Following the money

The looming spate of native wildlife extinctions Mike Seccombe warns of could be a handy earner for a federal government with a focus on commercial gain (“Droughts and flooding rains”, October 27–November 2). Tasmania managed to collect more than $50 million in federal funds over 12 years to eradicate a fox invasion that was never proved to exist, and subsidises public forest logging by more than $40 million a year. Even the endangered Tasmanian devil seems to have been drafted into the service of business, with the state government spurning the pleas of scientists to reintroduce captive-bred and disease-free animals to the mainland, preferring to sell close to 100 to overseas zoos while returning any surplus animals to the devil’s death row in the Tasmanian wild. The Morrison government seems locked into funnelling huge sums to emollient PR such as the Great Barrier Reef Foundation or drought “safeguards” rather than offshore tax havens.

– John Hayward, Weegena, Tas