Fire ants, solenopsis invicta, are a super-pest. No country that has been invaded by them has eradicated them. They inflict burning stings on anything that disturbs them: people, pets, agricultural animals and native fauna. People in south-east Queensland have been hospitalised with fire ant stings. People allergic to their sting can die. Fire ants can build their nests almost anywhere, but particularly in disturbed soil in gardens, parks and playing fields, farmlands and building sites. They put human health, our outdoor lifestyle, our natural environment at risk and add costs to many industries. Fire ants were discovered in two separate sites in Brisbane in February 2001: some were huge: meaning they had been here for years. Fire ant experts from the USA described south-east Queensland as ‘fire ant heaven’, said they were capable of infesting most of Australia and were too entrenched to eradicate. They recommended tightly containing the infestation and baiting it heavily to suppress it. But the Commonwealth Government’s formula for funding responses to incursions of invasive species creates an incentive for States and Territories to mount eradication attempts, whether advised or not. The Commonwealth and other States and Territories will contribute 100% of funding for an eradication attempt, but nothing for a State or Territory to contain and suppress an incursion within its borders. Understanding that constraint, USA experts suggested, with more advanced baits than the USA had in the 1930s, Australian had a chance of eradicating the pest IF an area larger than the known infested area was baited repeatedly, effectively and cheaply by air. That never happened. Because, in early 2001, the Queensland Labor government won a landslide election with the promise of ‘Jobs, Jobs, Jobs’ to address an unemployment rate of 8.5% .The Queensland Government, with the approval of the Commonwealth Government, rejected that scientific advice in order to create a jobs program for four hundred unskilled workers: to search for and treat fire ant nests, and overrode biosecurity legislation by allowing residents to refuse entry to their property. Any chance of containing the spread of fire ants, let alone eradicating the infestation, was lost in 2001. To keep national funding flowing into Queensland, the Agriculture and Resource Management Council of Australia and New Zealand (ARMCANZ) needed evidence that the eradication program was working. But the program does not have, and has never had, a functioning information system to record the program’s performance. Nevertheless, the program’s oversight committee, variously called Red Imported Fire Ant Consultative Committee, Fire Ant Steering Committee or National Management Group, has continually mis-reported the performance of the program to Ministerial Councils and the public: failing to ensure the proper use of public money. In doing so, I believe the chairs of consultative committees have breached the values of integrity, promoting the public good, accountability and transparency prescribed in the Queensland Public Sector Ethics Act 1994 and are guilty of acts of official misconduct, as prescribed by the Queensland Criminal Justice Act 1989 that involves the misuse of information that a person has acquired in connection with their function for the benefit of another person. In 2001 the fire ant infestation was estimated to cover 40,000-50,000ha and with an estimated cost of $123.4m over five years to eradicate. By 2024, the program’s operational area covered about 800,000ha, with no idea of the actual extent of the infestations, but with fire ants found on the Sunshine Coast, the Darling Downs, Moreton Bay Islands and south of Ballina in New South Wales. This essay is a history of the mis-management of an unscientific National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program and the failure of governance by national oversight committees to ensure the proper use of public money, >$1b so far, and to protect Australians from the consequences of an infestation of one of the world’s worst invasive species. 15th September 2025
A history of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2001-2024: unscientific, mis-managed, failed governance.
Table of contents
Chapter 1: Why would I do this and how would I know?
Brisbane is my home and home to six generations of my family. Great-grandparents on both sides of my family emigrated from the UK to make a better life for themselves and their children in Brisbane. It is now home to my children and grand-children and I want to protect it from one of the world’s worst invasive species:
I grew up in inner-city Red Hill with my telephone technician father, my mother, a volunteer school tuck-shop mum, and my two brothers. We lived behind the landmark St Brigid’s Catholic Church, within walking distance of Lang Park, Kelvin Grove State School, Kelvin Grove High School and, in my case, Kelvin Grove Teachers College. After teaching for some years, I graduate from the University of Queensland with a degree in organisational psychology to become a registered psychologist.
With that qualification, in 1987, I joined the Queensland Department of Primary Industries’ Staff Development Section. The department had a long history of educating and training its staff through university degrees and internal professional development programs: well-regarded by departmental scientists, farm advisors, regulatory officers, admin staff, and even primary producers in every region of the State. I also worked with unit managers and their teams to improve their performance. The education was a two-way process. I learn a lot about agricultural science from my highly qualified co-workers and in 2000, I earned a PhD with a thesis examining good research practices in both the social and physical sciences. I knew a lot about good management and good scientific practice.
Fire ants were detected at the Port of Brisbane and in a suburban backyard in Brisbane’s south-west in February 2001. CSIRO identified two different types of red imported fire ants, meaning two separate incursions that were likely a decade old. The Queensland Department of Primary Industries was the agency responsible for responding to any biosecurity threat and on 1st March I was seconded to the Department’s Fire Ant Emergency Response Team to liaise with communities and businesses already affected by the pest or likely to be by any future fire ant program.
When the Agriculture Ministerial Council approved the creation of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program in August 2001, I became the program’s Senior Policy Officer: responsible for preparing program progress reports for national funders and the public – based on the regular reports operational managers prepared for the Program Director.
I had a detailed knowledge of all aspects of the program: including the fact the Program Director could not report the true performance of the program because it did not have a functioning information system for collecting reliable performance data. In 2002, I raised my concerns with the Program Director who dismissed them. In April 2003, without supporting data, the program’s oversight committee, Consultative Committee overstated the progress of the program to Ministerial Council and the public and did not report serious issues threatening it.
I believed this was an act of official misconduct and in March 2003, I made a public interest disclosure to the Premier and the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission that the program was overstating the success of the program and not reporting serious issues threating it. I provided supporting evidence. The CMC took nearly three years to consider, then dismiss my disclosure while mis-reporting and serious issues continued. In 2005, I resigned from the Department to accept a senior position in the private sector.
When I retired in 2014 the program was still misreporting. I thought if I could do something to inform the public of the truth, and didn’t, how would I feel? I updated my knowledge of the program with progress reports and reviews I accessed through Right to Information procedures then posted blogs about the true state of the program on my website. They attracted a lot of media and public attention.
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Chapter 2: But first, how bad fire ants?
One of the gardeners at the Port of Brisbane nearly died from fire ant stings. Queensland’s largest port, the Port of Brisbane, located in the lower reaches of the Brisbane River is mostly covered in concrete but the Port authority employs a team of gardeners to tend ornamental gardens and maintain habitats for shorebirds.
The gardeners had been getting stung for years. Dozens of ants will swarm anything that disturbs their nest, even accidentally. Within about 10 to 20 seconds they will seize the victim with their mandibles and sting the victim simultaneously and repeatedly: inflicting multiple stings. The stings feel like being burnt with fire – hence their name ‘fire ants’. The stings turn into painful blisters that last for days and can become infected. Some people who have been stung many times and are allergic to their sting can die without urgent medical attention.
In fact, in early 2001, a particularly conscientious gardener at the Port, collapsed after being stung. He had been stung many times before but this time he went into anaphylactic shock and nearly died. He was in horrendous pain during extensive treatment in hospital and then for a long time after, had to have weekly injections. Eventually, he had to carry an epi-pen with him all the times in case he got stung again. He survived, but only just. If this can happen to a fit adult man, imagine what fire ants could do to a small child, older person or young animal.
The Port authority submitted a sample of the ant to CSIRO who identified it as one of the world’s worst invasive species, the Red Imported Fire Ant. The gardens were a perfect place for the ants to nest. Some were 1.5 metres wide and a metre high and had taken years to build.
By an amazing coincidence, in the same week, a back-yard gardener from the suburb of Richlands in Brisbane’s south-west also submitted a sample to CSIRO. She was continually being chased out of her beautiful back-yard garden by unusually aggressive, stinging ants.
On the 22nd February 2001, CSIRO identified both samples as red imported fire ants: and, with more bad news, the two samples were genetically different: meaning they had arrived in two separate incursions and showed they had been in the county for a long time – five years at least – and they had spread.
On 3rd March 2001, The Courier Mail reported that fire ant colonies had been found on 25 properties near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast, 45km north of Brisbane, that had arrived in potted plants from a nursery in Wacol in Brisbane’s south-west.
On the 4th March 2001, The Sunday Mail reported an historical incident of an employee of Ipswich City Council, west of Brisbane, getting repeatedly stung in 1998 while inspecting a water treatment plant in the suburb of Carole Park. He said the stings were like being burnt and his body started to swell. Colleagues got him to hospital where he was put into intensive care.
On 11th March 2001, The Courier Mail reported that fire ant nests on Brisbane’s outskirts may be the result of flash floods and the Department of Primary Industries attributed a nest found at Pinkenba, on the northern side of the Brisbane River to the Port of Brisbane, to a queen flying north on prevailing winds.
On 14th March 2001, The Courier Mail reported that a new nest found at Moggill in Brisbane’s west was the result of a queen flying across the Brisbane River from Wacol in Brisbane’s south-west.
By March 2001, the Department of Primary Industries knew there were centres of infestation in Brisbane’s east and west, with further infestations west in Ipswich and north on the Sunshine Coast.
The scientific name of Red Imported Fire Ant (Solenopsis Invicta) means ‘invincible’. Originating in South America, they arrived in the southern states of the United States in the 1930s and thrived! The United States Department of Agriculture estimates there are five times more fire ants per acre in the USA than where they came from in South America. They probably arrived in Australia in fire ant infested cargo from the United States of America. They have never been eradicated from any country they have infested.
Fire ants are a threat to the safety of humans and other animals. People die of fire ant stings in the United States every year. Half the population in fire ant infested areas in southern United States get stung each year and some die. Toddlers and the elderly are the most vulnerable and people who are allergic to their sting can go into anaphylactic shock and perhaps die.
Fire ants love to nest in disturbed soil like gardens, lawns and playing fields, but they will nest almost anywhere. There were flourishing just as well in the poor sandy soil and under the acres of concrete at the Port of Brisbane as they were in a lush backyard garden in Richlands.
They will put an end to Australia’s relaxed outdoors life-style of back-yard barbecues and gardening, picnics in the park, sports and games on playing fields and play-grounds unless they are treated year after year to keep those spaces safe.
Fire ants can be a huge problem to farmers like those in Queensland’s food basket in the Lockyer Valley. Fire ants will eat just about anything, either plant or animal, including germinating seeds or developing fruits and flowers. Farm workers can get stung harvesting crops from infested fields. Fire ants will attack new-born animals and hatchlings, stinging their eyes and mouths and blinding or killing them. Fire ants will invade an animal’s food and water supply and sting it if it comes near. The animals can die of starvation or dehydration. For some unknown reason, fire ants are attracted to electrical fields and will build nests in electrical equipment like air-conditioning units and irrigation pumps. Farmers and other exporters may have problems ensuring their products are pest and disease free. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that it costs US farmers US$750 million each year in the loss of stock stung by fire ants and crops that have been infested. All up, the USDA estimates the cost of medical treatments and controlling and repairing the damage caused by fire ants is more than US$5billion each year.
The many property developers, landscapers, nurseries and other businesses in south-east Queensland that move soil, mulch and other fire ant friendly materials will need to ensure they don’t also spread fire ants. Businesses and landholders who buy in soil and mulch will have to be sure that they are not also buying in live fire ants. Businesses whose sites become infested will have the additional costs of treating the fire ants and removing the infested products.
Fire ants threaten Australia’s unique wildlife. Studies in the USA have found that populations of ground-nesting insects, birds, snakes, lizards and turtles and mammals in infested areas of the USA have plummeted. The eggs and the young are particularly vulnerable because the ants will harass any adult animal guarding the nest until they abandon the nest. Even alligator eggs are not immune from fire ant attacks in Florida in the USA.
They are invincible because they are hard to find, hard to kill and hard to contain. Their nests can be hard to find because they like to nest under logs or rocks or bricks that absorb heat. Much of a fire ant nest is underground and it can take many months before a young nest becomes big enough to show above ground level. And when it does, without any central entrance tunnel, it looks like an innoxious pile of soil.
Fire ants are hard to kill. While a contingent of ants swarm to sting whatever is disturbing their nest, including someone treating it, thousands of other worker ants will have moved the queen, her brood of eggs, larvae and pupae to a new safe location along one of a network of underground tunnels that radiate out up to 30 metres from the centre nest. Before the nest can be treated, the ants are long since gone.
It is hard to stop fire ants from spreading. Young monogyne queens, the type found at the Port of Brisbane, take flight from their home nest, mate on the wing and land many kilometres from their home nest to create their own nest: resulting in a relatively sparse, but wide-spread infestations. Young polygyne queens in south-western suburbs of Brisbane build their nests close to their home nest – resulting in denser infestations. Either way, fire ants prefer to nest in fire ant friendly, high value materials like soil, mulch, compost, turf and potted plants. Fire ants can move thousands of kilometers in truck and trailer loads of such products to uninfested areas, like new housing estates, many kilometers away.
And fire ants can spread in flood waters. They originally came from the flood plains of the Paraguay River, where their nests are subject to frequent flooding events. When they are, the ants link legs to create a living raft with their bodies, place the queen and her brood of eggs in the centre of the raft then float downstream until they reach higher ground and establish a new nest. South-east Queensland is subject to major flooding events and fire ants have been found along the banks of creeks and rivers.
Chapter 3: The Fire Ant Emergency Response. How bad was it?
The Queensland Government agency with authority under the Plant Protection Act 1989 to respond to the incursion was the then Queensland Department of Primary Industries, the state’s agriculture department: in particular, the Division of Animal and Plant Health Services, the precursor of Biosecurity Queensland, with a large network of biosecurity inspectors spread across the State. By March 2001, the department knew it had a large and entrenched infestation of a super-pest on its hands and the Director-General generated an Emergency Response Team to respond to immediate concerns and to estimate the extent of the incursion.
I was seconded to the Emergency Response Team on 1st March 2001, as the Community and Industry Liaison Officer, to liaise with residents and businesses whose properties were already infested with fire ants or who would be affected by the government’s response to them. I felt privileged to be part of the Department’s emergency response to a very serious issue.
The rest of the Emergency Response Team was made up of departmental veterinarians, plant and stock inspectors from all regions of the State who came down to south-east Queensland for a few weeks at a time to look for and kill fire ants. Even some retired officers volunteered. Even they were not enough for this huge task. The Department augmented the team with about seventy of its own office workers and volunteers from the Department of the Environment, the State Emergency Service and Brisbane City Council. The Opposition Spokesman for Primary Industries criticised Minister Palaszczuk for not creating paid jobs for unemployed people rather than disrupting the work on other of the Department’s projects. Minister Palaszczuk responded to say he would consider creating paid jobs for the eradication project: before there was any scientific evidence to warrant one.
A temporary base was set up for the twenty to thirty departmental staff, plus volunteers, at the heritage listed Animal Research Centre (ARI) at Yeerongpilly: a centre for studying diseases in Queensland farm animals since 1909.
The emergency response team was tasked with killing the nests that had been found, trying to find out how the ants got onto the property, conducting surveillance around those properties to estimate the extent of the infestation and trying to find out if there was a chance they had spread further in things like potted plants, soil and mulch.
Unfortunately, the further they searched, the more fire ants they found. By the end of the scoping phase in July 2001, they had identified two main areas of infestations: one centred around the Port of Brisbane and a second one centred around the suburb of Richlands in Brisbane’s south-west. Their early estimate was that potentially 27,897ha of south-east Queensland could be infested. They found fire ants in loads of landscaping soil from Richlands in Brookfield in Brisbane’s west, and in Springfield between Ipswich and Brisbane. And further afield near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast and in the Dandenong in Victoria in potted plants from Richlands. And going by the size of some of the nests, the team estimated the nests had probably been there for years.
And businesses were being affected. In March 2001, two small businesses, a plant nursery and a landscape supplier in Inala, had been quarantined because they were infested with fire ants. Not long after, another five businesses in Inala were quarantined. Those businesses were able to keep trading with the support of DPI inspectors inspecting everything that left their properties, free of charge. But not the nursery or the landscape supplier. The nursery folded because the smell of chemical to treat pot plants would put customers off and the landscape supplier could simply not move his supplies.
As Industry Liaison Officer I had the unenviable task of meeting with the owners of those businesses on their properties to investigate what government support there was for them. The only thing amiss on these small, well-operated businesses was the look of absolute despair and dis-belief on the faces of the owners from this bolt out of the blue off. The Department of State Development arranged for a one-off payment to those businesses to send the message to other businesses who might suspect that they were infested with fire ants but feared being quarantined and therefore, did not report them. Nevertheless, the owners of the nursey and fifteen part time staff lost their income.
The Department of Employment, Training and Industrial Relations estimated that there were likely to be about 62 potentially high-risk businesses like nurseries, turf farms, landscape suppliers and sand and gravel suppliers that could be infested with fire ants in the infested areas.
And it wasn’t just businesses that were hurting. The Department commissioned the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resources Economics (ABARE) to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of either eradicating or containing fire ants. As Community Liaison Officer, I was commissioned to produce a Social Impact Statement as part of that analysis. I did that by interviewing residents in the older established area of Goodna/Gailes area and in new housing estates in Ellen Grove.
One was an older single lady in Goodna in a high set home, charmingly furnished with her invalid pensioner. She said “I didn’t know I had fire ants. My neighbour found them on our footpath. I thought they were just lumps of dirt but now they’ve moved into my yard as well and that’s made things pretty difficult. I’ve got problems walking, as you can see, but I have to be very careful getting around the yard so I don’t disturb them. My big worry though is when my three year old grandson comes over. You know what kids are like, they just like to run around, but I don’t want him to get stung. Or the kids on the foot-path. Lots of kids around here ride bikes. What if they ride through a nest? My son-in-law mows my yard for me, but he can’t do it properly now. He puts a stick near a nest and then whipper-snips around it. And he doesn’t want to take any fire ants back to his place, so he has to give his mower a good wash before he goes. The dog is OK so far. I feed him upstairs and his food is not attracting any ants yet and I keep him in the backyard where there aren’t any ants so far. The DPI people have been terrific but they said I can’t move anything off my property and I’ve got a bag of grass and tree cuttings I can’t get rid of. I’d been thinking of selling my house because it is so hard for me to get up and down stairs, but the real estate agent said that fire ant would frighten off prospective buyers or bring down the price. So, I guess I’m here for a while longer.’
I also spoke to a couple with eight children who had been living happily for eight years in their rented their home in Goodna. They had noticed a lump of dirt in their front yard and had heard about fire ants, so they rang DPI. There were twenty nests in their front yard and one in the back. They also found out that they were one of several houses in their cul-de-sac that was infested. The Doctor’s surgery in the street had some landscaping done and consequently seven neighbouring properties became infested. They said “The big problem is that the kids can’t go outside to play. There are eight kids in the house and you can’t keep them cooped up all the time. But it’s more of a problem with the little ones. Even shoes don’t protect their feet. The ants can still get in. The other problem is that we used to keep old TV sets under the house for spare parts for the technician shop where I work. We had to get rid of them because they were on the ground and ants could nest in them. We had to give them a good wash down with a gurney before we could get rid of them.”
In Gailes I spoke to an older couple who had lived there for many years with their adult son. The gentleman said “I was helping my neighbour across the road shift some mulch and I got bitten on my legs. I didn’t know what it was. Then one day, I was painting a post on the verandah and got bitten again. The ant looked reddish so I called the DPI Hotline. I think I’d brought the ants in with the mulch from my neighbour. We have been overwhelmed with how courteous the DPI people have been. They ring up to say when they are coming and are very careful in the yard. They found a nest 40cm wide in the back yard and they found fire ants in the garage under the house. My wife is a keen gardener, but she is terrified of the ants because she is allergic. But the ants have all gone now and she is back into the garden. It is her major form of relaxation.”
Over in the new housing development in Ellen Grove I spoke to a young couple with a six year old child. They had noticed mounds in their yard and that if they touched the mounds, thousands of ants came out. They had heard about fire ants through some publicity on TV and rang DPI. DPI found one nest about 1.5 meter long on one side of their house and 4-5 nests in the front yard. Neighbours in the street had the same problem. DPI treated the whole street and the footpaths. He said, “My big worry is our child’s safety. He only has to touch a nest and a whole lot come out ready to attack. He’s already been bitten, but not too badly. The front yard is now off limits and kids don’t understand these things. My other big concern is about the re-sale value of our property. Word gets around. Buyers would be put off buying around here.”
I also spoke to another young couple in Ellen Grove with an 18 month old child. They had a similar story. Their child had been stung before they had heard about fire ants. When they did, they rang DPI who came and found 7-8 nests on their property. They said “ Our main worry is about our toddler who has been stung twice. Both times we were with him – just metres away. But he put the hose onto a nest under some temporary paving and stirred up the nest. It happened very quickly and if we hadn’t been there, the ants would have been all over him. The backyard looks like a building site at the moment because I have been doing my own landscaping, but I can’t get on with it until the ants go. I am very happy to cooperate with DPI but what is the point if nothing is being done on new building sites nearby? I’ve seen fire ant nests on them and I’ve seen soil taken away from those sites, but these sites have not been reported to DPI.”
I also spoke to a couple with three teenage children in Ellen Grove. The mother said “I kept getting bitten. I thought I was allergic because I kept coming up in these lumps. The ants are so vicious. It is not just one but can be 20 bites. They are soil coloured so they are hard to see and it is hard to brush them off. When you try, they hold on and bite more. There are just so many when you disturb a nest. Some people up the road knew about fire ants and had got DPI in. They sounded the same, so we contacted DPI too. The biggest impact is not being able to get into the garden which is really important to me. It’s been like losing and arm and a leg. The kids are old enough to understand, but you still have to watch them.”
The big impacts were the same for the all residents; concern about the safely of small children in their back-yards, the loss of the backyard as a place of recreation and the impact on the value of their property.
The ABARE economists assessed damage to properties and the loss of property values, damage to livestock and agriculture, costs to human health, days off work and costs to schools and sporting clubs in their conservative estimate of the costs to residents and businesses in south-east Queensland. Their estimate did not include the indirect costs to the tourist industry, national parks, native habitat and native species. Even so, they estimated that fire ants would cost residents and businesses in south-east Queensland $8.9b over 30 years, if they became established. Therefore, ABARE assessed a five year, $123.4m south-east Queensland fire ant eradication program as cost-beneficial, IF the infestation did not extend beyond the 2001 estimation of the extent of the infestation at 30,000ha. In June 2001, the infested area was estimated to be 21,300 ha. By November 2001 it had doubled to 43,047ha.
In June 2001, the Department commissioned two fire ant experts from Fire Ant Extension Services at Texas A&M University and a fire ant research scientist from the US Department of Agriculture in Florida to assess the infestation in south-east Queensland. After ten days of inspection they were stunned by the extent and density of the infestation in south-east Queensland. They said it was as bad as, or worse, than anything they had seen in the USA. They described the climate and conditions in south-east Queensland as ‘Fire Ant Heaven’, were ambivalent about the chance of eradicating the pest and recommended tightly containing the infestation with tight movement controls and suppressing the infestation with repeated aerial baiting.
Not wanting to contradict the local politician who had commissioned them and who had already announced an eradication program, they did acknowledge that, in 2001, Australia had access to much more effective chemicals for killing fire ants than the US had when fire ant invaded there in the 1930s. They also acknowledged that, given the early estimate of the extent of the infestation, they thought that Australia had the highest probability of successfully eradicating fire ants they had seen. But, they added, with very strong proviso, ONLY if Australia, URGENTLY, undertook an extremely INTENSIVE AERIAL BAITING program.
But before doing that, the US experts said ‘you have to put your arms around it’: in other words, you need to know the extent of the infestation. The extent of the infestation was unknown in 2001, so they recommended extending the current estimate by 2km, because fire ant can fly that far and they might have already established nests in that area that aren’t visible yet.
The US experts explained that fire ant nests can be hard to find. They can stay under ground for months before they become big enough to be seen and they can nest in very difficult places, like under concrete slabs and in rough or swampy ground, making them hard to access. Therefore the US experts recommended, rather than searching for them, treating that whole area immediately and intensively; three or four times each year during the warmer months when the ants forage, for the next three years rather than searching for them. And to ensure that every nook and cranny was treated urgently, with no holes left in the blanket of bait, the US experts advised getting as much bait down as quickly and as thoroughly as possible by aerial application: using fixed-wing aircraft over rural areas, and by rotary wing aircraft close to urban areas so that the bait could be spread with more precisions and less impact on the community.
No program that fights an invasive pest with chemicals is ever going to be 100% free of any negative consequences. Good science and good policy attempts to balance the positive impacts of the chemicals with the negative. But, in the case of baiting fire ants, this is fairly easy to do. The negative effects of fire ants are huge. They are extremely destructive and will affect people’s health and well-being, the environment and the economy. And fire ant baits developed by US experts over the decades have as few negative impacts as any program can hope for.
The baits are not a knock-down insecticide that could affect people or other animals or insects that eat them. Fire ant baits consist of crushed corn, or corn grits, 1-3mm in size, that are soaked in soybean oil that contains an insect growth regulator (IGR). The IGR used in areas close to waterways is the chemical s-methoprene which is widely used in the Brisbane area to control mosquitoes. The other IGR is the chemical pyriproxyfen which is commonly used in dog and cat flea collars. Only about 0.5% of the baits are the IGR. Infested or likely to be infested properties are given a light dusting with the bait at the rate of about ½ teaspoon per square meter (200 grams on a suburban block of 1000 m2) and the bait breaks down quickly after about a day of sunlight. When the corn grits are spread, foraging worker ants take them back into the nest to feed the queen ant. She will continue to produce eggs, but they will not develop into adult ants. Over the next few weeks, without worker ants, the nest will collapse. These baits are specifically targeted at insects and have very low toxicity to humans and other animals. While it is quite safe to walk on the bait after it has been applied, residents are advised to keep young children and animals from crawling on it or eating it for a day while it breaks down. They are however, registered for professional use only to ensure the most effective application. More recently the Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Medicines Authority has issued a permit to the National Fire Ant Eradication Program for trained operators to use the insecticide indoxacarb to control fire ants.
To paraphrase what the US experts said: ‘No other country has managed to do it, but you’ve got an outside chance of eradication. You will have to go at it hard and fast if you want to have a chance. Get the helicopters out there and bombard it. If you don’t do it now, you’ll never contain it and you will end up like Texas.’
