One of the most common question we get is when we will be open to the public. We used to be able to answer this with some certainty, but recently due to actions of the Queensland Government - Biosecurity Queensland we can no longer provide an accurate date.
We moved to this property eight years ago, with our collection of wildlife that we housed for mobile wildlife education. It had always been our goal to open a static wildlife facility, the Moreton Bay Regions own Zoo. Our initial conversations with council were that due to our rural zoning, the council was happy for us to open our rural attraction from our property type.
This began our journey, and in 2018 we were granted authority from Biosecurity Queensland to house native and exotic animals on our property. In February 2020, officers from Moreton Bay Regional Council identified that we were really more of a zoo that a rural attraction, and asked that we complete a material change of use application to operate a tourist attraction at the property. We understood the reasoning, and engaged a town planner in the month after.
We had honestly shared this information with Biosecurity Queensland during an inspection of our facility with their Exhibited Animals Team, little did we know that the department would then use this honesty in an attempt to destroy our small business. As 2020 moved forward our focus switched from a focus on our material change of use, to one of ensuring we could continue to feed and acre for our animals and our family. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic we suffered a financial loss of more than a quarter of a million dollars, amazingly we still moved forward and submitted our development application for a material change of use in January of 2021, currently running at a cost of more than $50,000.
Whilst we were focusing on moving forward Biosecurity Queensland appeared to be working with us, identifying that our DA had not yet been granted and since October 2020 we have provided them with monthly updates of our progress. In December however, their tune changed, we received a Notice to Show cause demanding a DA be granted by the 15th of June or we will have all our Category C (exotic animal) species removed. In our detailed response we outlined how the DA process works, identified how we had suffered financially due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how we are moving forward. We asked that the department work with us to avoid any undue stress to our animals. This was submitted in January 2021. We did not receive a reply from Biosecurity Queensland and their Delegate Mr Ian Rodger until March 2021. In this reply all our advice was ignored, it even contained a statement that the Wildlife Exhibition industry was only affected by the COVID-19 pandemic from March until June 2020, despite the same department providing financial relief to the industry until October 2020 and the Federal Government still providing relief to the industry to today and into the future.
We had believed we would be in good stead to have our DA granted by June so accepted their terms and continued to move forward. After our DA was submitted MBRC provided an information request, which we complied with. The Department of Transport and Main roads issued a request for no information which was great, until this was retracted days later with a new request and threats to either give them an extension or withdraw and reapply with a new application fee, we chose to grant them an extension.
Over the last 9 weeks we have been working closely to get our amended report completed for DTMR, but delays with contractors, outside of our control have slowed this. We asked Mr Ian Rodger for an extension past June due to this, he refused, we asked for an internal review of his decision and provided more supporting evidence, this was refused. We are now being told if we had a problem with the date we should of complained in March!
We are now forced to move all our exotic animals to our supportive network of Zoos and Wildlife Parks while we navigate the final 6 weeks of our DA process, our animals have been packed up and shipped across the country, only to come back in three month - that’s if this department don’t victimise us any further. This department are supposed to be about animal welfare, but would rather see animals that have lived in large naturalistic enclosures for the last three years shipped around the country, rather than give us three more months - where is the animal welfare in that. We hope we can update you all again soon, in the meantime I want to thank Andrew Powell MP for his continued support, and hope that we can see some improvement in department processes and a common sense approach used in the future.
