disease and leptospirosis, all of which are carried by flying foxes.

“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.

“I would be very loath to allow children to run around in that park. In the days of my youth, we used to play football on it barefoot,” Mr Katter said.

He issued a challenge to the Queensland Minister of Health to get rid of flying foxes in populated areas:

“When you know that this danger is there and you can remove it, and you do absolutely nothing, then you are responsible. I have no hesitation in saying to the Minister for Health in Queensland, when people contract this disease it is your responsibility to remove those flying foxes from population centres.”

It has been left to the people in Charters Towers to find ways of getting rid of the flying foxes, Mr Katter said.

“They kept their lawnmower running underneath the trees for two or three days and we now know that is one sure way of getting rid of them. Put a radio in the tree and turn it on full volume. In the case of Charters Towers park, put radios in the trees.”

Mr Katter said flying fox numbers weren’t a problem until recently.

“I have heard the pathetic ravings of the green brigade: ‘We have invaded their habitat.’ In the days when these towns were little tiny hamlets of 100 people there were no flying foxes. The local, natural species wouldn’t be seen in the old ubiquitous ironbark trees, or in the bloodwood trees. You will not even find them in the black wattle tree. But you will find them in the mango trees and the fruit trees in your backyard.

“We human beings were the species that created a paradise there, and it is the flying foxes that have invaded that paradise,” Mr Katter said.