Naturally, and critically they recommended running a community education program to allay people’s fears about the safety of the bait and to gain support for aerial baiting.
Chapter 4: Minister Palaszczuk’s jobs program and a failure of governance
Fire ants in south-east Queensland was not good news for Minister Henry Palaszczuk. Not only was he the Queensland Minister of Primary Industries responsible for the State government’s response to the infestation, but the epicentre of the infestation in Brisbane’s south-west was in his electorate of Inala where businesses and residents were hurting.
But he got some good news too. Even before the emergency response phase ended it was clear the State government would have to mount some sort of long-term program to deal with fire ants. On 6th April 2001, the Minister opened a Fire Ant Control Centre at the Department’s recently de-commissioned Animal Breeding Centre in Wacol. It was large enough to accommodate a Directorate, a Surveillance Unit, a Treatment Unit, a Restricted Area Movement and Security Unit, a Scientific Services Unit, a Mapping and Data-base Services Unit, a Community and Business Support Unit that I led, a Public Relations and Education Unit, an Admin and Resources Unit: plus parking and the helicopter space. And it was in fire ant territory with a mass of fire ant nests nearby in the grounds of the decommissioned mental hospital and a prison.
The other good news for the Minister was the support and goodwill of the community to deal with this pest. In April 2001, he said, ‘public response has been very strong with many helpful calls received through the call centre.’ Further, through August and September, with the support of the City Councillors or State members whose electorates were infested, including with Minister Palaszczuk, my team and I conducted fourteen community consultations meetings, in evenings or on weekends, from the Bay through to south-west Brisbane: in time for the program to begin in September. Either the Program Director or the Science Manager explained the threat of fire ants and how the program intended to deal with them. Often, there was someone at the meeting who had visited fire ant infested areas in the USA and knew how bad they were. They would tell others ‘Let them throw whatever they can at this thing. It is bad!’ The people who came to those meetings gave the program their overwhelmingly support.
Naturally Minister Palaszczuk was concerned about averting a potential national fire ant disaster with its epi-centre in his own electorate of Inala, but he was also excited. A primary school teacher, he joined the Australian Labor Party in 1980 and became secretary of the Inala Branch of the Party. In 1984 the Labor fire brand member for Archerfield (to become Inala), Kev Hooper, sadly died in office and Palaszczuk followed him into Parliament.
On entering Parliament, Palaszczuk aligned himself with the dominant right-wing Australian Workers’ Union faction of the State Labor party at a time when Premier Beattie was challenging ‘The Old Guard’ for control of the party. Perhaps this was why he sat on the back-bench for 15 years until Premier Beattie appointed him Minister for Primary Industries in 1999. The fire ant infestation could become Minister Palaszczuk’s greatest challenge and greatest opportunity.
The identification of fire ants in south-east Queensland in early 2001 coincided with the massive electoral win of the Beattie government in February 2001. After struggling with a minority government since 1998, Beattie campaigned with the slogan ‘Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, to address Queensland’s staggering unemployment rate of 8.5%.
Minister Palaszczuk had been in his portfolio long enough to know how much national funding ($33.5m) had flowed into Queensland between 1995 and 1999 to eradicate the papaya fruit fly from north Queensland. He saw a fire ant eradication program as an opportunity to deliver on that election promise.
In May 2001, in the special fire ant edition of the Department of Primary Industries internal magazine ‘Prime News’, like a general going into battle, the Minister declared ‘Queensland has declared war on the fire ant. We have marshalled our existing resources and are enlisting national support for what may well be a long-term campaign to eradicate this pest.’ He acknowledged the challenges ‘We do not underestimate how difficult it will be to stamp out this pest, which no country has been able to eradicate.’ He also knew this was not his decision to make.
To access national funding for an eradication program through a National Environmental Biosecurity Response Agreement (NEBRA), he needed to convince a Red Imported Fire Ant Consultative Committee, made up of technical experts from each State and Territory, chaired by the Commonwealth’s Chief Plant Protection Officer or Chief Biosecurity Officer, that it was in the national interest and technically feasible and cost-beneficial to eradicate fire ants, rather than contain and suppress the infestations within south-east Queensland.
The chair of the Consultative Committee would then advise the relevant Standing Committee, originally the Agriculture and Resource Management Council of Australia and New Zealand (ARMCANZ) later replaced by the Primary Industries Standing Committee (PISC) and the Natural Resource Management Standing Committee (NRMSC).
If ARMCANZ agreed that it was technically feasible and cost beneficial to eradicate fire ants, the Commonwealth would contribute 50% of all costs and the States and Territories the other 50%: 16% from NSW, 13% from Victoria, 5.5% from Western Australia, 3.5% from South Australia, 1% from the ACT and 0.5% each from Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Queensland’s contribution would be 10%. If ARMCANZ decided that eradication was not feasible or cost beneficial and that a better course of action would be for Queensland to contain and manage the pest within its own borders, then Queensland would have to pay 100% of the costs.
From the beginning, there was no certainty about Queensland mounting an eradication attempt. In April 2001, ARMCANZ advised Minister Palaszczuk to continue the current surveillance response and to consider containment AND eradication options. In April 2001 the Courier Mail reported that internal departmental documents said, ‘eradication would not appear feasible given overseas experience and the results of surveys in Brisbane’ but that Queensland may have embarked on an ambitious eradication program partly to gain financial help from the Commonwealth and other States and Territories.
On 19th June 2001 Minister Palaszczuk got the chance to convince the Fire Ant Consultative Committee to agree to an eradication program when it met in the Primary Industries Building in Brisbane’s CBD.
The fire ant experts from the USA were stunned at the extent and the density of the infestation in south-east Queensland and were ambivalent about chances of eradicating it. Their first recommendation was to contain the infestation with tight movement controls and to suppress the infestation with repeated aerial baiting.
Minister Palaszczuk rejected both pieces of urgent scientific advice. His focus was not on eradicating fire ants: it was on creating a long-term jobs program, and he knew he would face little resistance from senior officers in his department or the Fire Ant Consultative Committee.
The long-established separation of powers between an independent public service and a current government had been lost was when tenured senior public servants, free to offer ‘frank and fearless advice’, in the public interest, were placed on short-term contracts. They quickly learned that Ministers wanted advice that suited their agenda: which may or may not be in the public interest and may or may not deliver good governance of the public purse.
The Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee supported the US experts’ recommendation to treat the whole infested area from the air. He said there were precedents for doing that in New Zealand and that it was an option that Australian Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS) had considered for other pests. He also noted that because aerial application would be cheaper than ground-based operations that option was more likely to be accepted by the Commonwealth and State and Territory governments who would be paying for it.
Minister Palaszczuk totally rejected the idea of aerial application of bait over urban areas, saying it would upset the community whose support the program needed. And because he had already announced an eradication campaign that would create jobs for 400 unskilled people to train as Fire Ant Field Staff to meet the Beattie Government promise to create ‘Jobs, Jobs; Jobs.’
While the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee briefly held his ground in support of an aerial baiting program, senior departmental bureaucrats fell in behind their Minister and said that aerial baiting was ‘politically unacceptable.’
The ABARE analysis suggested that eradicating fire ants was cost-beneficial, if fire ants did not spread beyond the estimated 30,000 ha identified in 2001. US fire ant experts had recommended ‘aggressive containment’ of the infestation. While fire ants can spread across the ground or by flying, they spread much further and faster in truck or trailer loads of fire ant friendly materials like soil, mulch, turf, potted-plants from infested areas to fire ant free areas. If the eradication attempt failed, at least they would be contained to south-east Queensland.
Minister Palaszczuk had legislative authority and responsibility to declare fire ant restrictions to oblige residents and businesses not to move live fire ants or fire ant friendly materials from their properties. He also had the authority to allow biosecurity inspectors to inspect properties in infested areas for fire ant nest and to treat them. But he was coming under pressure from industries most likely to be affected by controls on the movement of fire ant infested materials out of infested areas. They complained about the costs in time it would take to get an inspection and the costs of disposing of infested materials. They suggested businesses might not report that they were infested if it was going to cost them money. So, Minister Palaszczuk caved into industry pressure, and, in breach of his legislation, he allowed high-risk businesses to manage their own risk of spreading fire ants without having a biosecurity inspector check their business practices.
And he went further. Even though there was a good deal of community goodwill for the program, and perhaps nervous about upsetting the public and his electorate by allowing fire ant field staff to inspect private property for fire ants, again, in breach of his own legislation, allowed residents in Fire Ant Treatment Areas to decide if they would allow program staff to inspect and treat their property, or not.
A significant number of community-minded businesses adopted departmental ‘Approved Risk Managed Plans’ for managing their risk of spreading fire ants and most publicly minded residents agreed to have their properties inspected and treated. But significant numbers did not, creating an operational nightmare that became a real drag on the efficiency of the program’s field teams.
Not only had Minister Palaszczuk compromised any chance of eradicating fire ants he had also compromised any chance of controlling their spread.
Despite the fact that Minister Palaszczuk had rejected every piece of scientific advice from the US fire ant experts he had commissioned and breached the biosecurity legislation that he was responsible for, the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee advised Ministerial Council that it was ‘technically feasible’ for Queensland to eradicate fire ants and recommended a cost-sharing agreement with Queensland for $123.4m over 5 years.
Ministerial Council agreed in August 2001 and set milestones for the program for December 2001:
Minister Palaszczuk remained Queensland Minister for Primary Industries until July 2005 when he became Minister for Natural Resources and Mines until he retired, just short of his 60th birthday in September 2006 and free of the disaster he had created.
The program he created has come under sustained scientific criticism. By the end of 2024 the program was where US experts predicted in 2001: if it neither eradicated nor contained the spread of the infestation the only option left was self-management: dumping the risks and costs of finding, treating and containing the spread of fire ants onto the public, businesses and local Councils.
And the Fire Ant Consultative Committees came under criticism by auditors for failing to ensure the proper use of public money.
Chapter 5: A mis-managed jobs program
A program to respond to an incursion of one of the world’s invasive species needed systematic efforts to find fire ant nests, treat them and contain their spread. Instead, the Queensland Government created a jobs program for 400 unskilled workers to address the State’s 8.5% unemployment rate and appointed many government officers with no experience managing a large blue-collar workforce. The consequences were inevitable.
The Sarina Russo Group was given the contract to recruit four hundred field assistants and one hundred technical officers: biosecurity inspectors, scientists, a mapping and data base team, a community engagement team, a public relations and education team and an administration and resources team to commence work in September 2001.
They were helped by the fact that Minister Palaszczuk had designated the position of Fire Ant Assistant, to search for and treat fire ant nests as ‘unskilled’ because Centrelink paid recruitment agencies an incentive to place long-term unemployed people in positions for up to three months: including many on unemployment benefits because of mental disabilities, to search for and treat fire ant nests.
They were also helped by the fact that many recently retrenched but well-qualified and competent people applied for positions of Team Leader and Coordinator.
Fortunately, the Education Department had recently decommissioned the Oxley Secondary College and, in consultation with the Oxley Creek Catchment Association, fiercely protective of the catchment of one of Brisbane’s biggest creeks, the Fire Ant Control Centre re-located to the old college, on condition no live fire ants were kept on site. Classrooms were converted into offices and larger spaces accommodated four hundred field assistants. The playing fields at the bottom of the gully became the parking area for 16 quad bikes and 135 people carriers.
The consequences of Minister Palaszczuk jobs program soon became clear. The program relied on having feet on the ground, to search for and treat fire ants, but Team Leaders struggled to mount fully functioning teams. In July 2003 they said ‘In the initial intake of staff, long term unemployed people were told to take the job with fire ants (program) or lose their benefits. Many of them do not want to be here, many are not functionally literate and they still probably comprise 50-60% of the workforce.’
In 2005 the program’s auditor agreed. They said, ‘The existing workforce has proven extremely difficult and costly to manage because the initial recruitment process did not use background and medical checks to select the most suitable candidates.’
Managing the very difficult workforce that Minister Palaszczuk had created would have been a challenge for even the most experienced managers, but the rush to launch the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program by September 2001 also came at the expense of selecting the best managers for the job.
Many of the temporary managers seconded during the emergency response phase became permanent managers. There was no questioning their dedication and effort, but an independent review in October 2003 said ‘The necessarily intensive labour dependency of the Fire Ant Control Centre program operations exposes the program to considerable risk from industrial action. The large, diverse and complex nature of the labour force requires a sensitive approach and high-level management skills and line management are not necessarily adequately equipped to deal with such matters.’
With the move to Oxley, and my knowledge of the department’s response to the infestation from the beginning I moved from being temporary Community Engagement Manager to being the Program’s Policy Officer, responsible for drafting program reports to the public and State and Commonwealth funders. I produced them from the three weekly reports operational managers prepared for the Program Director.
In July 2003, the Program Director commissioned me in to review the effectiveness of the program. I interviewed one hundred of the four hundred people, individually or in groups, employed by the program: from the Director down to Field Assistants, about what needed to be done to improve the program.
The Director said ‘We had to grow the organization rapidly and this meant we were not able to track the best and most experienced managers for the job. As a result, we have a group of people who did not have the level of leadership skills to manage a multi-million-dollar organization.’ He might have include himself in that assessment. He had simply been relocated from his position of Regional Director. He had been involved in the national campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to eradicated bovine brucellosis and tuberculosis from cattle in northern Australia, but no departmental officer had experience in managing a very large, blue-collar work force.
Co-ordinators, Team Leaders and Field Assistants I interviewed said the program’s biggest problem was chaotic management: with no sense of urgency and no planning.
Field Assistants said ‘Senior managers have no set targets. People think: We’re getting paid, so who cares? Senior managers make knee-jerk reactions: constantly changing procedures but tell field assistants that they are hopeless. Originally teams were told not to waste bait in wet weather and to tell residents not to water after treating. Teams are now told to treat in wet weather. This makes the teams look silly to the public.’
Operational managers said, ‘Senior managers are ‘old style’ managers who demand rather than earn respect. They are quick to jump on negative things and do not acknowledge good work. They believe they can improve rates of effort by laying down harsher conditions. They ask for suggestions from Team Leaders, then interrogate them rather than listen to them. This is uncalled for and gets people off- side. They yell at staff in front of other staff, without having their facts correct and refuse to acknowledge that they have done this. This is unprofessional.’
The program ran with a high rate of absenteeism, but the Team Leaders complained, ‘Offenders are always the same people but (senior management) do not take the problem seriously. This brings morale down and reduces efficiency. Clear directions to staff at the beginning of the program on discipline standards would have made the handful of troublemakers conform and this would have reduced union involvement.’
Consequently, a large, disgruntled workforce was music to the ears of the Australian Workers’ Union. The Program Director had no experience in negotiating with unions and the AWU walked all over him to get a Certified Agreement that ran for three years and prevented management from taking any form of punitive action against the work-force: even for poor performance.
This did not need to happen. Operational managers with more experience in dealing with unions said, ‘Senior management over-estimate the influence of the union and the program has its hands tied because of the union. The majority of Field Assistants do not attend union meetings. The threat of strike action is hollow, but this impacts on Senior Management.’ But the Certified Agreement did come into effect with disastrous consequences.
In 2005, the program’s auditor said the efficiency of the program was constrained by ‘certain provisions of the Certified Agreement that DPI and FACC entered into with the AWU on 29th August 2003 and which remains in force until 30 June 2006. The efficiency of the program is compromised by poor staff attendance and the high rate of disciplinary incidents. This has resulted in variable rates of effort across the program and varying surveillance quality assurance rates.’.
The quality assurance rates were indeed variable. To monitor the treatment teams’ performance, the Compliance Officer placed sticky mats on properties that were due for treatment; then measured how much bait was stuck on them. To monitor the surveillance teams, the Compliance Officer placed artificial nests on properties that were about to be inspected to see how many of these nests the teams found. The auditor said, ‘only 62% of artificial nests have been successfully identified which is unsatisfactory and alarming.’
Senior management had alienated field staff with an attitude of ‘they should be grateful to have a job.’ Later, on reflection, the Director agreed. He said, ‘We tended to view things in terms of our own work experience: ie working with professional people who have a certain work ethic. No one had the experience to manage a workforce which has different expectations. Managers treated their workforces with less respect than they should. This attitude of treating them as ‘different’ has alienated the people who we rely on to do the work.’
What annoyed Field Assistants, Team Leaders and Coordinators most was the Director’s penny-pinching approach to fundamental supplies. He had reported to Consultative Committee in February 2002 that, ‘Fire Ant Control Centre (FACC) has showed good faith and built the infrastructure on 2nd hand computers and furniture and had probably saved $2m in the first year.’ At the same time, he was alienating staff with his penny-pinching: especially on safety gear. Safety was a big issue for the field teams. Fire ant stings are potentially fatal and there was always the potential for accidents while working in rough country. Field staff said, ‘Safety should be a first priority, but because Field Assistants were considered temporary, not even the most minimal amount was spent on safety gear. The Bush Teams got gaiters, but cheap ones that did not fit. The treatment teams got cheap masks for using with the bait they couldn’t breathe through. Field Teams had limited phone access. They could only phone their team leader or their bus driver, not a property owner or FACC. Field teams were not supposed to work without a Team Leader or Assistant Team leader, but sometimes they did and then they had no way to call in an accident. Consequently, the program ran with a high rate of injuries and a high rate of WorkCover claims.’
One manager said, ‘The fact that we give funds back to funders each year does not endear senior management to staff who are running the program on manual systems and are then criticized for errors and lack of performance.’ Another manager said ‘Keeping up the bait supply is a huge and on-going issue. Either our stores are not big enough or admin is not buying in enough. Sometimes, there is barely enough and other times we have had to cancel some work.’ Another manager agreed. ‘I don’t understand the wisdom of not spending money to fix things and then suffer the long-term consequences. Team Leaders manage the resources they have pretty well, but we always need more staff and vehicles. We need to top-up staff every six weeks to maintain adequate staffing levels. If the program is not achieving rates of effort, employ more staff!’ Another said, ‘There is only one spare bike (quad bike/ATV) but at times we have 6 bikes in for repairs and only two people to repair them. They could do with at least two spares.’
The Chair of the Consultative Committee had cautioned the Program Director, saying he needed to prove that cheap options are effective. But the Program Director continued to stint on staff and bait and the program continued to under-spend. In 2005, the auditors noted that every year so far, the program was under-spent: by $5m in 2001, $5.3m in 2002-03, $2.4m in 2003-04 and $2.7 in 2004-05. The program was still running under-budget in 2013-2014 and 2014-15.
All program functions suffered from being run on the cheap, including the critical Treatment Booking Section and the Fire Ant Information System.
When Minister Palaszczuk overruled bio-security legislation that authorised officers to access residents’ properties to inspect for and treat fire ant nests to allow residents to give permission first, he created an operational nightmare that slowed down any urgent response to the fire ant threat.
He declared that all residents in the Treatment Area had to give their permission for their property to be treated. To do that, they had to receive a consent form in the mail, fill it in correctly and return it to Fire Ant Control Centre in time for the current round of treatment. The program’s Booking Team was critical in making that system work. Working without enough biros and pads, the team was making thousands of bookings with residents for times when they would be home. To do so, they had to check three data bases because a lot of data was missing, then print out maps on just one photo-copier and print out consent forms on just one printer. Doing so, they took a lot of heat off the Coordinators because they could answer most residents’ questions, but they also coped some abuse. And like the other managers, the Booking Section Manager asked, ‘If the program is currently running under budget, why are we under resourced? The staff are happy to make-do and get-by in the short-term, but this has gone on for months now. We are going into Round 3 (of treatment) and things don’t look any better and this could go on for another two or three years. Resourcing is not just about extra people. We also need space, computers, phones, photocopiers, printers, etc. We get behind because of a lack of resources.’
But one of the biggest and continuing failures was to have a functioning information system to collect reliable and consistent performance data for the program to report against Key Performance Indicators of the program’s ability to find, kill and contain the spread fire ants and to demonstrate proper use of public money. By the end of 2024, it still did not have one.
In December 2001 the Program Director confidently reported to Ministerial Council that the Fire Ant Information System (FAIS) had been developed by integrating a complete history of each property (location, owner information and correspondence, treatment and surveillance activities, samples taken and biosecurity inspections and audits conducted): with the State governments digital cadastre database (DCDB) used by all government departments. Its purpose was to enable managers to create surveillance and treatment jobs, to book site visits and inspection requests, and manage staff data: including attendance, skills and workplace health and safety incidents.
But weeks later he was complaining to the DPI Fire Ant Steering Committee that it wasn’t functioning. He said it was still not able to produce maps that show which premises have been treated and how many times. He also reported that the volume of data had crashed the server in the Primary Industries Building (in the City) several times a day. And in January 2002, half-way through the first season of treatment, the Booking Team was bemoaning the fact they could not supply field teams with maps and forms because the data-base has not been up-dated since 16 December 2001. This meant field teams could be running blind.
In June 2002, as Senior Policy Officer producing program reports for the public and national funders, I became concerned our reports were becoming increasingly vague and the numbers did not add up. This was because the DCDB, recorded land parcels while field teams recorded property details: two different ways of measuring land. Sometimes the Director reported progress in terms of land parcels, sometimes in terms of property details: making it impossible to assess progress over time. I was concerned national funders would cut program funds and I raised my concerns with the Program Director. He dismissed them.
One data manager said it was not true that property information collected by field teams was incompatible with the land-parcel categories in the Digital Cadastral Data-base (DCDB). He said the data was 99.9% compatible. It was possible to report percentages of areas treated or inspected, but it was never asked for.
In July 2002, the Program Director was still complaining to Consultative Committee that ‘The data (on the program’s progress) is as good as we’ve got. The program operates in an area of high population density and this means it needs massive data storage and analysis requirements. Commissioning the Fire Ant Information System (FAIS) has taken longer than expected. It is very slow in producing maps. Field staff have to set time aside to manually sort out daily work activities and maps prior to the start of work. The time taken to enter bookings into the FAIS is extremely slow. Surveillance data is incompatible with the FAIS. All this impacts on the ability to task staff.’ But, he promised, ‘Now that we have done one season, we now know what we need for the FAIS to provide the field teams with treatment records for properties and it will be ready for the second season starting in September 2002.’
It wasn’t. In March 2003, the system failed spectacularly. The Program Director was concerned about the program’s slow rate of progress. While there was great community support for the program – 80% of residents in the treatment areas had given their permission for their properties to be treated – but nearly 30,000 residents had said they needed to be home at the time of treatment to open locked gates and restrain their dogs. This put an enormous drag on the field teams because they had to make repeat visits to an area rather than treat all of it in one sweep. So, the Program Director sent letters to the 30,000 residents who had agreed to treatment, but who needed to be home, in an effort to get them to allow treatment when they were not home. Thousands of residents responded to those letters by swamping the DPI Call Centre with complaints about that letter, or worse, about getting the letter many, many times. One poor resident received the letter twenty-seven times! Obviously, there were still serious problems with the FAIS and many residents who had previously given their consent for their property to be treated simply withdrew it.
In September 2002, the first independent scientific review team said the program was in no position to know what areas had not been treated, what areas had been treated and what they were treated with because it did not have a functioning information system. They said if the information system was not operative by the end of 2002, consideration should be given to terminating the program.
The information system was not operative by the end of 2002 but nothing changed. In 2003, the program auditor said they could not objectively evaluate the program’s operational efficiency because of the program’s scarcity of performance measures against outcomes.
The independent scientific review team of 2004 repeated what the 2002 review team had said: the program was in no position to know what areas had not been treated, what areas had been treated and what they were treated with because it did not have a functioning information system. They added that too much information was left out of reports, including how many properties had become re-infested and how many properties had not received the prescribed number of treatments.
In 2005, the program auditor said operational managers were running independent information systems through a series of spread-sheets because they could not trust the program’s information system.
The 2009 independent scientific review team were surprised by the program’s lack of a consistent and coherent information base to assess the effectiveness of surveillance and treatment protocols.
By December 2012, the team trying to make the FAIS work pleaded for it to be redeveloped. They explained that the FAIS underpins the activities of the BQCC (Biosecurity Qld Control Centre): by identifying infested locations and tracking activities undertaken at or near those location, but its modules were over 10 years old, had cost $5.8m to date (not including hardware, software, licensing, infrastructure and communication costs) and was never envisaged to hold 22m records plus the massive amount of data generated by the remote sensing technology. They said because the system is regularly ‘patched’ it is fragile, its performance is erratic and its ability to provide basic functions is questionable.
The FAIS re-development project was suspended on two separate occasions but in 2014, it was renamed FAMS (Fire Ant Management System) and transferred to the State Government’s Technology and Partners group (ITP) to manage Information Technology and Information Management services for six major State Government agencies on a single shared network to maximise economies of scale. The National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program’s annual report for 2014-2015 noted that FAMS was still being tested and had not realised any cost reductions so far. The Program Director agreed that ‘record keeping was imperative for reporting to national cost share partners but field staff were still complaining about the cost and unreliability of the FAMS.
The 2015 independent review of Biosecurity Queensland’s ability to manage the State’s biosecurity needs now (including the Fire Ant Eradication Program), and in the future, noted with alarm that Biosecurity Queensland lacked an effective performance management information system with high-quality performance data to inform operational and financial decisions.
The 2016 a scientific review team, commissioned to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of continuing with an eradication effort or reverting to a containment effort acknowledged it could not assess the program’s effectiveness because the program lacked performance data: nevertheless, it recommended continuing with an eradication effort.
In 2017 the Queensland Audit Office said Biosecurity Queensland cannot always demonstrate it has successfully achieved the ultimate aims of its programs, because Biosecurity Queensland programs (including the Fire Ant Eradication Program) do not have specific, measurable program performance indicators and Biosecurity Queensland does not capture adequate, reliable and consistent performance data. Biosecurity Queensland has no methods for evaluating its programs and reports only, inputs and activities, not progress.
In December 2018 the Fire Ant Program’s own Risk Management sub-committee reported the program’s lack of functioning information systems, digital and paper-based, which did not provide timely and accurate performance data because of poor functionality or issues with data integrity posed an EXTREME risk to the program.
In July 2023 the Queensland Audit Office said expert advice on the feasibility of eradicating the fire ants was varied and questioned the ability of the program’s information system to collect data on specific, measurable program performance indicators.
It didn’t have to be this way: a competent fire ant program
A well-resourced program with competent management and competent staff could have given a different result.
In early 2001, fire ants were identified at two separate locations: one in the south-western suburb of Richlands and the other at the Port of Brisbane. The Department of Primary Industries managed the program in the west and the Port Authority managed its own. The programs were like chalk and cheese.
The Port of Brisbane, at the mouth of the Brisbane River, is Queensland’ largest port and critical to the economy of the state: handing millions of tonnes of exports and imports. Fire ants at the port could jeopardies this huge amount of trade. And while most of the Port is now under concrete it is adjacent to the Moreton Bay Marine Park and the Port Authority maintains mangroves and sea-grass areas for marine life and sedge grass paddocks as habitat for migrating birds.
Aware of the risk fire ants posed to the Port, The Port Authority immediately commenced its own fire ant program, in partnership with DPI but well ahead of the Department’s program, on 21st March 2001. The Port Authority recruited an ex-DPI stock inspector to manage it part time, but by November 2001, realising the pest would be here for a long time, asked the ex-inspector to work full time. The Port Authority provided a team of dedicated gardeners who did not want their workplace quarantined. The gardeners spent four hours every morning walking the Port, then went back to their regular work in the afternoon, but even then, they kept an eye on the ground. By July 2002 they had found at least 631 nests. And there was no rhyme or reason about where they were: Some areas were heavily infested and some areas had none at all. They never found any fire ants in pure sand, or in new coal or new woodchips but they found plenty along the railway line that brought wheat into the Port.
Early in the program, DPI treated the Port four times by air with the s-methoprene, an approved insect growth regulator used in the control of mosquitoes. After that, the Port team injected each nest with an insecticide. It was difficult work: managing a high-pressure spray rig holding 300 litres of chemical and a 100 metre hose. They had to bore holes in the concrete to access some nests. Naturally, the operator wore full protective clothing: but that did not always stop fire ants from stinging the operator.
The Port program showed what could be done with commitment from the Port Authority, good leadership, good workers and enough resources and the team became contenders for an AQIS award (Australian Quarantine Inspection Service).
In 2012 the Port was declared ‘provisionally’ fire ant free but has suffered more incursions since then.
Chapter 6: The first season: worse than expected, failed governance.
In June 2001, fire ant experts from the USA said the fire ant infestation in south-east Queensland was as bad or worse than anything they had seen in the USA. They were not optimistic about Queensland’s chance of eradicating it, but they thought Queensland had a slim chance of doing so: but ONLY with immediate wide-spread, intensive aerial baiting. But Minister Palaszczuk rejected scientific advice to meet a political promise to create ‘Jobs, Jobs, Jobs’ with a cumbersome, inefficient ground force of four hundred unskilled field assistants to search for and treat fire ant nests.
Incredibly, in June 2001, the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee advised ARMCANZ that it was ‘technically feasible’ to eradicate fire ants. ARMCANZ agreed in August 2001.
The first season of any program attempting to control or eradicate a newly detected invasive pest was always going to be a challenge: without the added burden of a large unskilled workforce and inexperienced managers.
The first challenge was that the window of opportunity for killing fire ants each year was narrower than the scientists had thought. Fire ants stay underground during the cooler months, only foraging above ground in the warmer months when they can take up the fire ant bait. Originally, scientists estimated that the ants would forage from September to April in south-east Queensland: giving an eight-month window for spreading the bait. With the first season, they found that the ants did not start foraging until late September, effectively shortening the treatment season by one month.
The next challenge, not surprisingly, was the infestation was bigger than the first estimate of 27,897ha: an area 1/5 the size of the Brisbane City Local Government Area (LGA) the Emergency Response Team had estimated in June 2001. By November 2001, only part way through the first treatment season, it seemed more likely about 43,047ha of south-east Queensland was infested: an area about 1/3 the size of the Brisbane City LGA.
The increased size of the infestation and the shorten treatment season put more pressure on inexperienced managers and a cumbersome workforce to get down three or four applications of bait over the whole infested area of about 43,000ha each treatment season.
On 6th February 2002, the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee convened a meeting in the Primary Industries Building in the City to review the program’s progress. The mood of this meeting was much more sombre than the one in June 2001 when the Committee declared that eradicating fire ants was ‘technically feasible’. As the program’s Policy Officer, I took the minutes.
In response to ARMCANZ’s milestones for December 2001,’Successfully implemented National Eradication Plan”, the Program Director reported the establishment of the Fire Ant Control Centre: not an insignificant achievement, that two cycles of treatment had been applied (with only three months to apply the next one or two), that surveillance had been delayed because staff had been diverted to the treatment team, and voluntary Risk Management Plans and Fire Ant Movement Declarations had been implemented.
In response to ARMCANZ’s milestone for December 2001’ Spring eradication treatments completed and their effectiveness evident’ the Program Director reported that fifty monitoring sites had been established, but no results.
In response to ARMCANZ’s milestone for December 2001’ Establishment of interstate public awareness and surveillance programs’ the Program Director reported a teleconference, in which I participated, to establish a coordinated National Awareness and Surveillance program.
The Program Director told Consultative Committee that the biggest drain on the ground force’s efficiency was the need for teams to make multiple visits to each property: to collect residents’ consent forms then to return to treat their properties, at a time when the residents were home to open their gates and restrain their dogs. He reported that 51,000 properties had been treated. He also reported that 450 residents had refused treatment. He did not report how many applications of bait each of the 51,000 properties had received and he did not report how many properties in the treatment area had not yet been treated.
Naturally, Consultative Committee Chair was concerned with the program’s slow rate of progress: as they had been in June 2001. Again, he recommended treating the whole area by helicopter because it was the most effective and cheapest method available and what US experts had recommended in June 2001. He said there are precedents for doing that and helicopters, can cover between 700 and 1400 ha per day: therefore it is considerably cheaper. The Queensland representatives on the Committee again rejected the idea as ‘politically unacceptable.’ The Program Director did say, though, that as much as possible, the program would replace the use of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) in low residential areas with aerial application and non-residential areas were being treated aerially. The problem was that, at that stage, most of the infested areas were residential areas.
The surveillance teams made even slower progress than the treatment teams during the first season. They had to inspect the 51,380ha in the 5km buffer zone around the 43,000ha of the treatment area. They too were making slow progress because of having to make repeat visits to each property. The Program Director made their job even more difficult by directing half the surveillance teams to help the treatment teams that were behind schedule.
The Program Director reported that by December 2001, the surveillance teams had inspected only 40,875 properties but, even so, they had found significant infestations at Regent’s Park, Fig Tree Pocket and Wynnum. He did not report how many properties in the 51,380ha surveillance zone had not been inspected.
With an increase in the size of the area likely to be infested with fire ants, the Risk Management (Biosecurity) Inspectors up-graded their estimate of the number of high-risk enterprises in the Fire Ant Restricted Area (those that moved fire-ant friendly materials like soil and mulch), to around 1,500. The Program Director reported that the inspectors had encouraged 924 community-minded businesses to adopt Approved Risk Management Plans. He did not know what the other 500 high-risk businesses were doing because Minister Palaszczuk had given all businesses permission to manage their own risk.
By February 2002, the lack of a fully functioning information system was an ongoing drain on the effort of all the teams who had to spend a lot of time each morning creating their own work lists before they could go out into the field.
With the size of the infestation expanding, Consultative Committee was becoming concerned about the program’s budget and asked the Program Director to suggest some cost-saving options for the Committee to consider. The Program Director made two, non-scientific suggestions.
His first suggestion was for reducing the apparent, if not real, size of the infestation with an ‘Outlier Protocol’. Every time a new nest was found the boundary of the infestation was moved to include the new nest. The more the treatment area expanded the more it was going to cost in bait, staff, vehicles and time. The Program Director’s cost-saving suggestion was to reduce the size of the infested area by defining new detections as ‘Outliers’ rather than including them in the ‘core treatment area’. He argued that this would avoid wasting bait between the core area of the infestation and the ‘outlier’ and save $420,000 per outlier. But because there was a risk that fire ants could be established between the core treatment area and the ‘outlier’ he instructed all ‘outliers’ to be injected with an insecticide as well as being baited and the outlier would be inspected two-three times each year, rather than just once. Consultative Committee was worried that the public would be confused about movement regulations due to the ‘patchy’ picture of the Fire Ant Restricted Area and rejected the Director’s suggestion. He went ahead with it anyway, believing that operational decisions were his alone to make and that Consultative Committee’s suggestions were just that – not instructions. Just eighteen months later he had to abandon the Outlier protocol because it was taking up 75% of the total surveillance effort of the program.
The Program Director’s second suggestion for containing the program’s budget was to replace the expensive corn grits-based bait imported from the USA with a cheaper, locally produced wheat-based bait with the same active ingredient.
Consultative Committee was not enthusiastic. They said, ‘You would need to prove that a locally made bait is just as effective and attractive to fire ants.’ Without undertaking adequate trials, the Director ordered tonnes of wheat-based bait only to find that it turned to porridge when it was mixed with the soybean oil-based bait and would not go through the bait spreaders.
Despite having asked the Program Director to suggest some cost-savings measures, ultimately, Consultative Committee recommended that the Program Director continue with the original eradication plan to give it a chance to work and repeated what they said June 2001,’Don’t suggest changes unless you are sure they will work, not just be cost effective.’ Again, the Program Director heard this as a suggestion, not an order and there was no push-back from the Consultative Committee.
Consultative Committee July 2002
By July 2002, the first season of the program was over and the Chair of Fire Ant Consultative Committee convened another meeting to review the program’s progress against the milestones ARMCANZ set for 30 June 2002 which were:
No longer in the Primary Industries Building in the City, the Chair of Consultative Committee convened a meeting in a ground-floor class-room of the old Oxley Secondary College that had become the Fire Ant Control Centre’s conference room. Again, I took the minutes.
The main item on the agenda was the Director’s progress report. It was hard for him to show progress while the area of infestation continued to expand with every new detection. So he blamed the Fire Ant Information System (FAIS) for not having data on progress. He told Consultative Committee ‘the data is as good as we’ve got…. Commissioning the FAIS has taken longer than expected.’ So, he said, he could not be certain about the size of the treatment area because property counts by field assistants did not compare with the data-base (though one former Information Manager said they could have been). By using his ‘outlier protocol’ and not including roads in the infested area, with the argument that fire ants could not infest bitumen, he artificially reduced the estimated size of the Treatment Area to be 33,526ha: a significant reduction on the estimated 44,876ha he had reported in December 2001.
And, without a functioning data system and good data, the Program Director reported that 82% of the Treatment Area had been treated in Round One; 93% had been treated in Round Two; 96% had been treated in Round Three and 61% had been treated in Round Four. He reported that 70,607 residents had given their consent for their properties to be treated, that 320 had refused treatment: but not the number who had done neither. On the positive side, he reported that 52% of the treatment areas were being treated aerially: though not the heavily-infested residential areas.
After the first year of treatment, the program scientists set up trial sites on 55 different land-type areas to assess the effectiveness of the bait. The Program Director compromised those trials by ordering all nest on those sites to be injected with an insecticide: making it impossible to assess with the effectiveness of bait alone: the program’s main treatment.
By June 2002, program scientists had surveyed 244 of the 900 known infested sites. The results were variable and of little use: some of the properties were fire ant free but some were not but it was impossible to know what worked or did not work because of the wide variety of treatment regimes those properties had received.
Instead, to test the effectiveness of the proposed treatment plan of four applications of bait each year for 3 years followed up with two years of surveillance to find any remaining nests, the Program Director commissioned a computer model to predict the likely outcome. The model predicted that it would take eleven years, not five years, to find all the ants. The Program Director knew that the program was funded for five years and considered it unlikely the funders would extend that to eleven years, so he made another unscientific decision to speed up the treatment program. He ordered all nests be injected with an insecticide during the winter months. The program scientists cautioned him: saying that their trials were showing that a percentage of queens, especially polygyne queens, the ones in the western infestation western, were surviving direct nest injection. But the Director persisted and changed the ‘bait and wait’ program US fire ant experts had advised to a ‘seek and destroy’ program. The Program has pumped thousands of litres of chlorpyrifos (later fipronil) into the ground with no evidence that it kills fire ants, no evidence that the practice does not spread fire ants and no evidence of the impact of that much chemical on the environment.
In December 2001, the Director had estimated the buffer zone to be 51,380.98ha. In July 2002, after artificially reducing the size of the Treatment Area by taking out roads and new detections labelled ‘outliers’ the Director also reduced the size of the surveillance buffer to only 26,327ha: half what it had been. Enhanced surveillance around the outliers added another 11,255ha to the Surveillance zone, making a total of 37,582ha but still a lot less than the December 2001 figure.
The Surveillance teams had been slow to start get started because they were helping the Treatment teams, and they had the same problem accessing properties. Even so, they managed to inspect 82,702 properties in the Surveillance Area and between them and vigilant residents found another forty-three infested properties: most with more than one nest and some with more than twenty and some more than 15km away from other known nests. This was not a good result. The Program Director did not report how many properties in the Surveillance Areas had not been inspected.
Half of the new detections of fire ant nests during the first season appeared to be the result of people moving them in soil or mulch or pot plants. In July 2002, the Program Director reported that the Risk Management (Biosecurity) Inspectors had assessed 2,937 businesses and 1572 community-minded businesses had gone onto risk management plans. The Program Director could not report how many high-risk businesses there were in the Treatment Area and what those not on risk-management plans were doing to mitigate their risk of spreading fire ants because Minister Palaszczuk had allowed them to self-manage their risk. Obviously, some businesses and residents were spreading fire ants.
The last item on the agenda of Consultative Committee’s meeting in July 2002, was how to meet Ministerial Council’s requirement that the program receives ‘Favourable reports from independent …audits…..of all Fire Ant program elements.’ I was shocked when the Chair questioned the need for an independent audit. The Chair said, ‘Reporting to the States has been good. Transparency is good.’ I could not believe that he could not see through the selective statistics and did not question what was not being reported. ‘This Committee,’ the Chair continued, ‘should be able to produce an audit from the reports we’ve got this time and from what we’ve seen this visit…There is no need for some other group to do this because the Committee is not part of the Fire Ant Control Centre so is independent of it.’
This was an amazing statement by the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee and it deepened my concern that he was failing to provide the good governance of the program on behalf of national funders: the Commonwealth and all State and Territory governments. The Fire Ant Consultative Committee which he chaired, was the most influential group in advising ARMCANZ that the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program was or remained technically feasible and cost-beneficial. He knew Minister Palaszczuk had rejected sound scientific advice as a basis for the program and still reported to ARMCANZ that the program remained technically feasible and cost-beneficial.
He had listened to the Program Director’s selective use of statistics to paint an unreal picture of the program’s progress and yet declared that reporting was transparent and that progress was good and he intended to report that to ARMCANZ Fortunately, other Fire Ant Consultative Committee members did not think that Consultative Committee was sufficiently independent of the Fire Ant Control Centre to conduct an independent audit and insisted one was conducted.
Chapter 7: The first science review 2002: mis-management and failed governance.
The Program Director was ahead of the Consultative Committee and had already commissioned a Scientific Review Team (SRT 2002) of two scientists to conduct the first independent review of the program, ‘to take a wider view of all part of the program,’ One was one of the United State fire ant experts who had inspected the infestation in 2001. The other was a scientist from the Western Australian Department of Agriculture who was member of the program’s Scientific Advisory Panel.
The SRT 2002’s terms of reference were to ‘provide an assessment of progress and the long-term outlook for the program and recommend any necessary alteration…and to review treatment, surveillance and containment activities.’ To do so, between 2-6 September 2002, they met with all program managers, spoke to a lot of program staff, visited several field sites and reviewed the relevant documents I had collated for them.
I have worked with scientists for many years, and I know the fierce passion they feel for their work rarely shows through in their very rational scientific papers or reports. The SRT 2002 was impressed with how quickly the Fire Ant Control Centre, with 500 staff and a massive fleet of vehicles had been created. But they felt the need to remind the Program Director that fire ants are a serious problem! ‘Uncontrolled fire ants could end up affecting all Australians’ they said and ‘The fire ant populations in Brisbane rivals the worst-case scenarios in other parts of the world’. And the program’s lack of any sense of urgency was the main reason it could fail.
In September 2002, the SRT 2002 said after one year of treatment and surveillance efforts, they were unable to determine whether this eradication attempt would succeed because of:
And made 23 recommendations for addressing them.
Finally, they said if the ants were not virtually eradicated by the end of 2004 because of those problems the program should be terminated and planning should commence immediately for changing the focus of the program from eradication to containment, based on integrated pest management principles such as implementation of biological control methods.
The Program Director’s immediate response was to complain to the Chair of the Fire Ant Consultative Committee ahead of the Committee’s review of the report in December 2002. I had been amazed in July when the Consultative Committee Chair said the program did not need to be independently audited because Consultative Committee was sufficiently independent of the program. By November 2002 I knew for sure the Chair,was not.
The Program Director complained to the Chair that the SRT 2002 had had gone beyond it brief to make recommendations for when the program should be terminated, which he said, challenged the authority of the Consultative Committee to determine what circumstances should terminate the program. And he complained that their report was ‘emotive.’
On 3rd December 2002, the Fire Ant Consultative Committee met to consider the report of the program’s first independent scientific review team in a class-room at the re-purposed Oxley Secondary College. Only the Western Australian scientist was present. His partner from the USA had returned home but he assured the meeting that they were in agreement. Consultative Committee members and program operational managers attended the room. I took the minutes.
The Program Director reported that the Treatment Area now 46,861ha, only 2000 ha more than in December 2001, but not how much had been treated, only that 82,688 residents had given consent for their properties to be treated. He reported that 68,485 properties outside the Treatment Area had been inspected during the first year and 47,900 so far, in the second season, not the percentage, but that 71 properties outside the main Treatment Area were found to be infested with fire ants. He blamed poor results on the Commonwealth not approving the use of chemicals in time and not having the funds to appoint staff. In 2001, the program was underspent by $5m, by $5.3m in 2002-03, by $2.4m in 2003-04 and by $2.7 in 2004-05.
The Program’s Operational Manager gave a Power-Point response to the SRT2002’s 23 recommendations and said the program did not support all of them.
The SRT2002 had two ‘red flag’ issues which they considered were serious enough to question continuing the program. The first was the lack of a functioning information system. The Program Director explained that the program was taking its time to develop an information system that would meet the requirements of the program. It never did.
The second ‘red flag’ was the program’s lack of urgency with serious delays in treating known infested areas. Nests detected in February 2001 were not treated until April 2002. They said, ‘treatment of all land parcels within the Treatment area should be ‘completed midway through the next treatment cycle (ie early 2003)’ That could not happen because Minister Palaszczuk had given residents the option to refuse treatment and nearly four hundred had. The best the Program Director could do was to inspect the properties that had refused treatment.
The SRT2002 team was concerned about the Program Director by-passing the advice of the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) on at least two issues. One was commissioning the production of a cheaper, wheat-based bait to replace the expensive corn-based bait imported from the USA and ordering tonnes of it without telling the SAP and without trailing it. When it was mixed with the chemical-laced soil bean oil it turned to porridge and would not go through the bait spreaders.
The second issue was the Program Director’s decision to change the scientifically advised, ‘bait and wait’ treatment regime: laying down bait attractive to foraging ants who would feed it to their queen to make her fertile and eventually the colony would collapse. The Program Director believed he could speed up the eradication of the infestation with a ‘seek and destroy’ approach by injecting an insecticide into all active nests: a practise used in the USA only as a last resort because it likely causes the nest to split and spread. The compliant Scientific Advisory Panel had agreed for nests to be injected, but not those on the program’s 33 testing sites because the program needed to know if bait treatments alone worked because that would be the treatment of 75% of the infested area.
Almost from the beginning of the program, fire ants were returning to properties that had been treated. The Program Director did not report them: only new infestations found outside the treatment boundaries. There was no way to know if the baiting regime alone worked.
The Chair reminded the Program Director of the disaster with of the wheat-based bait. The Program Director reminded the Consultative Committee that that SAP has supported the decision to use individual nest injections. He said he was facing practical reality and did not always have time to be technically correct. And there was no need for monitoring sites because overseas data showed the baits worked. He said computer modelling showed the current program would leave a tail of infestation after the five-year program had ended, so he was injecting every nest to reduce that tail. And that the argument was academic now because all the nests had been injected and outliers will continue to be injected. But he assured Consultative Committee that the program was trying to assess the effectiveness of IGRs alone, admitting that would be difficult because the data management system did not contain the full treatment histories of each property.
The SRT2002 continued to push the Program Director to increase the use of helicopters to spread the bait because large, infested areas can be treated quickly, it can apply bait to all areas and is the least costly method of application. They noted that only 51% of the treatment area was being treated by air and said not using more aerial methods gave credence to the argument the eradication program was just a jobs program. The Program Director agreed to attempt to gain agreement from residents in some rural/residential blocks currently being treated by All Terrain Vehicles
The SRT2002 was appalled that Queensland was allowing the movement of high-risk items (eg soil, mulch and potted plants) to other parts of Queensland and to other States without mandatory treatments. This was the most likely cause of long-distance spread of this pest in Australia. The SRT2002 recommended putting in place the same sort of movement controls used in the USA.
The Program Director acknowledge that half of the new detections were the result of people moving fire ants, but he had his hands tied. Although it was an offence to move a live fire ant in Queensland, Minister Palaszczuk had declared that potentially high-risk businesses could monitor themselves. The Program Director said any protocols should not decrease cooperation and increase non-compliance. The half-way measure was for community minded businesses to adopt voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans. He reported that 1954 community minded businesses had done so, but he did not know how many high-risk businesses operated in the treatment area.
In September 2002, the SRT2002 said after one year of treatment it was too early to determine if an eradication attempt would succeed, but if by the third year of the program (winter 2005) active infestations remained, the eradication effort will have failed. Therefore, the SRT2002 strongly recommended planning for an alternative approach now, rather than later: such as integrated pest management using biological and other suppression methods.
Both the Chair and the Program Director rejected that suggestion outright. The Director said the funding was only for an eradication program and biological control is only a suppressant and does not eradicate them. The Chair agreed saying the program was focussed on eradication and looking for biological control options would be a distraction.
That brought the Consultative Committee’s assessment of the first independent scientific review of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program to an end. The Chair accepted the Director’s claim that some of the SRT’s recommendation were outside its terms of reference and not practical and accepted the Program Director’s assurances about others. In summation he said the science report was positive, the program had made good progress to date, a number of recommendations had already been addressed and there was no appearance at the moment that the program was at risk of failure.
I, for one, was stunned by the Chair’s summation. It was clear from the SRT2002 report that serious issues were threatening the program.
There were just two more items for the meeting to address. Having spent a good part of the meeting strongly asserting his authority to make ‘practical’ decisions that might not necessarily be ‘technically’ correct, the Program Director asked the Committee to approve reversing one of his previous ‘practical’ decisions that had been a disaster: his ‘Outlier Protocol’.
The rapidly expanding treatment area did not look good in reports and was becoming increasingly costly. To reign in both the extent and the cost, the Director, with the support of Scientific Advisory Panel, had created an Outlier Protocol.
Instead of extending the boundaries of the treatment area, new detections would be marked off as separate ‘outlier sites’. They would be treated separately and the land around them would be inspected twice each year instead of once. The protocol certainly reduced the size of the treatment area but it hugely increased the surveillance area. The area around the outliers became twice as large as the surveillance zone around the main treatment area and 75% of the program’s surveillance effort was going into inspecting the outlier sites. The Committee agreed for the Program Director to disband his Outlier Protocol.
The final item on the agenda was how to release the SRT2002’s ‘emotive’ report. The Program Director and the Chair did not like the SRT2002 saying that quite a number of problems were ‘severely threatening’ the program and if they could not be fixed, the program should be ‘terminated.’ The meeting agreed for the Program Director and the Chair to negotiate with the reviewers to change ‘terminated’ to ‘reviewed immediately’ or ‘re-directed.’
Nevertheless, they reported, ‘after one year of treatment and surveillance efforts (September 01 to September 02) the SRT is unable to determine whether success will be achieved in carrying out this eradication attempt….(because) the Fire Ant Control Centre of the Program is no position to know, with any degree of certainty, what areas have not been treated, what areas have been treated and what they were treated with…. and if the situation cannot be rectified immediately then serious consideration should be given to the termination of the program.’ They made 23 recommendations for fixing problems and said, ‘If the ants were not virtually eradicated by the end of 2004 the program should change its focus from eradication to containment.’
In April 2003, the Ministerial Council met in Brisbane. Consultative Committee reported that the program had received a favourable report from the SRT2002 who believed the results of the first year indicated that eradication was possible. The review team made 23 recommendations for improving the program. The program was aware of most of the issues and had addressed most of them and the program had made satisfactory progress against the first two milestones: that treatment is providing acceptable levels of control of fire ants and no significant infestations have been found in surveys outside the known infested areas in Queensland or elsewhere in Australia.
I became deeply concerned about the success of a program I so strongly supported because Consultative Committee would not hold the program to account, and because the program was not reporting serious operational managers were raising in November 2002: ie
But what finally convinced me that the program did not have a chance was my visit to Blunder Creek in the summer of 2002-03. Program scientists took me to inspect the infestation in the wetlands of Blunder Creek, a major tributary of Oxley Creek, itself a major tributary of the Brisbane River and close to the Fire Ant Control Centre. I was shocked by the sight of numerous wire stakes topped with luminous flag spread was throughout the wetlands. What shocked me even more was the fact that program records said the wetlands had been fully treated. That meant either the area had not been treated and the records were wrong, or not treated properly or the treatment didn’t work: and there was no way of knowing which was true.
At that point I lost any confidence in the program. I had raised my concerns with the Program Director and the Director-General and nothing changed. I knew Consultative Committee would not direct the program to change. I despaired for all Australians, particularly the generation of my grand-children. I decided I had to do what I could to remediate the program, or live regretting not doing something when I could have at least tried. That meant making a public interest disclosure to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission: blowing the whistle on the program mis-reporting to the public and national funders.
Chapter 8: Blowing the whistle.
This chapter is based on my submission to the review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2010 by the Honourable Alan Wilson KC in 2023, entitled ‘Is it even possible to blow the whistle in Queensland?’
The Queensland Government Public Interest Disclosure Policy said public servants have an ethical responsibility to report suspected misconduct. I believed program reports to the public and national funders that over-stated the success of the program and did not report serious issues threatening it was indeed official misconduct, but I feared reporting to those responsible for reporting.
Queensland Whistleblowers Protection Act 1994 provided special protection for a public officer to makes a public interest disclosure to a public sector entity of official mis-conduct as defined by the Queensland Criminal Justice Act 1989. The Act required agencies to establish procedures to protect their officers from reprisal which is unlawful and a person who suffers detriment may be entitled to damages. The Act says a person may also make a public interest disclosure to an entity about a reprisal taken against the person for making a disclosure.
The Queensland Criminal Justice Act 1989 defined official misconduct, as the conduct of a person that adversely affects the honest and impartial discharge of the functions of a unit of public administration or involves the misuse of information that a person has acquired in connection with their function for the benefit of another person. A public officer may disclose the improper management of public funds and dangers to public health or the environment.
I made my initial disclosure to the Office of the Premier who advised me to lodge it with the Crime and Misconduct Commission. I did so on 26th March 2003 and said ‘I wish to make a public interest disclosure under the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1994, that the public, the Parliament, the Premier, the Governor and the Commonwealth and other States and Territories are being misled by reports that over-state the success of the program by omitting to report serious issues that continue to threaten the success of the program.’ I supported my disclosure with a copy of the program’s draft report to Ministerial Council scheduled for April 2003: inserting the issues reported by operational managers at the time but not included in the report.
In 2001, the Queensland government created the Crime and Misconduct Act 2001 ‘to continuously improve the integrity of, and reduce the incidence of misconduct, in the public sector’ and established a permanent commission called the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) to help units of public administration deal effectively and appropriately with misconduct.’
The CMC’s method for preventing misconduct in units of public administration was to provide them with advice and training. The CMC’s method for ensuring misconduct was dealt with appropriately in a unit of public administration was by co-operating with the unit or devolving authority to it. The Act effectively legislates for Caesar to investigate Caesar and gives no consideration to the level of the public official accused of official misconduct.
From its beginning, the CMC was criticized for requiring units of public administration to investigate themselves. The CMC came to an ignominious end in May 2011 when it was discovered the Commission had illegally destroyed documents and made sensitive documents from the Fitzgerald Inquiry available to the public. The subsequent review of the CMC in 2012 was scathing and in 2014, it was replaced with the Crime and Corruption Commission.
In the light of the CMC’s history, the performance of the CMC in investigating my disclosure is not surprising.
Managing a whistleblower – Change the disclosure
On 13th June 2003, I received a letter from the CMC to say it did not intend to investigate my disclosure. The CMC had changed the terms of my disclosure from the department misreporting to the public and national funders of the fire ant program, to the ‘Alleged Official Misconduct by the Director of the Fire Ant Eradication Program’. This was not my disclosure and a Program Director would never be responsible for reporting to national authorities.
When I complained, the CMC attempted to justify its decision not to investigate my disclosure by claiming it would be an unjustifiable use of resources because there had been a scientific review of the program in September 2002. The CMC concluded by saying it was the department’s responsibility to protect me from reprisals and my only option for further action was to disclose to the Director-General of the Department.
I did so on 18th June 2003. I reported two things: the result of my review of the operations of the program, commissioned by the Program Director, and my public interest disclosure to the CMC. He was shocked. I sent him both my report on the operations of the program and my public interest disclosure to the CMC with the evidence I provided to support it. On 21st July 2003 he acknowledged that I had made a public interest disclosure as defined by the Whistlblowers Protection Act 1994, acknowledge me as a whistleblower, and at my request, removed from the program. In accordance with the Crime and Misconduct Act 2001, and the Public Service Act 1996, the Director-General appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an independent investigation of my disclosure and went on leave from 1st August 2003 for five weeks and was replaced with an Executive from the Office of the Public Service Commissioner for the period of the investigation.
I met with the PWC investigator on 24th July 2003 to discover he had only been given my report on the operations of the program, not the details of my public interest disclosure. I told the investigator that while I had evidence of what operational managers were reporting to the Fire Ant Program Director and what the department was reporting to Ministerial Council, I did not know what the Program Director had reported to the department’s Fire Ant Program Steering Committee. On 1st August 2003 I was given access to the minutes of Steering Committee meetings to compare operational managers’ reports with departmental reports to Ministerial Council. I completed by report on 12th August 2003 and detailed six significant issues impacting the program that the department had not reported to Ministerial Council.
The investigator acknowledged that I had presented the facts succinctly and the six allegations may be valid, but said his investigation had been limited to whether the true situation at the program was being reported to the department’s Fire Ant Program Steering Committee. The Chair of the Fire Ant Program Steering Committee acknowledged he was aware of all six issues: none of which were ever reported to Ministerial Council. This was when I became aware that both the Department and the CMC had changed the terms of my disclosure.
I made a second public interest disclosure to the CMC alleging the department had interfered in an independent investigation of my disclosure by changing the terms of my disclosure: from the department mis-reporting to the public and national funders to mis-reporting within the department.
Managing a whistleblower- Shoot the messenger
I suffered the consequences of blowing the whistle on the Department mis-reporting the fire ant program, but I was not the first to go. By February 2004, with most of his working life in the department, the Director-General was removed from the Department.
When I disclosed to the Director-General, I asked him to remove me from the fire ant program. He placed me in a position back in the department for which I was grateful: but it was only until 11th July 2004. And although I held a substantive position within the Directorate of Agriculture, on 25th June I was registered for re-deployment. I pushed back knowing I had a substantive position and that registering me for re-deployment after I had made a public interest disclosure was illegal.
The department’s next strategy for was to prove that I was surplus to the department’s requirements, despite four managers accepting my offer to work for them. To prove that, in October and November, I was required to apply for two positions within the Department where the selection panels found I did not meet the requirements of the positions. I pushed back again. These interviews were in breach of the department’s Deployment and Re-deployment Directive which required deployees to be assessed on their capacity to meeting the selection criteria of the position, not the specific requirements of a position. I also questioned the authority of the General Manager who was instructed to register me for re-deployment to do so. Only an officer at SES Level 1 had that authority. I lodged a third public interest disclosure to the CMC that the department was mounting a campaign of reprisal against me.
Suddenly, in March 2005, I was restored to my substantive position of Senior Program Officer within the Directorate of Agriculture and given work, but I remained registered for re-deployment.
I believed the Department was in breach of the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1994 and I could have continued to fight back, instead I resigned on 6th May 2005 to take up a senior position in the private sector.
The CMC
When I received a copy of the PWC report on 11th December 2003, I lodged a second complaint with the CMC that the department had interfered in an independent investigation of my public interest disclosure by changing my disclosure from the department misreporting to the public and national funder to the Director of the Fire Ant Program mis-reporting to the department’s Fire Ant Steering Committee and that the Chair of the committee was aware of those issues that were not reported.
The CMC Commissioner replied on 20th January 2004, repeating the false disclosure, said he could not direct how the department implemented the program, and would advise me ‘in due course.’ On the same day, I wrote to the Premier. His office advised me it was up to the Director-General to take action, if any, in response to the PWC report. And on 9th March 2004, the Premier’s office wrote to say the Premier had full confidence in the CMC’s investigation and it was not appropriate for him to act.
In early April 2004, the CMC informed me the new Director-General had fulfilled the Commission’s request for documents the departments had quarantined from the PWC investigator. I expressed to the CMC my doubts about the department’s willingness to provide all relevant files. The CMC then asked me to list what evidence I thought the CMC should be accessing. I did so on 14th May 2004: my original disclosure, the draft 2003 report to the Ministerial Council, my taped interview with the CMC investigator, the report I had prepared for the PWC investigator – identifying six significant issues reported by operational managers but not reported to Ministerial Council, and the PWC’s final report in November 2003 where the Chair of the Fire Ant Program acknowledged he was aware of the issues not reported to Ministerial Council. That got me the first of three interviews with a Senior Legal Officer in the CMC on 20th May 2004.
I repeated all my evidence and added that mis-reporting to Ministerial Council had secured funding for a program that did not know the extent of the infestation, knew that treatment was not working and knew that fire ants were spreading out of control, for another year. When I met with the Senior Legal Officer again on 25th June 2004, he said he had substantiated my claim that the department had interfered in the PWC investigation of my claim and would report to his superiors.
By 31st August 2004, I had heard nothing from the CMC and wrote to complain about the inordinate amount of time the Commission was taking to investigate an extremely time-sensitive issue and concluded by holding the CMC, in part responsible for the success or failure of the program. I sent a copy to the Premier who replied on 8th September that it was not appropriate for him to intervene in the CMC’s investigation.
But I got a response from the Commissioner. On 1st September 2004, the Senior Legal Officer advised me he had delivered his report to the Assistant Commissioner, Misconduct and the Senior Legal Officer invited me to another meeting on 7th September 2004 to brief me on his superiors’ consideration of my matter and to seek more information about the Executive Director of Corporate Capability’s interference with the independent investigation.
I was not prepared for that line of questioning. I replied on 9th September 2004 that a Consultant from Corporate Capability had been appointed the department’s Liaison Officer between the CMC and the PWC investigation and who had provided the investigator with only my report on the operation of the fire ant program: not my evidence of the Department mis-reporting to Ministerial Council. I also noted that the Executive Director of Corporate Capability is responsible for implementing the department’s HR Standard of Supporting and Protecting Whistleblowers when I was registered for re-deployment.
The Senior Legal Officer forward that information to the CMC’s Assistant Commission of 22nd September 2024 and advised me the CMC had requested the new Director-General to make the PWC investigator available to be interviewed and to advise what action the Department had taken to protect me from reprisal. He added that he did not expect a speedy response from the Department, but I was encouraged by his course of action.
On 8th November 2004, the new Director-General replied to the CMC’s request. He said I had requested the previous Director-General to not identify me or my disclosure, for my own protection. I made no such request. It was the Director-General who strongly directed me not to repeat my disclosure and to give a false reason for leaving the Fire Ant Program. He said my previous position had been declared surplus to requirements, which was not true.
I was very pleased with the Commissioner’s actions but disappointed that he retired in 2004 after overseeing a rapid increase in the number of complaints of official misconduct being reported to the Commission.
In January 2005, the new Commissioner advised me he was seeking information from the department regarding my concern that the department had changed the terms of my disclosure for the PWC investigation and that the CMC had interviewed the PWC investigator in December 2004, but did not reveal what he said. By the 31st of March 2005, I had heard nothing from the CMC and wrote to the Commissioner to spell out the consequences of the delay – certain failure of the Fire Ant Program, the Department securing national funding on the basis of misleading reports and a stressful campaign of reprisal against me. He replied on 28th April with a draft response to my disclosures for my comments which I supplied and which he ignored.
The CMC’s final report: 17 November 2005.
Two years and eight months after I had made a disclosure about a time sensitive program, I received the final letter from the Commissioner titled ‘Your concerns about the fire ant eradication program and an alleged campaign of reprisal against you as a whistleblower.’
All the CMC had to do to investigate my claim of the department mis-reporting to Ministerial Council was to compare the list of six significant issues, reported by operational managers and acknowledged by the Chair of the department’s Fire Ant Program with the department’s reports to Ministerial Council. The CMC never did.
Referencing the disclosure I made on 11th December 2003 that the department had interfered in an independent investigation of my original disclosure, the Commissioner wrote ‘I am not satisfied that it discloses evidence capable of supporting the view that the relevant officers of the department reported in a manner that was other than honest and impartial or as required by the funding bodies. Accordingly, the Commission does not intend to take any further action with respect to your public interest disclosure of possible official misconduct with respect to alleged improper reporting.’
He attempted to justify his decision by saying program reports on the department’s website was evidence the representatives of the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments were aware of the issues I had raised, even though none of the six significant issues identified during the PWC investigation ever appeared in those reports.
He also questioned my ability to produce reports ‘to high level entities such as the National Re Imported Fire Ant Consultative Committee’. He said in my role at the Fire Ant Control Centre I was not aware of what the reporting requirements were. Having attended almost all of those meetings as Senior Policy Officer and taken the minutes of some, I was very aware of the specific milestones imposed on the program by Ministerial Council.
The Commissioner’s response to my claim of a campaign of reprisal against me repeated the department’s defence. He said declaring me a deployee was not an act of reprisal even though I held a substantive position within the department and I was registered for re-deployment after I had made a public interest disclosure. And the fact the General Manager who was instructed to register me for re-deployment did not have the delegated authority to do so, was a mere administrative error.
The Commissioner concluded by complaining how hard and complex I had made it for the CMC to investigate, that the CMC had dedicated considerable resources to examining possible official misconduct and possible taking of reprisal against me and the CMC would take no further action.
In November 2005, I wrote to the Commissioner to say it was too late to save the Fire Ant Program which will result in a monumental ecological and economic disaster for Australia, and the CMC must bear some responsibility for this disaster.
On 16th December 2005, I complained to the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Commission, responsible for the performance of the Commission. The Chairperson replied on 16th February 2006, echoing the words of the CMC Commissioner.
I complained to the Queensland Ombudsman who replied that it did not intend to take any further actions because it would be substantially the same as what the CMC had done.
On 20th April 2010 I wrote to all the members of the Natural Resources Management Ministerial Council about the fire and program mis-reporting for seven years. On 28th June 2010, an Executive Director from the Australian Department of Agriculture replied on behalf of the Minister to say the program had had many independent reviews – failing to say they had all been scathing – and was satisfied the information presented by the Queensland Government was exact and precise. This admission by Ministerial Council can give the public no confidence in its ability to ensure the proper use of public money.
I had taken my concern to every public sector agency available to me – to no avail.
Going from whistleblowing to activism
In August 2005, new infestations of fire ants around Brisbane were evidence the ants were spreading. I wrote to both the Premier and the CMC asking them to act: the CMC to complete its investigation and the Premier to intervene in the Fire Ant Program. Neither replied. I was getting extremely frustrated. I was no longer a public servant, but I was still a whistleblower and only permitted to disclose to an appropriate public sector entity. I decided to disclose to the Parliamentary Leader of the Opposition. I emailed him on 11th September 2005 to tell him the Premier and the CMC were sitting on an extensive investigation of my claim that the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries was mis-reporting the progress of the Fire Ant Eradication Program to State and Commonwealth funders by not reporting serious matters impacting the program, that senior officials had interfered in a PWC investigation of my claim and mounted a campaign of reprisal against me. He invited me to give a fuller briefing to one of the Opposition’s advisors on 27th September 2005. The following Sunday, 2nd October 2005, everything I told the Opposition appeared in the ‘Sunday Mail’ and the Opposition Spokesman for Agriculture repeated my disclosures in Parliament and accused the Premier of a cover-up.
That generated a substantial push-back from the department in the media, and a substantial backlash against me. The first came from the Premier. On 10th October 2005, within a week of the Opposition Spokesman repeating my disclosure in Parliament, I received a personal letter from the Premier, the first and only one I ever received, to tell me he did not intend to correspond with me further on these matters. I continued to report further detections to him, but, eventually, with a new career in the private sector, I no longer had the time and energy to continue to do so – until I retired in 2014.
The department was still mis-reporting the fire ant program to national funders and the public and that fire ants were spreading. I thought, if I could do something, and didn’t how would I feel? So I endeavoured to tell the public the truth, as best I could, about the fire ant program.
I already had solid knowledge of the early years of the program, so I updated my knowledge of the program by accessing program reports and independent reviews of the program through Right to Information applications. By the end of 2015, I was up-to-date. At my own expense, I engaged a Website Designer to create and manage a website where I posted blogs to tell the public the truth about the Fire Ant Program. I discovered a receptive audience in the public and the media. My website recorded hundreds of hits, I gave many interviews on both radio and on television and was reported in the print media. I was being seen as serious political threat. The backlash came through my Right to Information applications.
The preamble to the Queensland Right to Information Act 2009 says ‘Parliament recognises that in a free and democratic society… information in the government’s possession or under the government’s control is a public resource…..Government information will be released administratively as a matter of course, unless there is a good reason not to, with applications under this Act being necessary only as a last resort.’ In reality, the Act can legally delay or deny an applicant access to government documents, potentially indefinitely.
In 2014, I made two applications for a reasonable number of specific documents: program reports, independent reviews and the minutes of Steering Committee and Consultative Committee meetings – all held by the Secretariat of the Program and all should have already been posted on the program’s website. I received a fulsome and timely responses to my applications.
Obstructions began with my 2015 application. The Department invoked s 37 of the Act to request an extension of time to consult undisclosed third parties. I did not understand how there could be any third parties to a 100% government funded program, but if I did not accept the Department’s request for an extension of time, the Department could simply cancel my application.
I made another application in 2016. This time I was denied access to independent reviews of the program and the minutes of the Consultative Committee. In 2017, I was again denied access to Consultative Committee meeting minutes.
The Department’s response to my 2018 application dragged on for six months while the Department again invoked s 37 of the Act to continue to consult with twenty undisclosed third parties. In the end I did not receive the minutes of either Steering Committee meetings or Consultative Committee meetings.
By December 2018, I had posted 120 blogs and my website had received over 20,000 hits. I had hundreds of followers on Facebook. I had appeared on ABC radio Brisbane, Radio National and ABC TV. I was being seen as a serious political threat.
Seven weeks after making an application for forty-four documents on 26th April 2019, for the same suite of documents, the department claimed I had applied for 1179 documents: inflating my application with emails and other documents I had not applied for. The department then invoked s 41 of the Act which allows an agency to refuse an application if it would require an unreasonable diversion of the Department’s resources.
I had had enough of the Department’s delays and interference, and on 20th November 2019, I applied to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) for an external review of the Department’s response to the application I had made on 26th April 2019. The Department’s response to that application on 9th December 2019 was to cancel my application and refund my application fee.
An officer in the Office of the Information Commission explained that the OIC had a backlog of 300 cases waiting for external review and suggested I give the Department another month till 17th January 2020, to respond. If they agreed, that would be quicker than waiting for an external review. On 20th January I received the first 284 pages of my application with 82 pages withheld because an undisclosed third party was objecting to disclosing two independent reports of the program, the minutes of the Scientific Advisory Group and the minutes of the Steering Committee meeting of February 2019. I complained to the Office of the Information Commissioner who said they could do no more.
The public and whistleblowers can have no confidence in Right to Information Act 2009 or the Office of the Information Commissioner to ensure public access to government documents, identified as being in the public interest, when the Office of the Information Commissioner is limited to investigating only ‘reviewable decisions’ and an agency can legally delay making ANY decision, potentially indefinitely.
Nevertheless, I garnered enough evidence to report on a politically driven program beset by poor management, poor science but most critically, poor governance that has cost the Australian public, as of 2024, ~ $1b and an out-of-control infestation of one of the world’s worst invasive pests.
What chance does the public have to know what their governments are doing in their name?
Chapter 9: Mismanagement continues.
The review I conducted of the management of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program in 2003 demonstrated poor management. Subsequent reviews show it never improved.
In September 2015, the independent Biosecurity Capability Review panel found that Biosecurity Queensland, who implements the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, is incapable of protecting Queensland’s economy, environment and way of life from the threats of invasive pests and diseases: both now and in the foreseeable future.
The panel assessed Biosecurity Queensland’s capacity to implement changes required to meet current and future needs against international standards.
The panel found Biosecurity Queensland lacked capacity because:
Not for the first time, stakeholders were asking if all responsibilities for Queensland’s biosecurity should be transferred to the Commonwealth, or at least, that Biosecurity Queensland should be established as an independent statutory authority where it would be less vulnerable to reductions in government spending and more accountable.
Incompetent management continued with the Second National Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27 and a new oversight committee.
The first National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program – 2001-2016, had cost $300-400m and the infestation was then around 400,000ha. It was replaced with the second Ten Year National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27 to cost another $411m. The previous Consultative Committee was replaced by a Steering Committee, with largely the same membership but with a private consultant as chair.
The program failed spectacularly in its first year. Less than half the areas in the west, targeted for treatment, received it. Spot treatment of persistent infestations in the east were abandoned because the program was swamped by reports from the public. Seven significant infestations were found west of the program’s operational area.
In August 2018, the Steering Committee increased the program’s annual budget from $39,585,385 to $42,425,416 and increased its contingency budget from $956,000 to $2,980,846.
There is little evidence of what a very large Senior Management Team, known to field staff as ‘The Club’, on annual salaries of between $115,000 and $205,000, achieved with 40% of a total budget of $42,425,416 towards eradicating, containing or suppressing fire ants in 2018-19.
It is difficult to know exactly how many senior managers there are because Biosecurity Queensland does not publish an organisational chart. And it’s difficult to know what functions they perform because the program changes the categories it reports against from report to report. From program progress and financial reports, it would appear the Senior Management Team of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program included a General Manager and a Program Director and Senior Managers of 1. Administration and Procurement. 2.WH&S and HR; 3. Governance, Strategic Policy, Compliance and Performance; 4. Planning and Quality Management; 5. Communications and Engagement; 6. Operations or Planned and Responsive Eradication;7. Information and Communication (including R&D on Remote Sensing Surveillance Technology); and 8. Science Services.
In addition, overseeing the whole program is the General Manager of Invasive Plants and Animals who also sits on the Program’s Steering Committee.
Only two Senior Managers are responsible for the program’s field operations: the Manager of Operations and the Manager of Communications and Engagement. Both on salaries of likely between $115,000 – $122,000, they had budgets of $23,600,091 and $1,600,246 respectively for 2018-19: 60% of the total program budget of $42,425,416. The program reported the activities that money was spent on but not what they achieved.
Neither did the program report what non-operational managers achieved with the other 40% of the program’s budget.
The program’s General Manager received a salary, likely between $205,000 to $220,000, and the Program Director received a salary. likely between $129,000 and $141,000. These two make up the Program’s Directorate in 2018-19 with a budget of $453,551 plus $2,980,846 for contingencies. Neither the program’s Annual Report for 2017-18 nor the reports for the first two quarters of 2018-19 give any details on how the Directorate spent its budget.
The Manager of Governance, Strategic Policy, Compliance and Performance had a salary likely between $115,000 – $122,000, and a budget of $2,289,413 for 2018-19. The program’s Annual Report for 2017-18 said the team was reviewing the program’s controls, business processes and KPIs, but had not completed any. The program’s first quarter report for 2018-19 said the team was still developing the Work Plan for 2018-19, three months after the start of the working year. And the team was commencing, developing, preparing and finalising lots of policies and reports, but had not completed any.
The program’s second quarterly report for 2018-19 said the team was still writing the program’s Annual Report for 2017-18, the first and second quarterly reports for 2018-19, and was developing, but had not completed, a policy proposal for landowner self-management and was providing secretarial services to the Steering Committee which did not approve the program’s Work Plan for 2018-19 until months after work had started.
The Manager of Administration, Procurement, WH&S and HR, on a salary likely between $115,000 – $122,000 had a budget $3,402,599 for 2018-19. The program’s Annual Report for 2017-18 showed the team had doubled staff from 154 to 315 but was underspent by $1,300,000 on employee related expenses and underspent by $1,006,000 on services and supplies: at a time when the program was supposed to be in the Ramp-Up phase of the new Ten Year Eradication Program.
In the first quarter of 2018-19 the team had secured three contracts: to demolish the helicopter landing zone at Wacol, to engage KPMG to run a workshop for the Steering Committee and to purchase insulated bait storage containers. They increased staff levels to a total of 383, relocated staff to Berrinba and overspent their budget by $214,000. In the second quarter of 2018-19, the team had secured no contracts, had delayed recruitment activities, had lost staff due to resignations and overspent their budget by $100,000.
The Manager of Planning and Quality Management on a salary likely between $115,000 and $122,000 had a budget of $2,324,547 for 2018-19. The intention of the team was to increase compliance-related activities. Neither the program’s Annual Report for 2017-18, nor the first or second quarter reports for 2018-19 reported any completed planning or quality assurance activities.
The Manager of Information and Communication on a salary likely between $115,000 – $122,000 had a budget of $2,300,000 for 2018-19, plus an additional $1,059,000 for research and development of Remote Sensing Surveillance technology. The program’s Annual Report for 2017-18 only said the Information and Communication section was commencing a comprehensive review of the program’s technology systems: but did not report any results. In the program’s first quarter report for 2018-19, the team said it was testing its ‘mobility solution’ to see if it integrates field data into the Fire Ant Management System. In the program’s second quarter report for 2018-19, the team said, ‘work on the mobility solution did not progress.’ In the program’s second quarter report for 2018-19, the team’s focus had been on integrating the Client and Stakeholder Engagement Solution CaSES (a portal for the general public to report suspect ants) into the Fire Ant Management System. It noted that in December 2018, CaSES was not operational.
With regard to Research and Development of the Remote Sensing Surveillance Technology, in the first quarter report for 2018-19 the team said it had overspent its budget by $300,000 investigating the latest remote surveillance technology and would make a recommendation in December 2018. In December 2018, the Steering Committee rejected the team’s recommendation, which was assessed as needing ‘continual refinement’ and delayed payment for the Imagery Analysis report.
The Manager of Science Services, on a salary likely between $115,000 – $122,000 and had a budget of $1,600,000 for 2018-19: larger than the Compliance section’s budget. The program’s Annual report for 2017-18 did not note any results from the science team. The first quarter report for 2018-19 noted the science team continued routine testing of suspicious ant samples submitted by the public (1786 suspicious ant samples: 92% were fire ants) was intending to identify monitoring sites within the treatment areas and was intending to determine if direct nest injections actually kills fire ants: seventeen years after the practice had begun.
In the second quarter for 2018-19, the team reported that it continued routine testing of suspicious ant samples submitted by the public (1868 samples received, 72% fire ants) was producing odour-impregnated material to train odour detection dog teams, was still selecting 300 monitoring sites outside the operational boundaries of the program, was still conducting trails to determine if direct nest injections destroy fire ant nests, was having discussions about alternative baits, and had determined that 99.3% of the infestation is monogyne; ie meaning nests have a single queen: evidence they claimed as evidence of the program’s success. CSIRO’s review of the program’s science in 2020 rejected that claim.
On top of those positions was the General Manager of Invasive Plants and Animals likely to be on a salary between $205,000 and $220,000 who sits on the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program Steering Committee.
The National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program’s Risk Management Sub-Committee Review 2018
In December 2018 the National Fire Ant Eradication Program’s Risk Management Sub-committee reported the many extreme, high and long-standing risks threatening the program.
Not surprising, the committee listed the program’s lack of functioning information systems, digital and paper-based, to provide timely and accurate performance data as an extreme risk: a milestone set for the program in 2001. The 2002 science review team said if the program did not have one by the end of 2002, consideration should be given to terminating the program. In 2003, the program’s auditor said they could not objectively evaluate the program’s operational efficiency because of the program’s scarcity of performance measures against outcomes. The science review team of 2004 said the program did not know what areas had been treated, or not treated, what properties had become re-infested or how many properties had not received the prescribed number of treatments because it did not have a functioning information system. In 2005, program auditor said operational managers were running independent information systems through a series of spread-sheets because they could not trust the program’s information system. The 2009 science review team were surprised by the program’s lack of a consistent and coherent information base to assess the effectiveness of the program’s surveillance and treatment protocols, but it was clear to them the program’s current methods could not eradicate fire ants and recommended a containment and suppression program. The 2012 review of the program’s information system questioned the ability of the system to provide basic functions. In 2015 the Queensland Biosecurity Capability Review said Biosecurity Queensland lacked an effective performance management information system with high quality, timely and well-understood performance information. The 2016 scientific review panel acknowledged it could not assess the effectiveness of the program because of the program’s lack of performance data. In 2017 the Queensland Audit Office said Biosecurity Queensland does not capture adequate, reliable and consistent performance data on its programs and said the same thing again in 2023.
On top of the Risk Management Sub-Committee’s list of high-risk issues was poor governance.
In 2018, the Risk Management Sub-Committee reported that the new national Steering Committee did not approve the actions, targets, timeframe and KPIs of the 2018-19 Work Plan until well after the start of the working year.
Poor performance was another high-risk identified by the Risk Management Sub-Committee. The Committee said if the extent of the infestation was likely to exceed the program’s capacity with current resources, there was a high-risk eradication was no longer technically unfeasible. In 2001 local and United States experts said fire ant were too well entrenched to eradicate. The 2006 scientific review team said fire ants were spreading faster than they were being found because the operations of the program were ‘poor and ineffective.’ The 2009 scientific review team concluded the program’s current methods could not eradicate fire ants and recommended reverting to a program of containment and suppression. An audit of the 2nd Ten Year National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-2027 in 2019 found the program’s operational boundary had increased 21% because of poor treatment.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor operations as a high risk. They said program activities were not undertaken effectively because the program lacks clearly defined procedures, protocols and policies. Properties did not receive the required amount of treatment in a given period of time because the program has no Treatment Policy, Protocol or Standard Operating Procedure. This was an issue also identified by the independent scientific review team of 2006.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor workforce management as a high risk. They said the program does not comply with the department’s Workforce Strategy to convert temporary employees to permanent status when their performance warrants it.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor procurement processes as a high risk. They said when the program does not order bait well in advance, insufficient bait can lead to delays or interruption of treatment. They said treatment can be delayed or interrupted because helicopter contractors may be unavailable for the full treatment period because the program does not negotiate effectively or manage for contingencies.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor engagement with industry as a high risk. They said industries and the public cannot comply with the General Biosecurity Obligation when they don’t know what it means and when the outdated the Fire Ant Biosecurity Zones Map does not align with, and is much smaller than, the extent of the infestation.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor engagement with the community as a high risk. They said the community might become less supportive and less motivated to report suspected fire ant nests.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor engagement with government as a high risk. They said program’s planning and delivery of services can be reactive due to political influence.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee identified poor engagement with national funders as a high risk. They said national cost share funders might not approve adjustments to the funding arrangement to align it with the program’s treatment strategy and national cost share funders might withdraw their funding because program reports do not provide full information on the program’s activities and progress on issues impeding the success of the program.
The Risk Management Sub-Committee considered the program’s reliance on the highly speculative remote sensing surveillance technology to be highly risky. Between 2009 and 2015, a previous version of the technology had a very high false positive rating: finding only 38 nests but identified thousands of warm rocks and cow pats as fire ant nests and a very high false negative rating as the fire ant infestation tripled from 100,000ha to 300,000ha. In 2017 the Robotics Centre at the University of Sydney said the system was not refined enough to work over different terrains and in 2018 they said the technology needed ‘continual refinement.’
Chapter 10: Four more science reviews: a failed program and failed governance.
The science underpinning the National Fire Ant Eradication Program had been fundamentally compromised by a political decision to mount an eradication attempt of an entrenched fire ant infestation to attract national funding not available for a scientifically advised containment and suppression program. So too was good governance of the program when its national oversight committee continually mis-reported the performance of the program to Ministerial Council and the public.
The first science review team (1st SRT 2002) was frustrated with the lack of any sense of urgency in the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program and the very many problems plaguing it. They said ‘after one year of treatment and surveillance efforts (September 2001 to September 2002) the SRT is unable to determine whether success will be achieved in carrying out this eradication attempt….(because) the Fire Ant Control Centre of the program is no position to know, with any degree of certainty, what areas have not been treated, what areas have been treated and what they were treated with…. and if the situation cannot be rectified immediately then serious consideration should be given to the termination of the program.’ They made 23 recommendations for fixing problems and said, ‘If the ants were not virtually eradicated by the end of 2004 the program should change its focus from eradication to containment.’
2003
In Brisbane, in April 2003, the National Fire Ant Eradication Program’s Consultative Committee reported to Ministerial Council that ‘A favourable report has been received from an independent scientific review. Consultative Committee was pleased to note that the review team believed that the results of the first year indicate that eradication is possible. The review team made 23 recommendations for improving the program, the Fire Ant Control Centre was aware of most of the issues and Consultative Committee noted the efforts of the Fire Ant Control Centre to address most of the issues.’ Consequently, Ministerial Council resolved that ‘The program had made satisfactory progress against the first two milestones: that treatment is providing acceptable levels of control of Red Imported Fire Ants and no significant infestations have been found in surveys outside the known infested areas in Queensland or elsewhere in Australia.’
2004
When Ministerial Council met again, in Adelaide in April 2004, the extent of the fire ant infestation had increased significantly with the detection of a huge infestation centred on Swanbank, known as the South-West Extension of the current treatment area. The density of the infestation suggested it had been there for some time and it was going to be expensive to treat. It was also a breach of one of Ministerial Council’s milestones that ‘no significant infestations have been found in surveys outside the known infested areas in Queensland or elsewhere in Australia.’ And it brought into question ABARE’s cost benefit analysis in 2001 of a potential eradication program: premised on the infestation remaining in the range identified in 2001.
Consultative Committee’s report to Ministerial Council said that ‘the eradication efforts have reduced the threat compared with that which existed at the start of the program,’ but that level of threat was uncertain at the beginning. Consultative Committee also reported that ‘monitoring shows that 96.7% of previously infested properties no longer have viable nests,’ A few months later, in August 2004, the second science review team found fire ants were reinfesting properties that had been fully treated.
Consultative Committee also reported that, in October 2003, an independent auditor found that program operations were appropriate, effective and efficient. What the auditor actually said was, ‘The scarcity of performance measures against outcomes prevents a more objective evaluation of operational efficiency….(with regard to) indicators of program and function area efficiency, there was no measure of respective effort or cost associated with key outcomes’
Consequently, Ministerial Council resolved that ‘Progress towards eradication to date has been excellent, that some outlying infestations were discovered ….the most significant of the outlying infestations was the Swanbank epicentre….(which) posed a challenge to the program.’
For a week in August 2004, another Australian entomologist and one from New Zealand joined the two entomologists who had reviewed the program in 2002 to conduct the second scientific review of the program, the 2nd SRT 2004. The 2002 scientific report had been accused of being ‘emotive’ so the next review was less emotive but no less critical. The 2nd SRT 2004 started with the good news: that the first three years had resulted in a dramatic reduction in fire ant populations. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, a huge infestation had been found in semi-rural land around Swanbank, south-west of the Richlands/Wacol infestation that significantly increased the treatment area. What did shock the scientific review team was the Program Director’s plan to again reject scientific advice by planning to treat the South-West Extension, by air, for just 2 years instead of three.
This was premised on the Program Director’s decision to divide the treatment area into high and low risk areas. Rural areas were deemed high risk because smaller rural populations were less likely to detect fire ant nests than larger populations in urban areas. Also, rural areas were easier to treat than urban areas. The plan was to treat high risks areas 3-4 times each year and low-risk areas 2-3 times each year.
The 1st SRT 2002 complained that the Program Director was making operational decisions in contradiction to scientific advice. He was doing it again in 2004. The 2nd SRT 2004 was happy the Program Director was increasing the use of aerial application, but they said that the program still had no evidence that the baits alone (without injections of a pesticide) worked in Queensland conditions and scientific advice was three years of treatment was the minimum required.
The 2nd SRT 2004 was also surprised by the Program Director’s claim the program was killing 99.4% of nests: given those nests had received a cocktail of chemicals that 95% of the treatment area would not receive, and they could see with their own eyes that fire ants were making a resurgence in the areas that had received most treatments.
The 1st SRT 2002 had asked the Program Director to report the number of properties that had become re-infested after having been declared fire ant free. The 2nd SRT 2004 asked again and for the number of properties that were negative in previous surveys but positive in subsequent surveys and for the treatment and surveillance histories of all properties field staff had visited. It was not clear to them what properties had been surveyed and not treated or treated and not surveyed. They suspected a number of sites were not treated or surveyed and that many properties may not have received the prescribed number of treatments over the prescribed time. The FAIS did not record that information.
The 1st SRT 2002 was frustrated with the program’s lack of any sense of urgency and the fact that too many areas were not being treated. The Program Director promised that all land parcels would be treated mid-way through 2003. They weren’t. The 2nd SRT 2004 said again ‘Many properties, including fifteen known infested properties received only a single treatment during the 2003/04 season. This is cause for concern.’
The 1st SRT 2002 was frustrated with the ‘lack of urgency by either the program or the Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to approve treatment products for all situations,’ especially wet-lands. The 2nd SRT 2004 was also frustrated. They said, ‘This advice appears to have been ignored and significant delays in granting of critical permits has compromised the program and put it at risk.’ APVMA did not provide permits to treat wetlands until August 2003, which meant ‘that only then (in August 2003) did the eradication program commence treatment on areas most favourable to fire ants.’ ‘It is somewhat fortuitous,’ they said, ‘that the severe drought experienced in Brisbane during the life of the program has no doubt facilitated the treatment of many previously wetland areas and reduced the impact of the permit delays on the program.’ Brisbane and south-east Queensland have experienced several significant flooding events since 2004.
The 2nd SRT 2004 continued to be critical of the program’s practice of injecting all live nests. The 1st SRT 2002 said ‘Nest injections appear to cause nests to split into a series of separate nests potentially (making the problem worse)……and demonstrates a lack of belief by the program in the recommended eradication strategy.’ The 2nd SRT 2004 said, ‘the fact that the site at White Rock received at least three rounds of injections to achieve controls demonstrates that it is ineffective.’ And they added, ‘Nest injection is very labour intensive and reasonably ineffective. It is questionable whether the practice justifies the extra resources it requires.’
Even at this very early stage, the Program Director wanted to be able to declare some previously infested properties free of fire to demonstrate that the program was working. But because fire ants were re-emerging on properties that had been declared fire ant free, the 2nd SRT 2004 wanted the Director to develop protocols for validating a claim that a property was now free of fire ant free: to include ‘an analysis of the property’s history …invasions/re-invasion, treatment regime, survey history.’ As of December 2024, the program has never developed a proof of freedom protocol or a functioning information system to provide data for such protocols. Finally, the 2nd SRT 2004 said, ‘if the cost of validation surveys plus inlier control efforts is more than the cost of re-treating the entire area, the validation program efforts should be reconsidered.’ In other words they said, ‘start again.’
2005
In April 2005, program auditors reported that the existing workforce had proven difficult and costly to manage, that a Certified Agreement had resulted in a high rate of disciplinary incidents with no dismissals until June 2005. Staff attendance rates were poor and the rate and quality of effort was variable.
Ministerial Council met again in Darwin in April 2005. Consultative Committee reported that the findings of the review by the 2nd SRT 2004 in August were very positive, drew attention to a number of areas of concern and made 26 recommendations. Consultative Committee also reported that program could not determine the number of high-risk enterprises in the Fire Ant Risk Areas because companies would not cooperate (because the Minister had said they didn’t have to).
Consequently Ministerial Council resolved that several reviews of the program had been satisfactory, that the National Fire Ant Eradication Program was half-way through the seven year program and progressing well, only six inlying areas of infestation had been found (evidence of treatment failure), progress towards eradication had been excellent, monitoring infested properties showed excellent progress towards eradication, some outlier infestations had been found but fewer than in 2004-05 (because of the lack of systematic surveillance).
By September 2005, the area infested with fire ants had expanded massively with the detection of large infestations at Swanbank and Rochedale, fire ants were re-emerging in areas that had been treated and fire ant friendly wetlands had not been treated until two years after the program has started. Nevertheless, the Queensland Minister was claiming that wide-scale treatments for fire ants was almost over and Queensland had become the world leader in fire ant eradication. All that was left was the ‘Last Big Push’.
2006
In January 2006 the Program Director told a journalist that fire ants that threatened suburbs in Brisbane and Ipswich were on the brink of extinction and the program was shifting from treatment to surveillance. At the same time The Courier Mail reported that fire ants had been found in a garden in Toowong, an inner western suburb of Brisbane, probably brought in with high-risk landscaping supplies. In February 2006 The Courier Mail reported that authorities were warning Queenslanders to expect more fire ant outbreaks. In March 2006, The Courier Mail reported fire ants in Redland Shire, south-east of Brisbane, in a delivery of soil from Sunnybank. By March 2006, the Fire Ant Restricted Areas was up to 72,600ha with six new areas of infestation detected in the last nine months. In April 2006, The Courier Mail reported that fire ants had been discovered in an industrial site in Gladstone, operated by company importing and exporting mining equipment: likely a new incursion and a wake-up call for the Commonwealth Government’s Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service.
Ministerial Council’s next meeting was in Sydney in April 2006. Consultative Committee reported the difficult task of treating 72,600ha multiple times, that only 6000ha had been treated during 2005-06, and only twice instead of three times, because the program had run out of time. Fourteen clusters of infested properties remained within the core treatment area: mostly due to flights from poorly treated areas.
Consultative Committee explained that determining the number of service providers such as earth-moving companies operating in the restricted area continued to be a difficult task and only 2854 businesses (likely to be a fraction of those operating in an area of 72,600ha) had voluntarily adopted Approved Risk Management Plans.
The Queensland Minister said the twenty-seven newly found sites inside the core treatment area that year were a lot less than at the beginning of the program, the program had reduced the treatment area down from 72,600ha in 2003/04 to just 6000ha and was planning for the post eradication validation program. The new infestations, he said, were just a tail of the infestation, which is common in eradication programs and the program had progressed from the brink of disaster to the mopping up phase.
Ministerial Council resolved that the program had made satisfactory progress against agreed milestones. Progress towards eradication had been excellent with the large area at the core of the restricted area now nominally free of fire ant infestations. The program was negotiating with Consultative Committee to remove movement controls for fire ants from large parts of the restricted as evidence of the success of the program. The few remaining infestations in the previously treated area could be attributed to difficulties treating the 72,600ha restricted area. A tail of the infestation is common during eradication programs. The success to date is unprecedented and Australia is now considered a world leader in the field. The program has massively reduced the threat posed by fire ants to our social, economic and ecological systems. We have progressed from the brink of disaster to the brink of eradication in five short years.
The third independent scientific review team (3rd SRT 2006) was made up of the same team of two entomologists who had conducted the first science and second reviews plus the United States Department of Agriculture fire ant scientist who had inspected the infestation in 2001 and a Queensland entomologist who was a member of the Program’s Scientific Advisory Panel. They commenced their review in June 2006. The tone of the first scientific review in 2002 was accused of being ‘emotive’. The tone of the 2004 review was more subdued, but clear. By 2006, the 3rd SRT 2006 could see with their own eyes that fire ants were making a resurgence and that few if any of the recommendations from the two previous reviews had been implemented. The 3rd SRT 2006’s recommendation was very direct. They said, ‘Start again!’
By June 2006, fire ants had re-infested 97 properties that had previously been treated. The 3rd SRT 2006 said, either suppressed colonies are recovering and becoming more noticeable or the area had become re-infested by fly-ins from surrounding areas. More than 60 infestations had been found outside the boundary of the treatment area: some more than 6km from known infested properties: either because the treatment program was not working or the program’s movement controls were not working. Because fire ants were spreading faster than they were being found, the 3rd SRT 2006 doubted that the program was in a ‘mopping phase.’ They believed there was a resurgence of fire ants two years after an ineffective treatment program had stopped.
The 2002 and 2004 SRTs had been critical of the program’s poor treatment program and so was the third. Some residents were refusing to have their properties treated, some areas were just too rough and difficult for ground teams to access, the APVMA had been slow to approve treatments for wetlands, the ground force could not work fast enough to cover a huge treatment area several times each season: some only received one or two treatments. The 3rd SRT 2006 was not surprised that colonies were surviving in under-treated areas.
Like the two previous scientific reviews, the 3rd SRT 2006 was critical of the Program Director making operational decision that contradicted scientific advice. His excuse was that he had to do the best he could within a shrinking budget. This became the program’s recurring excuse, but the 3rd SRT 2006 did not buy it. They said funding for treatment or surveillance per hectare in an eradication program reduces over time as the area of infestation increases, but compromising treatment timing and sequencing may have contributed to the current situation.
The 3rd SRT 2006 was extremely concerned about the future of the program. They said, ‘Having spent $175m already, nobody wants to walk away from the program, nor does anybody relish the prospect of living with the ant.’ But they were concerned that the program had already downsized from 380 to 140 staff and that program partners were now questioning the wisdom of continued funding.
Staff numbers were reduced in June 2006 because the Certified Agreement the program had entered into with the Australian Workers Union in 2003 that prevented any dismissals, had expired. The number and severity of disciplinary incidents declined and performance improved.
The 3rd SRT 2006 said ‘The option with the highest probability of eliminating all re-infestations and new infestations would be to treat the entire region of the infestation (approximately 150,000ha) by air. They estimated that 6-9 rounds of treatment over 2-3 years would cost $70-100m. In effect the 3rd SRT 2006 said, ‘Do what we told you to do the first time. If not, ‘mopping up’ is the only option.’
The 3rd SRT 2006 was fully aware that the Queensland Minister had over-ruled advice in 2001 to quickly, efficiently and cheaply treat the whole infestation by air. Instead, he created a jobs program for 500 people at a time when Queensland had high levels of unemployment. And fearful of upsetting the electorate, and in breach of the Plant Protection Act, he allowed property owners to choose to have their property treated or not.
Expecting more political interference, the 3rd SRT 2006 warned of the consequence of ignoring scientific advice again. They said: from the outset we said that aerial application of bait was likely to be the most effective eradication treatment and the experience of using it over semi-rural areas now shows this. However, the application of bait in urbanised areas has been from the ground. The reality is that fire ants nest below and above ground, including in roof gutters, rooftops and tree holes and those places have not been treated. We re-iterate that aerial application gives greater levels of certainty than any other method that all areas are treated properly. The result of the program so far indicates that when treatments are applied correctly, eradication of fire ants can be achieved.
If aerial application over urban areas was still politically unacceptable, they said, then the current strategy of ‘mopping up’ was the only option and they were not optimistic about that either because fire ants were spreading faster than they were being found.
In sum the 3rd SRT 2006 said ‘It’s time to make some hard decisions. In the next 12-18 months it will become very clear whether the program is headed toward eradication or not. Substantial commitment and hard decisions may need to be made soon if eradication is still the goal.’ And given that the Program Director was saying that the program was close to eradicating fire ants, the 3rd SRT 2006 said the program needed a protocol for validating claims that an area had become fire ant free. They also said the program needed criteria for switching from an eradication program to a containment program. They said that if 20 re-infestations and 20 new infestations were detected over the next 5 years the eradication effort was under severe threat. If there 40 reinfestations and 40 new infestations, there was no hope of eradication.
In August 2006 The Courier Mail reported that more nests had been found at Fairfield, Loganholme, and Peak Crossing.
Consultative Committee’s report to Ministerial Council in Christchurch in November 2006 almost completely contradicted the findings of the 3rd SRT 2006. They said the program was making satisfactory progress against agreed milestones and the Committee remained positive about the chances of eradication. They did acknowledge that the 3rd SRT 2006 concluded that the program was at a critical stage and acknowledged ‘occasional new infestations.’. Consultative Committee repeated the program’s claim of a dramatic reduction in the number of infested properties (more a function of the lack of surveillance), that new detections were just the expected ‘tail of the infestation’, that the program was now in a ‘mopping up’ phase and agreed to a process to declare some areas of the restricted area fire ant free because the program expected that a large proportion of the restricted area to be fire ant free by 2008. It wasn’t.
Consultative Committee did report that the 3rd SRT 2006 said the program was at a critical stage: that detecting outlier colonies was going to be a challenge, and that it would be clear within the next year if eradication can be achieved – with existing resources: blaming funding issues rather than rejecting scientific advice, mis-management and failed governance.
Ministerial Council accepted Consultative Committee’s report and agreed in principle to additional funding to achieve freedom from fire ants in South-East Queensland ‘to deal with remnant infestations and to prove that eradication has been achieved’: subject to an independent assessment to be presented to Ministerial Council by April 2007. Ministerial Council did not receive another independent report until 2010.
2007
In Brisbane in April 2007, Consultative Committee repeated the report it had given Ministerial Council the previous November: still contradicting the findings of the 3rd SRT 2006: that during the last five years, the program had eradicated more than 98% of the fire ant population, leaving only isolated and sporadic colonies to be detected and destroyed….the main challenge at this stage of the eradication program was to find the remaining fire ant infestation and that Consultative Committee remained positive about the chances of achieving eradication.
Consultative Committee rejected the 3rd SRT’ 2006’s advice that eradication was only possible if the program diligently implemented aerial application and continued with the claim the 3rd SRT 2006 had categorically denied: that eradication depended on more money, and sought additional funding for the period 2007-12 for a post-eradication validation program to deal with remnant infestations, to declare freedom from fire ants in the restricted areas and to prove that eradication had been achieved.
The rest of 2007 showed that there were more than a few ‘isolated and sporadic fire ant colonies’ still in South East Queensland. While the program had been claiming that 98% of fire ants had been eradicated, they had gone underground. In May 2007, The Courier Mail reported ‘Sting in the tail of the fire ant fight. Drought and warmer winter days are hampering the program to eradicate fire ants from the Brisbane area. Dry conditions mean that the exotic pest can burrow more than 10m down in search of moisture; making detection more difficult. Fire ants began re-emerging inside and outside the treatment areas.’ In September 2007, The Courier Mail reported: ‘Fire ants have been found at Tarragindi on Brisbane’s south-side and outside the exclusion boundaries. Most of the new detections had either a single or small number of nests, with the exception of a site in the Amberley area near Ipswich where hundreds of nests had been found. The Tarragindi outbreak, on a footpath, had come from infestations at nearby Fairfield or Rocklea. By then 83,380 ha of south-east Queensland was a fire ant Restricted Area.
Because the program did not treat the entire area of the infestation by air as advised by the 3rd SRT 2006, 38 suburbs missed out on their third treatment during 2008 and the Fire Ant Restricted Area blew out to 90,000ha with a lot more than a few ‘isolated and sporadic infestations’ that needed to be ‘mopped-up.’
In June 2007 the program confirmed for the first time that fire ants had been found on the Gold Coast: likely transported there in garden and building materials.
2008
In 2008, as fire ants were still re-infesting previously treated areas and spreading into new territory, the Program Director launched a short-lived desperate attempt to stop them. In April 2008, The Courier Mail reported ‘State posts a $500 fire ant nest bounty. In a last-ditch attempt to wipe out the damaging pest, the State government is offering a $500 reward to anyone who finds a fire ant nest.’ The Program Director said the eradication program had been so successful it had reached the point where some previously infested places were considered fire ant free, but what concerned him most was the high-growth corridor between Brisbane and the Gold Coast where booming housing development resulted in large areas of freshly disturbed soil – ideal conditions for fire ants.
The Fire Ant Reward Scheme elicited 2,196 calls from the public – compared with 234 the previous year, twelve vigilant residents found more nests at Marsden, Sunnybank, Mansfield, Eight Miles Plains, Calamvale, Purga, Coopers Plans, Deebing Heights, Loganlea and Archerfield before the scheme was shut down in July.
In a desperate attempt to save the program, with the support of Consultative Committee, the Program Director commissioned modellers from Monash University to investigate the use of population decline models to decide whether the eradication program was on-track or not. The modellers noted a massive reduction in the fire ant population in south-east Queensland, (likely due to reduced surveillance) and concluded the obvious, that eradication would not be possible with the rate of detection less than the rate of spread and the cost of searching large rural and semi-rural areas for fire ants using current visual methods was high. Then, surprisingly, these modellers, not entomologists, proposed researching the use of low-cost remote sensing technology, being explored in the USA, they said, as a more effective method of detecting fire ant nests. So, instead of implementing the recommendations of the 3rd SRT 2006 to treat the entire infested area by air, the program, with the support of the Consultative Committee launched another desperate, unscientific strategy.
The next meeting of Ministerial Council was in Adelaide in November 2008.
Consultative Committee’s report contradicted the findings of the 3rd SRT 2006 which said because fire ants were spreading faster than they were being found, they doubted the program’s claim that the program was in a ‘mopping phase’. They believed there had been a resurgence of fire ants two years after the treatment program had stopped because the treatment program had been ineffective. They said the option with the highest probability of eliminating all remaining inliers (re-infestations) and outliers (new infestations) would be to treat the entire region of the infestation by air: as recommended in 2001.
Instead, Consultative Committee reported to Ministerial Council, without any supporting data, that the program had demonstrated that eradication of populations can be achieved with existing treatment methods, that the bulk of the original infestation had been eradicated and that the program had delayed the spread of fire ants by 10-15 years.
Nevertheless, Ministerial Council commissioned a review of several on-going eradication programs, including the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, to review their governance and management arrangements, their risk and cost-benefit analysis, the technical feasibility of eradication, milestones and trigger points, funding arrangements, beneficiary contributions and independent reviews.
Each eradication program would then be managed and critically reviewed by a newly established CEO sub-Group that would review the terms of reference and membership of its Consultative Committee to ensure it could adequately perform the functions of a consultative committee and, in this case, make recommendations on the nature of a future National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program to determine if it is in the national interest.
2009
The sub-group met in Brisbane 23rd April 2009. They agreed that eradication of fire ants should remain the primary objective of the program because of the potential considerable impact the pest would have on many Australians if it became widespread. They agreed that funding was not adequate to either eradicate or to control fire ants enough to maintain the option for eradication in the future. They noted that the program was successful in detecting and destroying nests in urban areas, because of the role of the community, but ignored the fact that fire ants were making a resurgence in those areas. However, they were concerned that current methods for detecting and treating fire would not be effective in the less populated more peri-urban and rural areas where fire ants were now being found and they were concerned about the proximity of the infestation to agricultural land. They concluded that developing an alternative surveillance technology was critical to the success of any continuing rural fire ant program.
Ministerial Council approved $1m to develop and test the remote sensing technology, being explored in the USA, as a more effective method of detecting fire ant nests.
I checked the Monash University team’s claim that remote-sensing technology was being used to detect fire ants in the USA. In 2008, it was being trialled to monitor the behaviour of known fire ant nests for research and development purposes. Those trials showed that the technology could detect around 80% of nests, with 17.5% of them being false alarms: ie a near 20% chance it would mistake fire ant nests for other things. And because trails in the USA focussed on known nests, they had no interest in knowing where fire ant nests were not: meaning those trials did not calculate the technology’s false negative rate: declaring an area fire ant free when it was not: which is critical for surveillance. And those trials showed the technology did not detect unusually shaped fire ant nests or those under thick vegetation.
The next Ministerial Council meeting was held in Hobart in May 2009. Consultative Committee was no longer claiming the program was in the ‘mopping-up’ phase because fire ants were re-emerging in treated areas and because of the 490 nests found at Amberley. The Program Director’s plan for 2009-10 was to split the operational area of the program into urban and peri-urban/rural areas: the program would rely on residents in urban areas to detect and report fire ants, program staff would treat new detections and previously infested properties and do some limited surveillance in high-risk areas. Rural areas and the edge of the Amberley infestation would receive two rounds of bait by air, instead of undertaking surveillance, because the program now acknowledged what four scientific panels had told them: prophylactic treatment was cheaper and more efficient that surveillance methods.
Trials of the remote sensing surveillance system (RSS) continued. The theory was simple enough. During cooler months, fire ant nests can be warmer than the surrounding ground and can appear in thermal imagery captured by low flying helicopters which can cover much larger areas in a day than ground crews. The application, though, was technically very difficult. The helicopters needed to virtually hover to capture images of the ground; meaning they could not fly when the weather was windy or raining. Ground temperatures needed to be cool enough for the nests to show up, so it could only be used between May and October. And to keep ahead of the rate of spread of the infestation, the RSS needed to capture and analyse a massive 100,000ha of imagery every year or 750ha per day. The risk was the fire ants could spread faster than the RSS could detect them.
Also, it was difficult to (a) have three cameras focussed on the same area at the same time, (b) collect three different sets of data: near infrared images of the amount of chlorophyll in the area as fire ants remove vegetation from their mounds, visual images of fire ant nest shaped objects, and infra-red images of warm fire ant nests and (c) combining that data to create usable maps. Also, each camera would capture about 1TM of data per day, the different data-sets had to be compatible with the program’s information system, already known to be non-functioning, and for the program’s information system to have sufficient capacity to store and analyse this huge amount of data.
To be effective, there needed to be a high degree of confidence that the RSS could differentiate fire ant nests from other warm things like a warm rock or animal manure: ie have a low false positive rate and it did not miss nests that were actually there: ie have a low false negative rate.
The program contracted the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney to develop a computer program to analyse the imagery data. To err on the side of not missing any actual nests, the computer program was likely to make a lot of false detection (have a high false positive rate), so, another factor complicating the remote-sensing technology was the need to have human analysts rationalise the large number of ‘points of interests’ generated by the computer program to bring the estimate down to a practical number for field staff to check.
Between June and September 2009, the program commenced trials of the helicopter-mounted camera system over a site of 243 known fire ant nests, ranging in size from 5-80cm. The program reported to The Courier Mail that Queensland was ramping up its fight against fire ants by developing world-first technology to detect fire ants from the air. The Program Director acknowledged the likelihood of the remote-sensing surveillance technology making too many false detections, but the redeeming feature was that the technology would cost only about ¼ of what human surveillance would cost. The Program Director said that trial results would be available around June-July 2010. They weren’t.
During the trial, the cameras collected 2033ha of imagery, but because the three cameras could not all focus on the same spot at the same time, the imagery was too blurry to analyse. At best, the cameras could detect three out of ten mounds if they were bigger than 30cm. They could not detect 5cm-sized nests and 33% of the things the cameras identified as fire ant mounds were only rocks or manure. The helicopter operators could do better than that. Just by looking at the ground from the helicopter, the operators could see 80% of mounds bigger than 60cm and 65% of those bigger than 30cm. Obviously, the first camera system did not meet the program’s requirement that it detect 60% of mounds bigger than 30cm from a height of 400 feet. So the program sought another camera-system.
Instead of a biannual independent scientific review of the program, due in 2008, Consultative Committee did not commission the 4th SRT until the end of 2009. The review was chaired by the Dean of the School of Land and Environment at the University of Melbourne with a research scientist from the Florida Fire Ant Research Centre, the western Australian entomologist from all previous scientific reviews, an advisor from the Victorian government, (the third biggest funder of the program) a program leader in environmental informatics from CSIRO, and the Director of the Australian Centre for Biosecurity and Environment Economics who had conducted the first cost-benefit analysis of the fire ant infestation in Queensland in 2001. The review team (4th ST 2009) was asked to determine whether the program should continue, and if so, in what form.
The 4th SRT 2009, met for about nine days in the second half of October 2009. They reviewed all previous scientific reports, operational plans and other relevant documents, undertook a number of field trips and attended a series of presentations by program managers.
The findings of the 4th independent scientific review team (4th SRT 2009) were clear, damming and not surprising. The panel was alarmed that the fire ant restricted area had grown form 28,000ha in 2001 to ‘an all-time high’ of 93,000ha in 2009. This, they said, was evidence that ‘Current surveillance methods are inadequate for defining the limits of the infestation or for detecting new infestations that result from natural or human assisted spread. In addition, the efficacy of current treatment methods is questionable given that infestations are recurring in key or difficult habitats, eg market gardens’. Thus, the 4th SRT 2009 concluded that fire ants cannot be eradicated from Brisbane using current techniques.
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The panel added ‘Like the review team of 1st SRT 2002, we recommend that the current eradication program revert to a program of suppression and containment for period of 18-24 months to enable alternative surveillance and treatments options to be developed. At the end of this period, another review should be undertaken to determine the feasibility of eradication in light of the result of that key research. If technically sound options have been developed, it would be appropriate for a revised eradication program to be considered. Should eradication eventually be abandoned in south-east Queensland, there are a range of alternatives methods for managing fire ants ranging from state-by-state efforts to avoiding fire ants becoming established to local community education and fire ant control methods.
‘As is often the case,’ they said, ‘the challenges for this program were more difficult than initially anticipated. The number and distribution of fire ant colonies is larger than first believed. On the positive side, fire ants appear to have been successfully eradicated from Gladstone and the Brisbane Port. Unfortunately, the area of infestation in Brisbane’s south-west, an area of light industry, some agricultural and natural areas and a variety of housing patterns remain problematic. The total restricted area has increased to an all-time high of 93,000 ha as additional sites have been found.’
But the main reason they could not assess the technical feasibility of eradication was, as they repeated the complaint of all three previous science reviews, the lack of scientific evidence to underpin or validate the program. They said, ‘compelling evidence that eradication is technically feasible is limited by the lack of some key research, especially on the effectiveness of using remote-sensing technology for broad scale detection of infestations, but also on the efficacy of current control methods, given that infestations are recurring in key or difficult habitats, eg market gardens.’
They said ‘The review team was surprised by the lack of a consistent and coherent information base to assess the effectiveness of surveillance and treatment protocols and the shortage of critical research on key technologies. It was obvious that program protocols did not work sufficiently to eradicate fire ants. Since at least 2004/05, the program has not been on a clear trajectory to achieve eradication in the Brisbane area. The science support to the program is fragmented and too ad hoc. The program needs to collect and analyse data from the eradication operations to integrate scientific research into the program, recruit additional scientists, engage external scientists and have the program science peer-reviewed.’
The fact that the Restricted Area had expanded to 93,000ha since the program commenced was ‘evidence that the inability to effectively detect incursions is one of the primary causes of the program’s failure to eradicate. Successful eradication is heavily dependent on detecting colonies so that they can be destroyed before the ants have had an opportunity to disperse and establish new colonies outside the boundaries. Until the boundary of the current incursion is accurately defined, attempts at eradication will be frustrated. Fire ant colonies have now been identified in more than 20,000ha of agricultural and other non-urban land to the south of Ipswich. This highlights the need for an alternative surveillance option that effectively inspects the 10-15km area outside the current boundary of the Restricted Area before a further attempt at eradication is contemplated. Multiple methods are necessary to cope with a wide range of terrain, special situations and the magnitude of the problem. Surveillance by odour detecting dogs is a novel and sensitive method for fire ant colony discovery, but the dogs are expensive to train and maintain and their daily workload is limited to several hectares.
The only other technique presented to the review team was aerial remote-sensing. The panel had mixed views about the possibilities of this approach. The 4th RST 2009 noted that this was the third time that the program had considered remote-sensing technology. There were many potential problems with the technology which need to be tested. If the false positive rate cannot be carefully controlled; ie it identifies thing as nests that aren’t nests, the utility of the technology will be limited, as it will effectively detect possible nests everywhere, and therefore not significantly reduce the size of the surveillance problem. If it does not control the false negative rate; ie declaring an area free of nests, when it isn’t, small but undetected infestation will be a key cause of failure of the eradication program. The assumption that any missed infestations will eventually be found needs to be tested.
Also, remote-sensing technology can only be used at certain times of the year and over limited areas, so the current processes of dispersion and re-infestation could undermine any gains made by this surveillance/treatment methodology; ie fire ants could spread faster than the remote-sensing technology was finding them. Overall, there are significant challenges with the use of this technology and the review team recommends that it is rigorously assessed as soon as possible. If this technique cannot be developed as an effective tool for identifying colonies in broad-acre situations, any future eradication program could not be successful at reasonable cost.’
The 4th SRT was also concerned about the mathematical model of fire ant spread developed for the program by Monash University that would be used to choose the most efficient and cost-effective surveillance strategies for finding fire ants. They said, ‘the panel was not convinced that the current model is able to predict the probability of eradication from a given management strategy because it was missing key information. It needed to include information on the actual effects of the current treatment and surveillance systems in the field and field data on the actual patterns of fire ant dispersal in south-east Queensland.’ The information was missing because the program did not collect and analyse these essential statistics.
The review team also questioned the assumption that fire ants prefer to nest in open disturbed land which underpinned the Habitat Mapping model used to target the remote sensing surveillance. The review team said, ‘we agree that the military reserve and other natural vegetation sites near fire ant infestations are unlikely to have many fire ant colonies, but the probability is not zero. Members of the review team with US experience consider it likely that some colonies could reside in these less suitable habitats and act as a source for further infestation.’
The current surveillance methods had failed, and so too had the current treatment methods. The review team summed up the treatment results of the program. They said ‘there have been at least three separate incursions of fire ants in Queensland: a monogyne (single queen) population at the Port of Brisbane and in Gladstone and a mixed polygyne (multiple queen) population centred about Wacol. The program reports that the two monogyne infestations have been eradicated. However, while the largest and possibly oldest infestation, centred about Wacol, has been substantially reduced, there are persistent survivals or re-infestations. The detection of polygyne colonies within the core treatment area long after the completion of treatments is indicative of treatment failure rather than re-infestation. Understanding why fire ant populations were surviving in areas which have received the full complement of bait treatments is complicated by the use of direct nest treatment (via injection of liquid insecticide under pressure) in addition to the standard broadcast bait recommended by the USDA scientists. The 2004 review team identified routine nest injection as a complication is assessing the efficacy of standard bait treatments because there was no data on the effective of the standard bait treatment alone.
Therefore, the review team recommended that the three fire ant baits currently being used be tested under local field conditions. They suggested testing a new ant bait (active ingredient indoxacarb) under Queensland conditions to replace the practice of direct nest injection which is slow, labour intensive and gives uncertain results. The new bait has been demonstrated to give excellent control in the USA within 2-3 days and could be more cost effective than nest injections. Like previous review teams, the panel was concerned that the program was not using fire ant products according to their label specifications which could be a reason for poor performance and fire ants surviving and recommended that they did. And finally, they urged some serious and urgent research into the unexpected and recurring infestations (monogyne and polygyne) in market gardens (small farms raising vegetable, fruit and flowers) which appear to have been adequately treated.
The review team had been asked to determine whether the program should continue, and if it was to continue, what form the program should take. They were concerned about the enormous potential economic and environmental losses from the widespread establishment of fire ants but noted that various Cost-Benefit Analyses have identified a large ‘pay-off’ from an eradication program, only if it is completely successful. They had said that the program had not been on a path towards eradication since about 2004/05 and the Wacol/Richland incursion in south-east Queensland was proving difficult to eradicate.
Therefore the 4th SRT 2009 recommended that ‘the current eradication program revert to a program of suppression within the containment area to make sure the boundaries are not breached for a period of 18-24 months.’ This meant controlling the two main ways that fire ants spread: relatively slowly by natural processes, less than 10km per year, but much further and faster via human-assisted transport like earth moving and horticultural industries and residents moving potted plants and landscaping materials. Maximum economic benefit comes from preventing the spread of fire ants to other urban centres such as Sydney or Melbourne. So, the review panel recommended a program that combined active suppression of fire ants in Brisbane urban areas along with fire ant education to reduce the chance of residents moving fire ants in potted plants and the aggressive containment of risk materials through government control and certification of the risk material destined for other population centres to reduce the national risk. During those 18-24 months, the program would develop alternative surveillance and treatment options.
If, at the end of this period, technically sound options have been developed, it would be appropriate for a revised eradication program to be considered. Should eradication eventually be abandoned in south-east Queensland, there are a range of alternatives methods for managing for fire ants ranging from state-by-state efforts to avoid fire ant establishment to local community education with fire ant control methods.
However, they said, a proper analysis of alternative management options will depend at least in part on a more detailed economic analysis of the options of eradication containment and suppression. Previous cost-benefit studies, they said, seriously underestimated the potential costs of control and eradication, underestimated the time needed to achieve those ends and did not analyse all the potential damages of fire ants: ie environmental and recreational costs and the impact of fire ants spreading beyond Queensland. Therefore, they recommended ‘an updated, definitive and properly peer-reviewed cost-benefit analysis for the control and potential eradication of fire ants be conducted, including analyses to determine where containment and/or suppression is likely to be most cost effective”.
Finally, they said, ‘Should an eradication program be contemplated in the future it will be important that appropriate milestones relating to the size and rate of expansion of the restricted area, the number of colonies re-establishing in previously treated areas etc, be included in the program proposal to enable the annual assessment of the success of any future eradication program to be made.’ The 4th SRT 2009 noted that, at the time of their review, ‘it was unclear what measures and outcomes (eg containment, eradication or suppression) were assumed in order to estimate the projected costs of the program.’
The next scientific review of the program was not until 2016 and it was not independent.
In the meantime, fire ants were spreading. In May 2009, another 90 mounds were found on a nearly completed 25ha residential estate in Yamanto in Ipswich.
2010
In April 2010, another 180 mounds were found at Marburg, a village west of Ipswich, along the road verge adjoining grazing land and a rural residential area. These mounds were 4km from the nearest infestation and so, outside the Fire Ant Restricted Area. Scientists estimated that they had been there sometime before they were detected.
In May 2010, more than 700 mounds were found over an area of 164ha at an open cut mine near the town of Rosewood, a rural town 60km south-west of Brisbane, in a known infested area. There were 60-100 mounds within the operational area of the mine, another 20 in surrounding areas and another 600 mounds in parts of the site that previously had been mined and had since been re-vegetated.
In June 2010, 2799 mounds were found on a large property at Purga, inside the Fire Ant Restricted Area, used for grazing cattle and horses. The low-lying area was subject to regular flash-floods from the creek that runs through it. The scientists believed that the fire ants may respond to the regular inundations by splitting their mounds and moving to higher ground. The site was so heavily infested that scientists estimated that the ant had probably been there for over 5 years before they were detected.
Between 2009 and 2011, more than 200 mounds were found in over 170ha of commercial landfill at Larapinta, an outer southern suburb of Brisbane. Large volumes of soil were regularly brought onto the site, increasing the risk of spreading fire ants. Trucks operating daily made the ground unstable and a large lake on site, surrounded by high over-grown cliffs made it unsafe for field staff to access.
One of the most worrying detections was of another 97 mounds at market gardens at Rochedale. Fire ants were first detected in market gardens at Rochedale in 2004. They had received multiple treatments with cocktail of chemicals over several the years. But a year after treatment, many were still infested. Scientists assumed that market gardens were attractive to fire ants because they were well-watered, had disturbed soil and pesticides to keep their competitors out.
Fire ants were re-infesting and spreading. 25% of the new detections made in 2009-10 were outside the Fire Ant Restricted Area: a serious discovery was the detection at Grandchester, 80km from the first detection at the Port of Brisbane and within reach of prime agricultural land in the Lockyer and Fassifern valleys. The Courier Mail reported that $215m had been poured into the fire ant eradication program since 2002 but fire ants were now claiming an arc of territory from the Port of Brisbane down to Logan City and out to Grandchester. The Program Director told The Courier Mail, ‘It shows that this infestation is still bubbling along,’ he said. ‘It confirms our belief that prolonged drought had slowed their spread. But the wet weather has now created the perfect habitat for them,’ he added.
After a very wet summer, by the end of the 2009-10 financial year, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was up to 98,608ha: 7/10 the size of the Brisbane City Local Government Area, up from 28,000ha in 2001. Field staff and the community had found another 4800 mounds across 4111 sites and 90 suburbs. Six of those infested sites were massive.
The next Ministerial Council meeting considered the program in Darwin on 23rd April in 2010. Consultative Committee reported ‘As requested by Ministerial Council in May 2009 an independent review panel was established to review the fire ant eradication program. The review panel concluded that fire ants cannot be eradicated from Brisbane using current techniques. The report recommends ‘aggressive containment’ be pursued, allowing for the potential of eradication to be followed in due course as techniques develop. However, Consultative Committee believes that it is premature to cease the pursuit of eradication and proposes that the program be one of containment with a view to eradication. Eradication options will depend in part on the further development of the remote-sensing technology.’
Around 2010, Ministerial Council ceased making meeting minutes available to the public and replaced them is vague, data-less ‘Communiques.’
The Queensland Minister’s media release said he was pleased with Ministerial Council’s on-going commitment to the fire ant eradication program, that scientific trials had been conducted in the use of high-tech, remote-sensing technology for the purpose of detecting fire ant colonies, and, while the area of infestation had expanded, the level of infestation remained low and Queensland remained confident that eradication was feasible.
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Trials of an up-graded camera system for the remote-sensing surveillance technology were not available for another year – around August or September 2011. During November 2010, the program continued trials with its information system FAIS (Fire Ant Information System): to analyse the huge amount of imagery captured by the remote-sensing technology to detect potential fire ant mounds. They ran trials with the helicopter flying at a lower and more difficult height of 200 feet over seven known areas of infestation at Marburg, Purga and Peak Crossing: sometimes several times to detect all the mounds, The cameras collected data on 3035 mounds in 1300ha of imagery and the camera data was compared with data on mound size collected by field staff on the day or within 1-3 days of the flight. At Purga, the computer program was detecting 40% of the mounds and falsely identifying some small things as small mounds. At Murburg, the computer program detected 50% of mounds correctly, but wrongly identified 33%. At Peak Crossing, the computer program correctly identified 30% of nests but wrongly identified 96%. In sum, the detection rates were too low and the false identification rates were too high.
And the remote-sensing technology was becoming more expensive with the need to purchase of high-end data processing workstations for computer analysts, personal digital assistants (PDA) for field staff to record field data and significant modifications to the Fire Ant Information System to accommodate the massive IT requirements of the remote-sensing program. In the meantime, fire ants continued to spread.
2011
During the FY 2010-11, 2480 more colonies were detected, down from the 4811 found during 2009-10, but the area of infestation had increased by another 581ha, up from the addition of 479ha in 2009-10. Twelve more suburbs were infested, bringing the total number of infested suburbs to 105. 31% of infestations were detected outside the Fire Ant Restricted Area, up from 28% in 2009-10.
One of the major causes of fire ant spread was disturbed soil associated with housing development and road works. During 2010-11, major infestations were found in association with the development of Springfield Lakes and road works on the Mt Lindsey Highway, Springfield Connection Road and the Gateway Motorway.
Flash flooding was another cause of fire ant spread. In October 2010, scientists found a huge infestation of 18,000 mounds on 70ha at Purga (west of Ipswich). The area had been inspected in 2005 and found to be free of fire ants. This showed just how fast fire ants can spread when a site is subject to regular flooding and fire ants split and move their nests to higher ground to avoid the flood-waters. And flood-waters also seemed to have played a part in spreading fire ants to a cattle grazing property at Walloon. In November 2010, 1700 mounds were found in the centre of a 67ha paddock that was subject to regular flash floods that spread the fire ants. Then in late December 2010 a massive thunderstorm created flash floods in Toowoomba’s CBD that washed down the range to flood the Lockyer Valley and Ipswich and Brisbane CBDs. Fire ants originated in the flood plains of Paraguay and Brazil and know how to survive floods.
And either because fire ant treatments were not working, or surveillance was not thorough enough or people or businesses were accidently moving fire ants, fire ants were turning up on properties that had never seen fire ants before: on machinery in Clontarf, in mulch at Ormeau, and also on properties in Harrisville, Pine Mountain, Calvert, The Bluff and Wulkuraka.
But of extra concern were the detections at Mount Mort and Mulgowie, 10km from the infestation at Grandchester, and moving even further west into prime agricultural land.
2010-11 had been a disastrous year for the program and in May 2011 The Courier Mail reported that despite $250M having been spent of the program to date fire ants were by then in 231 suburbs. All that the Queensland Minister could do was to repeat the story he told Queenslanders in 2010: that Queensland was ‘launching a world-first, $1.2m remote-sensing camera with infra-red powers to search for lingering fire ants.’
The next meeting of Ministerial Council was on 15th April 2011 in Brisbane. Council noted that the Consultative Committee had endorsed a program of containment with a view to eradication for an 18-24 month period while trials of remote sensing technology were completed and after technical reviews of population spread modelling, research on bait efficacy and an epidemiological analysis.
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Consultative Committee met in September 2011 to consider the progress of the program based on population and spread modelling, bait efficacy research and epidemiological analysis. The Committee noted that activities undertaken by the program in 2010-11 appear to have contained and suppressed the spread of the ant in south-east Queensland. The Committee also noted that due to the delays in delivery of the remote-sensing cameras, it had not been possible to assess the full impact of this technology on the future objectives and operation of the program. The Committee also considered the need for a financial audit of the program due to be being a long-standing significant investment. In 2013, the auditor said without fit-for-purpose performance measure and complete and accurate information, the program may be unable to demonstrate due care in the use of public money.
Trials of the second camera system did not begin until November 2011, too late for the 2011 surveillance season between May and September. But on the day after the new camera actually arrived in Australia, on the 14th September 2011, the Queensland Minister released a media statement to say that the Fire Ant Restricted Area was now up to 118,000ha, now nearly 9/10 the size of the Brisbane City LGA, with 560ha of that area being known infestations. His good news was the wonders of the new camera technology: ‘It was so sensitive that it could detect fire ant mounds from 500 feet in the air.’ he said. But it couldn’t.
By November 2011, ground temperatures were too warm for the camera system to detect fire ant mounds, so a second trial was run over another 7000 ha of known infestations. Again, the trials did not go well. To produce images with high enough resolution to detect fire ant nests, the helicopter had to fly very low and very slow, virtually hovering. So, the helicopters could not fly when it was windy or raining, and then, only in the middle of the day when there were no shadows on the ground. So, not of a lot of imagery was captured. But again, the analysts could not make sense of the images, because, this time, the data from the three cameras could not be integrated into a single map. Ironically, analysts could detect 48% of mounds larger than 30cm and 59% of mounds larger than 60cm just from aerial photography, without the need for extremely complex remote-sensing technology. But manual analysis was not effective enough and too time consuming, so the camera system went back to the USA for further development.
By the mid December 2011, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was 120,714ha, 9/10 the size of the Brisbane City LGA. During 2011-12 another 2480 colonies were detected over 448 sites. There were seven significant detections in 2011-12, the most significant was a previously un-infested property in the Lockyer Valley suburb of Hatton Vale and on a nearby property at Summerholm, 700m away. Fire ants had also turned up on properties at Mount Cotton, Rosevale, Karalee, Mount Forbes, Logan Village and Woolloongabba.
Fire ants were spreading and persisting. Fire ant inspectors inspected 400 current or previous market gardens that had had the full regime of treatment. 16 of them were still infested and four in the Rochedale area where the infestation was first discovered, remained infested.
By then program funders were having reservations about the programs ability to de-limited the extent of the infestation. At the meeting of Consultative Committee in September 2011, the West Australian and Victorian representatives said that the only tool that Queensland had for doing defining the boundaries of the infestation was the remote-sensing technology but delays with the trials over the past two years of trial meant there were no results for it so far. Consultative Committee convened a technical workshop in early February 2012 to assess the ability of remote-sensing technology. As they often did, they deferred making any decision until the end of the next set of trials due in September 2012.
But there were more shocks for the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program in November 2011 when fire ants turned up in a container of mining equipment delivered to Roma in south-west Queensland. Staff found the fire ants at the base of a crate and sprayed them immediately. Program staff then treated the site and inspected neighbouring properties. The crate had been shipped from Houston, Texas, USA, an area known to be infested with fire ants. The crate was due to be shipped on to Perth, potentially spreading the pest across the country. The program appealed to the mining industry to urgently check their sites and machinery for signs of the invasive pest because a lot of mining equipment was being brought into the coal seam gas industry in Queensland at this time.
This was the fifth separate incursion of fire ants into Queensland after three into south-east Queensland and one into Gladstone and it raised the questions about the effectiveness of the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service. Under current quarantine regimes, containers from fire ant infested countries are not treated before they leave and containers of mining or farming equipment coming into Australia are inspected only if the equipment is declared as ‘used’; ie potentially harbouring a fire ant nest in soil still on the equipment. The crate that went to Roma had been declared new equipment when, obviously, it wasn’t.
Consultative Committee met again at the end of November 2011 to review the role of molecular genetics in the program to determine whether fire ant populations in Queensland are derived from a single or multiple importations and to determine the origins of outlying colonies and to differentiate them from re-infestations and persistent colonies. The results showed that the remaining Brisbane population, the polygyne (multi-queen) infestation in the west, came from a single incursion. They also found that the polygyne population had been substantially reduced and with an unexpected decrease in genetic variation in the remaining populations. They suggested this was evidence, refuted by CSIRO in 2020, that eradication was being successful.
2012
In early February 2012, Consultative Committee chaired a two-day meeting with scientists from CSIRO, the modellers from Monash University, a representative from ABARES, representatives of the two largest funders, the New South Wales and Victorian governments plus the Program Director and the program’s scientists.
The modellers from Monash University reported their analysis of the historical trajectory of the Brisbane fire ant invasion. They said the larger incursion in Brisbane’s south-west continues to spread more than twelve years after the program began. More than $275m had been spent on the eradication program thus far and the known infested area had doubled in area since 2004. The opportunity for eradication seems to have been narrowly missed. There was always an infested area outside the searched and treated areas. Delimiting the invasions was recognized as crucial from its inception but the boundary has not been defined. If accurate estimates of the boundary had been available, resources could have been reallocated to fully cover the infested region – at no extra cost, by reducing the number of follow-up treatments in formerly infested areas. The southern and western boundaries of the invasion advance at a steady rate, seemingly unaffected by the sharp drop in the number of reproductively mature nests. So, the eradication program appeared highly successful in that fewer nests were being reported, but this masked an expansion of geographic range. They found that numbers of fire ants were again in decline in 2011, but by December of that year, the infested region was larger than ever with the invasion boundaries still advancing to the south towards the Gold Coast and Scenic Rim and west into the Lockyer Valley. Another unexpected finding was that immature nests (those not yet capable of founding new nests) outnumbered mature nests at almost every stage of the invasion. Destroying immature nests is at least as important as destroying mature nests. But many of these immature nests are too small to detect and their presence can only be inferred.
Consultative Committee deferred making any decision on the feasibility or otherwise of a future eradication program. They said that they would know in three years whether the surveillance package of remote-sensing and community surveillance would be able to delimited the infestation or not, but they recommended a review at the end of the next surveillance season in September 2012 to assess progress towards delineation and the level of confidence in achieving eradication over the next financial year.
Consultative Committee met again on 14 March 2012 to consider a forward plan for the program for 2012-15. The Committee’s support for the continuation of the program past 2012-13 was subject to funders’ budget processes and consideration of the results of the remote-sensing surveillance technology trials and delimitation activities up to December 2012. It was agreed that parallel work developing a contingency plan would be undertaken if preliminary results suggested containment with a view to eradication may no longer be technically feasible.
Lacking any real results from the remote-sensing technology so far the Program Director promised that it would be able to delimit the extent of the infestation in just three years by surveying the 150,000ha in the 10km buffer zone each year for three years. The Program Director did acknowledge that the technology would not be able to detect nests less than 6 months old, but he added confidently, they would be picked up in the 2nd and 3rd inspection rounds and it was unlikely there would be any nests beyond the 10km buffer zone. And, making the assumption the remote-sensing technology could effectively inspect the 10km buffer zone, the Program Director said it was cheaper to inspect the whole 10km buffer zone than to prophylactically treat the entire infested area.
As usual, the results from the 2012 remote-sensing surveillance season did not match the promises. The technology could only be used between May and September. 2012 had been unseasonably wet and the re-developed, complex camera system was late in arriving back from the USA. This meant the remote-sensing technology captured only 85,000ha of imagery instead of the target of 105,00ha per year. And the small team of computer analysts could process only 50,000ha of the 85,500ha of imagery because they were still dealing with a backlog of imagery from 2011 when the technology had not been able to detect fire ant mounds that were actually there. In 2012, the technology was identifying just about anything as a fire ant nest. It identified 5,237,146 potential targets which human analysts rationalised down to approximately 200,000 ‘points of interest,’: that meant 180 possible fire ant mounds per hectare which the field teams had to validate: that is, if they could actually access them and field inspectors could cover only about 5ha a day. And because the cameras could not detect nests less than 10cm, it was failing to detect nests that were actually there.
By now, cost comparisons with other surveillance methods were not looking good. Using remote-sensing technology to survey the buffer zone cost $60-80 per hectare: prophylactic treatment of the whole buffer zone cost $65 per hectare. Field staff surveyed 49,047ha in 2012. The remote-sensing technology surveyed 39,889 ha. This process of trial and error in the use of remote-sensing technology went on as the computer program went back to Sydney University to develop their 5th version of the program to get the detection rate down. In the meantime, fire ants were spreading.
By December 2012, Consultative Committee members were concerned whether the remote-sensing technology could successfully delimit fire ant infestations by June 2015. The Committee elected a Red Imported Fire Ant Contingency Plan Working Group to develop a plan should eradication no longer be considered feasible.
By the end of the 2012-13 year, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was up to 282,000ha, twice the size of the Brisbane City LGA. During 2012-13, 1548 new mounds were found over 784ha with six significant infestations. But three on-going concerns remained: fire ants were moving further and further into the food bowl of the Lockyer Valley. In October 2012, the Lockyer Valley Mayor announced another infestation at Forest Hill, close to other infestations in the Valley. Fire ants were infesting development sites. In March 2012, two more colonies of fire ants were found at Logan Village which was 3km from an infestation at Buccan and Logan Reserve that was ‘undergoing significant development.’ Fire ants were persisting in market gardens: During 2012-13, field staff and inspectors inspected 650 current or previous market gardens, 54 of them had been infested and sixteen still were: eleven were still active market gardens. So too were three residential developments, one industrial site and one school.
In 2012, the computer program behind the remote-sensing technology could not tell the difference between fire ant mounds and other similar warm, elliptical objects. In was identifying a possible 180 mounds per hectare. It went back to Sydney University to improve its detection rate. In one trial, they got the detection rate down to 21 potential mounds per hectare, but it was missing 40% of actual mounds, so for the 2013 surveillance season they adjusted the detection rate to 45 mounds per hectare to increase the detection rate, but this increased the number of false alarms. There were still no reports on its false negative rate: how many actual mounds it did not find, despite the requirement that it gave that crucial estimate.
2013
The surveillance season, from May to September in 2013, was again unseasonably wet, so the helicopter could only fly over 85,500 ha of the planned 100,000ha during the year. The cameras captured only 50,000ha of imagery but only 31,000ha of the imagery could be analysed because there were not enough human analysts to rationalise the computer program’s wild over-estimate of 1,224,165 potential targets. The human analysts rationalised that number down to 342,500 possible fire ant mounds, but there were not enough field staff to check this many potential nests in any sort of reasonable time frame. The field staff managed to check 67,600 of the nearly 350,000 potential nests – and found three infested properties with a total of six colonies.
In July 2013 The Courier Mail had a field day with the results: “$7.2m, two years, 85,000ha and this is all they found!” The Queensland Minister insisted that that was not evidence that the technology did not work, but evidence that that fire ants were being contained. A fire ant program staff member who contacted The Courier Mail dis-agreed. ‘There have been no nests found by the chopper using infra-red cameras after flying thousands of hours. All it picks up is horse or cow dung, rocks and other rubbish. One property had thousands of ‘points of interest’ on it but the camera did not pick up the fire ant nests that were actually there.’
Aerial surveillance validation staff got sick of writing ‘rock’ or ‘manure’ against the ‘point of interest’ coordinates on their Record of Surveillance form – especially on grazing properties. Staff were told NOT to report nests they found visually apart from what the remote-sensing technology identified as a ‘point of interest’ and the program contracted another fifty field staff for field validation surveys. In the meantime, fire ants continued to spread.
By January 2013, the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program had cost tax payers almost $275m. In the 12 months to June 2013, community and field staff had found another 751 infested properties over 588ha of infested land; twice as many as they had found the previous year. The Fire Ant Restricted Area had more than tripled in three years. In 2010, it was 90,000ha, 7/10 the size of the Brisbane City LGA. By March 2014 it was 316,304ha, up from 282,000ha the previous year and was by then 2.4 times the size of the Brisbane City LGA. The Fire Ant Restricted Area stretched from bayside Redland City, through Logan and Ipswich cities to as far west as Forest Hill in the Lockyer Valley: Queensland’s prime black-soil farming country. There were 15 infested properties in the Lockyer Valley by then including one at Glen Cairn. The Lockyer Valley Mayor and horticultural group ‘Growcom’ said the infestation would devastate farming and the State government was not doing enough. The Mayor of the Somerset region, a popular tourist destination, feared the impact of fire ants if they got into our National Parks. The public found a serious infestation at Yatala, outside the surveillance zone. And fire ants were coming back to properties that had previously been treated, especially 54 market gardens. The Program’s Deputy Director said that this was not evidence that fire ants were out of control, but evidence that the remote-sensing technology was finding more nests more easily. The actual evidence was that it was detecting more warm rocks and manure than fire ant mounds.
By the end of 2013, the cost-benefit argument for the remote-sensing technology, over field surveillance or prophylactic treatment of the whole 510km buffer zone was looking weak. By the end of 2013, field staff had surveyed 49,047ha and 39,889ha had been surveyed by helicopter. Field staff cost about $3.9M and the remote sensing technology cost about $3.12M. But the remote-sensing technology was the ‘basket’ that the eradication program had put all their ‘eggs’ into for delimiting the extent of the infestation and getting eradication back on track. If remote-sensing technology could not do the job, they had nothing else. While the numbers of fire ants were again in decline throughout 2013, by December that year, the infested region was larger than ever: around 342,000ha.
2013 ended as badly as all other years for the program. In November, fire ants had turned up for a second time at the Port of Gladstone; four kilometres away from the first infestation that occurred there in 2006. Ironically, the first site had been declared fire ant free in 2010. A manager of one of the port terminals sent photos of two large mounds and several smaller ones in the gardens at the port to the program who identified them as fire ants. But they were different from the ones that had been detected in 2006, and declared eradicated in 2010, and they different from the ones in south-east Queensland. This was the second separate incursion into Gladstone and the sixth into Queensland since 2001. With more surveillance around those mounds, field teams found 60 colonies over 5 sites and determined that this infestation had probably been there for 2-3 years already.
Support from the Commonwealth and other States and Territories was beginning to crumble. In April 2013, Consultative Committee was unable to reach a consensus on whether to recommend funding the program for the next 2 years (2013-14 and 2014-15). Western Australia was only prepared to commit funding for one more year (2013-14). In August 2013, the Western Australian representative on the Committee again expressed serious reservation about the program when it had breached one of its review triggers: > 600ha of new infestation in one year. In 2012-13, another 794ha were found infested.
2014
By February 2014, even the too-close Consultative Committee was concerned about the limitations of the remote-sensing technology: images were blurry on days with more than 30% cloud cover; it could not detect mounds on disturbed or cultivated ground – the favourite habitat of fire ants: it could not detect nests less than 30cm. There was concern that undetected mounds could show up outside any boundary line that might be drawn by June 2015. Despite the evidence, the Queensland government continued to claim that eradication was still feasible and cost effective. The Victorian representative was concerned about the infestation moving into the Lockyer Valley and thought the program could probably contain fire ants but not achieve eradication.
By April 2014 Consultative Committee was discussing the need for a ‘whole-of-life’ response plan to fire ants with options for both eradication and transition to management. Again, the meeting was unable to come to a consensus on continued funding because some jurisdictions were voting with their feet. While the Commonwealth, Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia supported funding for 2014-15, Western Australia did not and Tasmania’s and the Northern Territory’s contribution was contingent on all jurisdictions agreeing to the cost-sharing arrangements. Significant cracks were opening up in the continued funding and continued future of the program.
In August 2014, the program was still touting the wonders of the remote-sensing technology. On their Facebook page they said ‘Can you believe that we can pinpoint fire ant mounds from our chopper? A unique multi-spectral camera system is mounted to a helicopter to detect fire ant nests over large areas. The images are analysed using a sophisticated computer program to identify suspect fire ant nests. This is a world-first fire ant detection technology. …Up until September, we will be operating surveillance flights in south-east Queensland.’
From the beginning of the trials in 2009, results of the remote-sensing technology never matched the promises made about it, By September 2014, the end of the remote-sensing surveillance season, the cameras had captured 63,100ha of the annual target of 100,000 ha of imagery. By then the University of Sydney had done all they could with their computer program for analysing the imagery. They said, ‘The current version had reached the limits of its performance.’ The remote-sensing technology had found one infested site with five mounds. In the meantime, the public and field staff had found many more. Three more suburbs were added to the list that were infested, making a total of 291, the total area of infestation increased from 2334ha to 2464ha and the Fire Ant Restricted Area increased from 316,304ha to 323,808ha, 2.4 times the size of the Brisbane City LG Area. By March 2015, there were 123 high-risk suburbs and 104 low-risk suburbs in the Fire Ant Restricted Area: a total of 227 suburbs.
2015
By early 2015, the review of the Remote Sensing Surveillance Technology’s ability to delimit the infestation was finally completed. The review found that between 2012 and 2015, the technology had detected only 38 colonies on 23 sites. The cameras were by then aging and becoming unreliable and would cost $192,000 and $461,000 respectively to replace. The reviewers made no claim the technology had delimited the extent of the fire ant infestation – its whole reason for existing, but optimistically anticipated that the remote-sensing technology program would resume in 2016-17 or soon after. There was no remote sensing for fire ants during the cooler months of 2016. By June 2016 the Fire Ant Restricted Area was up to 411,500ha. And in December 2017, the Robotic Centre at the University of Sydney said the technology was not sufficiently refined to work over different environments and different terrains. In December 2018, they assessed the technology as needing continual refinement.
2016
By November 2014, the Queensland Government had spent about $400m of public money over twelve years trying to eradicate a fire ant infestation that was, by then, ten times bigger than what it was in 2002. Four independent scientific reviews of the program commissioned by Consultative Committee had been scathing.
In November 2014, the Agricultural Ministers’ Forum took control of commissioning the next scientific reviews of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program and commissioned a private consultant to chair it. The final report was provided to the Minister’s Forum in May 2016.
The review’s terms of reference were to:
Part 1: to review of the current operations of the south-east Queensland Program to determine if:
Part 2: to undertake scenario modelling to provide advice on options for eradication, containment and/or management of fire ants.
The chair commissioned the program-friendly Monash University modeller, involved with the program since 2008, to determine the appropriate level of funding for any future ten-year fire ant program so that the review’s findings would be consistent with the work he had done previously. In 2012 he had said, ‘an opportunity for eradication seems to have been narrowly missed’. In 2013 he reported that neither he nor the program regarded the battle to eradicate fire ants as having been lost.
The 5th SRT 2016 acknowledged ‘the generous contribution of …. all staff in the Biosecurity Control Centre (Brisbane)…(and)‘ the work of the modeller from Monash University.’ In essence the review’s findings were to do more of the same with the same staff, same contractors and with the same amount of funding: another $380m over another 10 years on top of the $400m spent over the previous fifteen years but with even less scrutiny of the use of public money.
The 5th SRT 2016 strongly supported the current science program. The panel said thirteen previous reviews had shown that the fire ant program in south-east Queensland was scientifically sound. This essay shows that every independent scientific review of the program had been critical and their recommendation had been rejected.
The 5th SRT 2016 recommended a whole-of-life fire ant eradication program, with as much money again, to fund the same treatment program, movement control program and remote-sensing surveillance programs (despite the lack of any performance data or cost-benefit analyses of these programs), delivered in five yearly increments instead of yearly increments: meaning with even less scrutiny of the use of public money.
The 5th SRT 2016 could not address its second term of reference: to undertake scenario modelling to compare options for eradication: containment and/or management of fire ants, because of the program had no reliable and consistent performance data.
The 5th SRT 2016 blamed the program’s poor performance to date on funding issues: the excuse rejected by previous reviews who blamed the program’s poor science, poor management and its lack of performance data to support continued funding for an eradication attempt.
By 2016, after the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program had spent nearly $400m over $14 years, fire ants infested an area of over 400,000ha stretching from Redlands on Moreton Bay, through Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan, Ipswich City Council areas and into the Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Scenic Rim Regional Areas. The infestation was by then more than ten times what it was in 2001 when fire ants were first detected in south-east Queensland.
The main cause of fire ants spreading was human-assisted movement. Businesses who deal in fire ant friendly materials like soil, mulch, and compost, especially in a part of south-east Queensland undergoing massive urban development, carelessly or accidentally moving fire ants. Or residents accidentally or carelessly moving fire ant infested potted-plants. The fire ant experts from the USA said in 2001 that the first thing the program needed to do was to stop people spreading them with an ‘aggressive containment’ program. As of December 2024, the program has never had one.
The 5th SRT 2016 acknowledged that movement controls were a crucial component of current and future programs to address the problem of human-assisted movement and noted the importance of ensuring that this is adequately resourced. But, the reviewers said, human-assisted movement was far less predictable than natural spread and more difficult to plan for and they recommended only a scant fraction of the additional $380m be spent on compliance with critical movement controls: relying on the General Biosecurity Obligation, created under the Biosecurity Act 2014 to make high risk enterprises more compliant with movement controls. It didn’t.
The 5th SRT 2016 said eradication success depended on re-commissioning the failed remote sensing surveillance technology (recommended by the Monash University modeller in 2008), to detect fire ant nests quicker than they were spreading.
Trials of the remote-sensing surveillance technology were phased out in 2015 after the technology found 38 nests, mis-identified thousands of rocks and lumps of manure as fire ant nests and missed hundreds of actual nests while the fire ant infestation tripled in size from around 100,000ha to over 300,000ha.
The Monash University modeller blamed the dismal result of trials of the remote-sensing surveillance technology on the fact it was only used to monitor the edge of the incursion where they hoped to find only a few nests when. In fact, by July 2016, fire ants had been detected well beyond biosecurity zones.
In 2016 the Monash University modeller acknowledged that their team could not actually model the program’s current approach to eradicating fire ants or predict the probability of eradication because of the lack of empirical data from rigorous field trials on the efficacy of the treatment and surveillance regimes. Therefore, the Monash University modeller could only give guidance, not an optimal approach, and offered four future funding options for the program based on four scenarios: one without using remote-sensing surveillance technology and three with it. The predicted speed and effectiveness of those options was a function of how much money was spent developing them: more money will give better result more quickly. But given that the current remote sensing surveillance technology had only a 38% chance of differentiating a fire ant nest from a cow pat, and an undisclosed chance of missing nests entirely, the Monash University modeller advised it would take ‘extensive investigation’ to improve the remote sensing surveillance technology: between 1-2 years, and it was unlikely to be fully operational before May 2018.
.
Other contributions of the program
The 4th SRT 2009 said the program’s science program was ‘fragmented’ and ‘ad hoc’. The 5th SRT 2016 said ‘The science program has contributed significantly to the successes to date and it needed to do so in the future.’
Ably supported by program managers, the review panel claimed, without supporting data, the program had contained fire ants within south-east Queensland and eradicated two incursions as well as developing significant technologies that will have application in other biosecurity programs: remote-sensing surveillance technology, habitat modelling for targeting surveillance, effective baits, odour detection dogs, fire ant genetic analysis and an effective community engagement program.
I checked those claims.
Contained fire ants within south-east Queensland.
The program has reported significant infestations outside it’s operational area every year. A review of the program in 2013 found fire ants were always found beyond the operational area of the program and were advancing steadily towards the Gold Coast, Lockyer Valley and Scenic Rim.
The program’s science team published a paper in 2018, claiming the program had contained the rate spread of fire ants to just 500,000ha of south-east Queensland when the program has never defined the extent of the infestation.
By the end of 2024, the fire ant infested area extended from the Sunshine Coast, east to the Moreton Bay islands, west to the Darling Downs and south of Ballina in New South Wales.
Eradicated two incursions
As early as 2004, the Program Director wanted to be able to declare some previously infested properties free of fire ants. To do so, the 2nd SRT 2004 said the Director needed to develop a protocol for validating such claims that included an analysis of the property’s history: invasions/re-invasion, treatment regime and survey history. The program has never developed such a protocol because it has never collected the relevant data.
Transferable technologies
Fire ant genetic analysis
In 2001, the fire ant population in south-east Queensland was a mixture of polygyne fire ants (colonies with multiple queens) and monogyne fire ants (colonies with a single queen). They spread in very different ways. Polygyne fire ants spread when a newly mated queen walks a short distance from her maternal nest to create her own: creating a dense infestation. Monogyne fire ants spread when a newly mated queen flies 5km, or further with the wind behind her, from her maternal nest, to create her own nest in any attractive materials like soil, potted plants, turf, hay, organic mulch, compost, animal manure, gravels, sand and non-soil aggregates. Monogyne infestations are likely to be low density, but be no less invasive.
By 2016 the fire ant population in south-east Queensland was almost entirely monogyne. The program’s Science Director claimed the change in the fire ant population was the result of the pressure being exerted by the eradication program and evidence the program was working.
In January 2020, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) reviewed the scientific principles that underpin the National Fire Ant Eradication Program. CSIRO agreed that change in the fire ant population in south-east Queensland was indeed a direct result of the program’s decision to target polygyne fire ants, AND that the shift in the fire ant population had considerable ramifications for how the program controlled the movement of fire ant carriers.
The program could not claim a low-density infestation was evidence the program was working: it was evidence of a monogyne infestation. Visual inspections of a property to declare it fire ant free was not likely to detect incipient monogyne nests. And there was little value in declaring a property fire ant free when it could be immediately invaded by newly mated, airborne, monogyne queens.
Consequently, the program needed to place greater emphasis on protecting fire ant carriers from infestation by newly mated, airborne, monogyne queens.
In sum, CSIRO said the program’s scientific principles were a mish-mash of poorly referenced biological details and management actions which failed to respond to a major change in the fire ant population in south-east Queensland.
Odour detection dogs
The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries hires professional dog handlers, on an as-needs basis, to search for Yellow Crazy Ants. The NSW government does not waste public money training detection dogs or maintaining them and their handlers all year round. Dogs trained by internationally certified trainers find 100% of targets humans can’t find. In trials, Biosecurity Queensland’s fire ant dogs found about 10% of the target fire ant nests. Professional standards for detection dogs are 100ha per day, with a minimum of 30ha per day in difficult terrain. Biosecurity Queensland detection dogs only work 2ha per day and only used to check that treated nests have been killed. The program says treated nests can be checked by poking them with a stick.
The odour detection dogs are just expensive Public Relations distractors. As fire ant spread out of control and re-infest treated areas the program tells the public, ‘Look at the cute dogs!’
Effective baits
International advice in 2001 was for 3-4 treatments per season for 3 years over the entire infested area. The program has never achieved that level: leaving areas under-treated or not treated at all. Previous reviews have repeatedly asked the program to conduct field trial on the efficacy of using broadcast baits alone (without the additional use of direct nest injections), and field trials on the efficacy of direct nest injections.
In 2014, the program’s Science team published a paper claiming that it’s standard treatment program: (an application of an insect growth regulator 3-4 times per season) kills fire ants. The paper does not say the data was collected from only 60 of the 905 infested properties the program was monitoring between 2001 and 2006.
Habitat modelling
Against the advice of the 4th SRT 2009 the program adopted the fire ant habitat model developed by Monash University to focus the program’s remote sensing surveillance effort. The 4th SRT 2009 questioned the program’s assumption ‘that fire ants prefer to nest in open disturbed land.’ The 4th SRT 2009 agreed that natural vegetation sites near fire ant infestations are unlikely to have many colonies, but they said the probability is not zero and members of the 4th SRT 2009 with experience in the USA considered it likely that some colonies could reside in these less suitable habitats and act as a source for further infestation. The program used the habitat model to target its surveillance effort and fire ants continued to spread.
Remote sensing surveillance
In 2018, Consultative Committee commissioned another external company to advise on the effectiveness of an up-dated remote-sensing surveillance system. Their report sounded a lot like that of the 4th SRT 2009. It said:
In the November 2020 edition of Biosecurity News Biosecurity Queensland was still claiming that detecting fire ant nests from the sky using high-resolution cameras fitted to helicopters is a potential ‘game-changer’ for the program.
An effective community engagement program.
By the end of 2024, the program had been facing years of push back from the public: ill- informed about the risk of fire ants and the safety of a standard baiting program, frustrated by the program’s erratic treatment program and worried about non-professional program staff entering their property. The result is the ‘Stop the Toxic Fire Ant Program.’
The second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27
By 2016, the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program: a five-year program to cost $123.4m, had blown out to a fifteen year program, had cost ~$400m and the Fire Ant Restricted Area had blown out to 400,000ha. It is worth noting that the Fire Ant Restricted Area is not equivalent to the Fire Ant Infested Area, which has NEVER been determined. The Fire Ant Restricted Area is only the program’s operational area.
Inevitably the first National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2001-16 was replaced by a second: ‘The Ten Year National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program SEQ 2017-18 to 2026-27’ to cost another $411.4m to implement the recommendations of the 2016 review: ie to do more of the same with the same amount of money.
It’s key strategies were:
This meant:
It did not start well. By April 2020 fire ants had spread:
2019 Effectiveness and Efficiency Audit (science)
The program had not been audited since 2013. In 2019 Consultative Committee commissioned an ex-Commonwealth Department of Agriculture senior executive to audit all aspects of the second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27: including its scientific basis.
The auditor said the program was not based on sound science. He said there was no scientific basis for the program’s west to east rolling treatment strategy. It was a policy decision to prioritise the expanding infestation into farmland in the Lockyer Valley over the persistent and intensifying infestations in the cities in the east: Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands and the Gold Coast.
He noted that in the first year, 2017-18, the program’s operational boundary blew out to include another 78,000ha – a 21% increase: completely negating the claim of the 2016 scientific review, that the extent of the infestation had been defined – a critical determinant of whether the 2017-27 Eradication Program was technically feasible.
He noted that in 2017-18, the infestation covered 600,000ha, fifteen times what it was in 2002, that eleven significant infestations had been found outside the program’s 2017 operational boundary and they were not always acted on swiftly
He noted that areas targeted for treatment in both 2017-18 and 2018-19 had received significantly less than the three rounds of treatment scheduled for each year, and the science team was considering reducing treatments to just two rounds per year because no live ants had been found at sentinel sites in the treatment area. The reviewer noted there had been no independent assessment of the siting of the program’s sentinel sites or of the data collection method.
And he questioned the likelihood that new generation remote-sensing surveillance technology would enable the program to reduce treatment costs by only treating targeted areas. He recommended the program’s Steering Committee adjust its work plan to address the scientific needs of the program.
The Second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program; 2017-27, exhausted its $411.4m budget in just five years. By July 2023, fire ants infested an area of around 800,000ha., stretching from Moreton Bay Regional Council in the north, Redland City, including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), in the east, Gold Coast City in the south and extending through Brisbane, Ipswich, and Logan cities to the Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Scenic Rim Regional Councils and west of Toowoomba city.
Chapter 11: Consequences: Under the guise of ‘shared public-private responsibilities’, dumping all aspects of the failed program – treatment, surveillance and containment – onto the public.
It is clear the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program cannot find, kill or stop fire ants from spreading. In 2001, fire ant experts said if the Australian fire ant program neither eradicated the infestation nor controlled its spread, the only option left was self-management. That is where the program is now.
Under the guise of shared public-private responsibilities, which the 2019 auditor described as cost-transference, not cost-saving, the program is dumping the responsibilities for finding, killing and not spreading fire ants onto residents, businesses and Councils.
Finding fire ants: surveillance
With the lack of any systematic surveillance of the infested area to determine its limits, either from the ground or from the air, the program relies on ad-hoc detections by field staff or the public.
Perversely, the program defined rural areas on the western edge of the infestation, with lower populations less likely to detect fire ant nests, but easier to treat by air as ‘high risk’ but defined urban areas with high populations likely to detect fire ants, but harder to treat, as ‘low risk.’
‘Low-risk’ areas were the heavily infested cities in the east of the infestation: Brisbane, Ipswich, Redlands, Logan and the Gold Coast and the public reported suspicious nests, as they were asked to.
80% of new detections were made by the public. But by May 2019, the program had a back log of 8764 untreated nests across Ipswich, Logan, Redlands and Gold Coast cities: up from 3039 in the middle of April. By July 2019, the backlog was up to 13,000. And it was likely more people wanted to report suspicious nests: but couldn’t. A recorded message to callers said the program was experiencing high volumes of reports and asked for their patience. They didn’t want to be patient. They just gave up.
When the program did respond to reports of suspicious nests, it took 21 days, and only to inspect those in public areas like schools, childcare centres, parks, footpaths and sporting fields. If the nest was a fire ant nest, it would be weeks before it was actually treated.
One of the reasons for the backlog was the program’s cumbersome operations. It took staff three weeks to collect a sample of a suspicious ant, then another month to treat the nest, if it was a fire ant nest. In the meantime, the ants were free to spread.
To speed up the process the program began sending a Fire Ant Identification Resource to residents who had reported a suspicious nest.
The covering letter said, in part: “Dear Resident…..To assist us in identifying the ant that you are reporting please:
The Fire Ant Sampling Kit contained an information brochure, a single rubber glove, a small plastic sachet and a reply-paid envelope.
The information brochure warned residents that fire ants can inflict painful stings that result in blisters and, in rare cases, death and warned residents not to touch the nest. It showed a photo of a person’s arm with multiple blisters. The brochure said residents could identify a potential fire ant nest by poking it with a stick to see if the ants swarm aggressively. It is inconceivable that residents, armed with a single rubber glove, could get fire ants off the end of a stick and into a tiny plastic sachet without the ants swarming up their arm and stinging them.
Asking residents to mail in a fire ant sample was a breach of the program’s Fire Ant Movement Controls and Australia Post does not permit dangerous insects to be send by post.
Killing fire ants: Treatment
At the beginning of the program, in response to the frequently asked question, ‘Can I treat the (fire ant) nest myself?’ the program said, ‘Fire ants are a category one restricted matter under the Biosecurity Act 2014. Destruction of fire ant nests should only be administered by a qualified Biosecurity Queensland authorised officer. Treating the nest yourself is not recommended as this will likely be ineffective and result in the colony evacuating the queen and relocating to another area. There is also significant risk to your safety – fire ants are very aggressive and swarm when their nest is disturbed. Each ant can inflict repeated stings that are extremely painful, and in some cases can result in anaphylactic shock.’
When Liberal National Party Minister McVeigh came into office in 2012, he proposed, then quickly dropped, allowing the public to treat fire ant nests.
But by 2019-20, self-treatment was back on the agenda with the program handing out free fire ant bait: in breach of legislation and putting the public and the environment at risk.
The Queensland Pest Management Act 2001 made it illegal for the public to treat fire ant nests. The Act aimed to protect the public from health risks associate with pest control activities and the adverse results of the ineffective control of pests by establishing a licensing regime to ensure that such activities are carried out by a pest management technician. The public is only permitted to use household pesticides ordinarily available in retail stores where groceries are sold.
The active ingredient in the bait Biosecurity Queensland is providing is pyriproxyfen. The manufacturers give clear safety instructions for its use. Will they public follow those instructions, or put themselves and the environment at risk?
A user must protect themselves and their home by:
A user must apply it effectively by:
The bait is toxic to aquatic life. To protect the environment, a user must:
Containing the spread of fire ants: Movement controls
In 2001, United States fire ant experts and Queensland Department executives acknowledged that the most critical element of the fire ant program was to stop them spreading.
In 2001, the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries had authority under The Plant Protection Act 1989 to prevent, control and remove pest infestations and had the authority to appoint experienced inspectors. In May 2001, the red imported fire ant was declared a pest under the Plant Protection Regulation 2001 under the Act and the land within two kilometres of a known nest was declared the Fire Ant Restricted Area.
But the Queensland Government feared that movement controls would give national funders the impression that Queensland was not confident it could eradicate the pest, and hence, threaten the significant amount of national funding that would flow into Queensland for an eradication program. And fearing a political backlash from high-risk enterprises, the Queensland Government allowed those high-risk enterprises to manage their risk of spreading fire ants: arguing a containment effort was not necessary because the pest was going to be eradicated.
Noting that the Fire Ant Restricted Area is the program’s operational area: not the Fire Ant Infested Area which has never been defined: in November 2001, when the Restricted Area was 43,047ha (about 1/3 the size of the Brisbane City LGA), about twenty Risk Management and Security Officers (Biosecurity Compliance Officers) identified 290 high risk enterprises areas but only 66 agreed to develop voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans.
By January 2002 Biosecurity Compliance Officers had developed voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans with 1262 high risk enterprises: though there were potentially more. By December 2002 the Biosecurity Compliance Officers had identified 2937 high-risk businesses but only half agreed to Approved Risk Management Plans and only 370 agreed to site inspections. The Biosecurity Compliance Officers still had no idea how many high-risk businesses were operating within the Fire Ant Restricted Area.
In October 2002, the 1st SRT 2002 said the movement of high-risk materials was the most likely mechanism for long distance spread of fire ants in Australia and there were no uniform restrictions on the movement of high-risk materials within Queensland and between other States.
By July 2003, the Biosecurity Compliance Officers had developed voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans with 2348 high risk enterprise but had no idea how many there were, especially those operating in eighty-five new housing developments. In 2003, two years after the program had stared, seventeen road signs were finally erected within the Fire Ant Restricted Area: reminding residents and travellers not to spread fire ants.
By 2005 the Biosecurity Compliance Officers had developed Approved Risk Management Plans with 2743 high-risk enterprises, at least up from 2348 in 2003, but they still with no idea how many high-risk enterprises were operating within the Fire Ant Restricted Area.
By 2006, the Biosecurity Compliance Officers had developed 2854 Approved Risk Management Plans, could audit only 594 and found 67 non-compliant.
By 2009, the Fire Ant Restricted Area had blown out to 94,891ha and the 4th SRT 2009 reported that the program still had no idea of how many high-risk businesses were operating with the Fire Ant Restricted Area and repeated the obvious need for aggressive containment.
By 2010 the Fire Ant Restricted Area was up to 98,608ha but only 3570 high risk enterprises had entered into voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans.
By 2011, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was up to 118,287ha, covering large scale development and road construction sites but only 3693 high risk enterprises had entered into voluntary Approved Risk Management Plans.
In February 2011, facing criticism for not imposing consequences on the illegal movement of high-risk materials, the Queensland Government made a spectacle of fining a company $12,500 for illegally moving 388 tonnes of soil out of the Fire Ant Restricted Area. Fortunately, that load was not infested.
By 2012, all commercial operators in the Fire Ant Restricted Area were required to have risk management plans, they were no longer optional. But identifying all relevant high-risk businesses within the Fire Ant Restricted Area was a challenge with so few Biosecurity Compliance Officers.
By 2013, 3690 high-risk businesses had Approved Risk Management Plans but the team of Biosecurity Compliance Officers was down to just 18 with a budget of just $1.5m. They could review only 98 high-risk businesses and they still had no idea how many high-risk enterprises were operating within the Fire Ant Restricted Area. They conducted 843 property inspections and found 29 instances of human assisted movement.
In April 2014, a hay producer was detected moving a very large amount of hay out of the Lockyer Valley to un-infested parts of Queensland and New South Wales. Fortunately, the load of hay was intercepted and the incident raised awareness of how easily fire ants can be spread and eighty hay and other producers signed up for Approved Risk Management Plans. Spot audits by Biosecurity Compliance Officers during the year found many hay inspectors were not compliant with movement controls.
In 2001, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was around 43,000ha about 1/3 the size of the Brisbane City LGA. Because of little control on the movement of fire ant friendly materials, by August 2014, the Fire Ant Restricted Area had blown out to 323,808ha, nearly 2.5 times the size of the Brisbane City LGA; that included 15 infested properties in the Lockyer Valley. By 2016, the Fire Ant Restricted Area had blown out to 400,000ha.
Blaming industries for spreading fire ants, rather than the program’s failure to implement movement controls, the Queensland Government introduced the Biosecurity Act 2014 which created a ‘General Biosecurity Obligation’; imposing a legal responsibility on people and organizations living or working within fire ant biosecurity zones to take all reasonable precautions to ensure they don’t spread fire ants.
Industry representatives at a Fire Ant Program Stakeholder Forum in May 2018 said they were happy to accept their General Biosecurity Obligation, but they wanted the program to fulfil its own obligations by:
In 2019 the program auditor was particularly critical of the program’s failure to control the movement of fire ant carriers.
He said controlling the spread of fire ants, either by natural spread or human-assisted movement was a central and essential element of the eradication program and that the Queensland Biosecurity Act 2014 provides for regulations to control the movement of fire ant carriers and penalty infringements notices for non-compliance.
He found that while the program was funded for eleven compliance officers, there were just seven, and the program had no idea of how many high-risk businesses operated in the operational area. He said between 2018-19 the program conducted 912 compliance checks, at least better than the 534 conducted in 2017-18. He said 30% cases were not resolved in a month, but for the first time, three infringement notices had been issued, but there were no prosecutions. He said dismissing breaches as minor was not acceptable. He recommended having a full complement of compliance offices who used infringement notices and prosecutions to improve compliance with movement controls.
The program said it would consider the auditor’s recommendation to introduce regulations and fees to inspect loads of fire ant carriers crossing the operational area boundary by the end of 2020. It didn’t.
In December 2020, CSIRO’s review of the scientific basis of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program found:
In response, in 2020 the New South Wales government and in 2021 the Victorian government no longer accepted Queensland Government fire-ant free accredited potted plants coming into their markets. To be able to enter those markets Queensland producers required additional certification that potted plants had been chemically treated.
By the end of 2024, fire ants had spread to the islands in Moreton Bay, to the Sunshine Coast, to Oakey on the Darling Downs and south of Ballina in New South Wales.
Chapter 12: Who’s responsible? Politicians on both sides of politics.
Political decisions by Minister Palaszczuk and an ALP government in 2001 over-rode national and international scientific advice for meeting the challenge of a well-established infestation of one of the world’s worst invasive species to tap into a flawed national funding formula for invasive species programs that created a cash cow for Queensland to mount an enormous jobs program: at the cost of managing, controlling and suppressing fire ant infestations.
Between 2012 and 2015, a Liberal National Party government followed suit.
Prior to their election win in March 2012 the NLP government promised to ‘beef up’ Queensland’s biosecurity effort by investing $6m over 4 years to employ an additional fifteen biosecurity officers to address Labor’s ineffective response to ticks, citrus canker, fire ants, Hendra virus, cane smut and equine influenza. It sounded like political spin, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. The incoming government had the opportunity to say, ‘The others failed, we can fix it.’ All they had to do was to renegotiate the funding formula with the Commonwealth to fund aggressive containment programs and to implement one with the biosecurity officers it intended to recruit.
Incoming Minister for Agriculture, John McVeigh looked promising. In December 2011 he was awarded a PhD in agricultural economics and agribusiness. Likely, as a new Minister, he would have attended the meeting of the Primary Industries Standing Committee on 27th April 2012 in Adelaide. Consultative Committee reported that while, between 2010 and 2011 the National Fire Ant Eradication Program appeared to have contained and suppressed the spread of fire ants in south-east Queensland, the southern and western boundaries of the invasion advanced at a steady rate, seemingly unaffected by the sharp drop in the number of reproductively mature nests. And due to delays in trails of the Remote Sensing Technology to finally delimit the extent of the infestation, the Committee was not able to assess the impact of that technology on the operations of the program, but hoped to be able to in December 2012.
Standing Committee agreed that, depending on the results of the review of the remote-sensing technology, a financial audit and a cost-benefit analysis of the program, Consultative Committee should start work in developing a contingency plan if the reviews find that containment with a view to eradiation may no longer be technically feasible and to provide that contingency plan to Ministerial Council by March 2013.
When the result of the State election became clear, I wrote to both Premier Newman and Minister McVeigh with my concerns about the program and their opportunity to remediate it.
I met the Minister on 12th July 2012. I explained that scientific advice had been for an aggressive containment program, not an eradication program and remote sensing technology was not used for surveillance in the USA, only for monitoring known nests. I advised him to re-negotiate the funding arrangement with the Commonwealth to transition to a program of management and aggressive containment.
Instead, in October 2012, he halved the amount of money that Queensland was contributing to the National Fire Ant Eradication Program and cut forty-five positions from the program to rely on the untested remote-sensing technology to find fire ants. At the same time, fire ants had moved into the farmlands of the Lockyer Valley.
In November 2012, Minister McVeigh up-dated the Queensland Parliament on the progress of the fire ant eradication program. He said the national funding partners had agreed to fund the program for 2012-13, which was true. He told Parliament that fire ants had been successfully contained to south-east Queensland when, in fact, they were spreading into the Lockyer Valley. He told Parliament that 13,000ha of previously deemed infested areas were now free of infestation when the program had no ‘Proof of Freedom Protocol’ or data to support such a claim. He told Parliament the fire ant program would achieve greater efficiencies with a scale-down workforce and with remote sensing technology – which, in 2012 was identifying millions of warm objects as fire ant nests but not detecting fire ant nests that were less than 10cm high. He told Parliament that in early 2012 a scientific panel had found the eradication methods used by the program were appropriate to eradicate fire ants from Australia. In fact, the 4th SRT 2009 reported that current methods were not eradicating fire ants because it was not detecting them. And in 2012 Monash University modellers informed Consultative Committee that the opportunity for eradication seemed to have been narrowly missed because there was always an infested area outside the searched and treated areas and the southern and western boundaries of the invasion had advanced at a steady rate, seemingly unaffected by the sharp drop in the number of reproductively mature nests. In September 2012, trials of the technology found it was identifying more than five million potential nests.
In July 2013 in an interview for Qweekend Minister McVeigh admitted he was under pressure from Ministerial Council and was aware of stories about the program under the former government but said many independent reviews over the past ten years showed the program’s efforts towards eradication were probably better than anywhere else but admitted the program could have done a better job.
His method for doing a better job was to push the risk and costs of treating fire ant nests onto the residents and businesses that found them. There are real risks of people getting seriously stung trying to treat a fire ant nest and a real risk that inexpert efforts could actually cause a nest to split and spread. The public had been told to report any findings of fire ant nests to the program and to leave treating them to experts. Minister McVeigh said that requests from residents and businesses for the program to treat fire nests was causing ‘a backlog’ that was just ‘ridiculous red tape’. Instead of putting on more staff to deal with the backlog, he opened up the treatment program to anyone willing ‘to give it a go. The Pest Management Act 2001 does not permit the public to use registered chemicals and using hot water or petrol was likely to do more harm than good.
Minister McVeigh pinned all his hope on an eradication effort with a scaled-down workforce using the untried and untested Remote Sensing Technology to cheaply and effectively find fire ants. In December 2011, prior to Minister McVeigh becoming responsible, the Fire Ant Restricted Area was 120,741ha (about 9/10 the size of the Brisbane LGA). While the development of the Remote Sensing Technology limped along and the public and ground staff found more fire ant nests, the Fire Ant Restricted Area blew out nearly three times to 323,808ha by August 2014 (about 2.4 times the size of the Brisbane LGA) and fire ants were moving further into the Lockyer Valley. Local Government Mayors called on Minister McVeigh to do more: he recruited another fifty field staff, perhaps to replace the forty-five he had sacked in 2012.
The LNP government went out of office in February 2015. By May 2015, the Remote Sensing Technology had detected a total of eleven fire ant nests.
Chapter 13: Who’s responsible? Chairs of national oversight committees.
Because of the high level of investment from the Australian and state and territory governments in the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program it was appropriate for a separate governance body (Consultative Committee or Steering Committee) to be established to provide primary strategic oversight of the program: with a clear delineation between the responsibilities of the governance body and the program.
Its responsibilities were:
State and territory government representatives must have expertise in technical matters, financial management, project management, risk management, compliance, research and development, and communications and the chair must have significant governance expertise.
The program was audited by one auditor between 2003 and 2013 and another in 2019. Both were scathing of the performance of the program’s governance body: Consultative Committee/Steering Committee.
The first auditor (2003-2013) reported its inability to audit the progress of the program because of ‘The scarcity of performance measures against outcomes prevents a more objective evaluation of operational efficiency….(with regard to) indicators of program functions and efficiency, there was no measure of respective effort or cost associated with key outcomes.’ The auditor also reported the poor rate and quality of effort of a workforce that was difficult and costly to manage.
In 2013, the first auditor’s most severe criticisms were of the program’s oversight committee: Consultative Committee. It never approved any long-terms plans for the program, there were no performance indicators of key aspects of the program and no mechanism for analysing the return on investment of program initiatives.
It did not approve plans and funding in a timely manner. In 2010-11, Consultative Committee approved the budget for the program a year after it was submitted and in 2009-10, Consultative Committee approved funds two months prior to the end of the financial year.
Consultative Committee did not have a regular meeting schedule, fire ant program managers had not been advised on the nature of the information Consultative Committee required and committee members’ attendance was inconsistent: some jurisdictions sent representatives to only half of the meetings or different representatives to different meetings.
The auditor recommended the Consultative Committee establish a consistent, regular timetable of oversight committee meetings – determined by program milestones and meetings of the Ministers’ Forum – establish a standing agenda for each meeting, ensure that the program’s work plan and budget is approved before the start of the relevant financial year and confirm the appropriateness of the members of the committees and encourage members to attend consistently.
And the auditors were critical of the quality of reports Consultative Committee was prepared to accept. They said status reports were just ‘narratives’ that did not report against a set of specific, measurable and fit-for-purpose performance indicators of key aspects of the program. They said program reports did not compare the activities undertaken with those planned. In some instances, the variance was up to 21%, but program reports gave no explanation for it. Consequently, they said, program reports did not provide trend analyses, making it difficult for the oversight committees to track the progress of the program, or any robust cost-benefit return-on-investment analysis to enable the oversight committees to assess the benefits of any program initiatives to decide if they should proceed.
Finally, they said ‘without complete, clear and accurate information to support decision making, governance committees may be unable to provide appropriate oversight and guidance to the program as required, leading to an increased risk of inappropriate decisions being made, or undue delays in the decision-making process or difficulty in being able to critically examine the performance of the program…. Further, without fit-for-purpose performance measures and target benefits, including appropriate tracking of project benefits to realisation, there is a risk that the expected value of a project may not be achieved or that the program may be unable to demonstrate due care has been taken in utilising public money.
Consultative Committee never commissioned that auditor again and the program was not audited again until 2019.
By then, the failed first National Fire Ant Eradication Program 2001-2016 had been replaced by the second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27: so too was the program’s governance body. Consultative Committee was replaced with a Steering Committee: with largely the same members but with a private consultant as chair.
When the program was audited again in 2019, the auditor’s most stinging criticisms were of the performance of the Steering Committee. The 2013 auditor said Consultative Committee never approved any long-term plans for the program. Likewise, in 2017, Steering Committee approved major changes to the $411.4m Ten Year Plan 2017-27, but with no change in the long-term plans. In 2019, the auditor recommended the Steering Committee request a Three Year Strategic Plan to address the issues raised in this review.
In 2013 the first auditor said Consultative Committee never set any outcome focused performance indicators to assess the progress of the program in achieving its clear objectives: to contain and eradicate fire ants from Queensland and stop the pest spreading throughout Australia.
In 2019 the auditor’s first priority was for the program to develop a new set of ‘outcome focused’ performance indicators. He noted the program had 105 indicators: none capable of informing the Steering Committee, the funding partners or the community of the progress the program was making in eradicating fire ants from south-east Queensland. He acknowledged that would be difficult to achieve because the Fire Ant Management System, the program’s information system, does not provide data that can support program decision making: a make-or-break performance indicator set for the program in 2001.
In 2013 the first auditor complained that the program did not have a functioning information system. At least ten independent reviews of the program since 2002 to 2018 had said the same. In 2018, the program’s Risk Management Committee said the program’s lack of a functioning information system and the lack of timely and accurate performance data posed an extreme risk to the program. In 2019 the auditor recommended the Steering Committee monitor the adequacy of the Fire Ant Management System and the program’s proposal for collecting management information to support decision making.
In 2013 the first auditor said Consultative Committee did not meet frequently enough and did not approve program plans in a timely manner. In 2018 the program’s Risk Management Committee said the Steering Committee not approving the program’s Work Plan, actions, targets, timeframe and performance indicators in a timely manner posed a high risk to the program’s progress.
In 2019 the auditor recommended the Steering Committee schedule additional and/or longer meetings and, as a priority, request out of session monthly updates on progress with actions in the business plan, as well a quarterly report, to attend to a wide range of significant issues over the next 12-18 months.
In 2013 the first auditor said the members’ attendance was inconsistent. The 2019 auditor noted the same thing and questioned the expertise balance of the committee, noting it lacked expertise in governance, finance, communication, information technology and technical skills. The auditor’s priority recommendation was that the Steering Committee review the expertise it needs to progress the issues at hand and seek nominations to address the gaps.
The 2019 auditor also questioned the relationship of the Steering Committee to the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program’s management. He said it was too close. Steering Committee needed to act as Board of Management and work more intensively with the program to address issues requiring resolution over the next 12-18 months with a follow-up audit:
For a program that has been operating for eighteen years, the deficiencies identified by auditors were astounding and the performance of the oversight committees appalling.
Chapter 14: Failed governance: more money to do more of the same, misreporting continues.
Fire Ant Program Executive becomes chair of Steering Committee chair: commissions
a program-friendly audit.
Any pretence of the Steering Committee being separate from the program had disappeared by 2021.
By 2021 the private consultant appointed chair of the Steering Committee in 2017 was gone: perhaps because they confessed on ABC radio in June 2021 that they had only just realised the extent of the infestation and did not know how much the program had cost from its the beginning. They were replaced by an Executive of the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries: the agency implementing the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program.
Steering Committee’s response to the criticism of the 2019 auditor was to commission a more program-friendly auditor and restrict the of the terms of reference of their review.
The terms of reference of The National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program Strategic Review 2021 were NOT to consider the best and most cost-effective option for managing a clearly out-of-control fire ant infestation that was threatening the entire country. The terms of reference were ONLY to examine the effectiveness of the first four years of the 2nd National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program: 2017-27 in achieving its objective of the eradication of fire ants or alternative strategies for achieving a ‘Fire Ant Free Olympics in Brisbane in 2032’.
Consideration of any scientific review, prior to the program-friendly 2016 scientific review, (the scathing reviews of 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009) were specifically outside of the terms of reference of this review.
The chair of the 2021 audit was a member of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program’s Scientific Advisory Panel and their data source was a paper produced by the program’s scientific team which claimed, without data, that the program had slowed the infestation’s rate of spread.
By 2021 the fire ant infestation had blown out to 750,000ha and the second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27 had spent its entire budget of $411.4m, plus an additional $34m in just four year. The 2021 review team said the program would not be able to eradicate or contain fire ants within the current scope and budget and made a recommendation for a ‘Fire Ant Free Olympics in Brisbane in 2032’.
Repeating the program’s claim that failure was due to budgetary issues, not failed science, management and governance, the review team estimated the program needed another $5b to ensure a Fire Ant Free Olympics, on top of the >$1b the program had spent from 2001 to 2020.
The review team’s preferred option for a Fire Ant Free Olympic in 2032 was to dump the problem onto the public, industries and other government agencies: the outcome US fire ant experts said in 2001 was inevitable if the program neither eradicated nor controlled the spread of fire ants.
Venues for the Brisbane Olympics range from the Sunshine Coast in the north, to the Gold Coast in the south, from Redland City in the east, through Brisbane, Ipswich and Logan cities, west to the Scenic Rim Region and Toowoomba City. All these venues are inside the Fire Ant Infested Area of south-east Queensland.
Regional and City Councils’ Fire Ant Policies are clear that their General Biosecurity Obligation under the Biosecurity Act 2015 is to maintain the safety of council lands and to report fire ant nests to the State government. They are equally clear the Queensland State Government, through Biosecurity Queensland, is responsible for delivering the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program.
The chance of a ‘Fire Ant Free Olympics in Brisbane in 2032’ is remote, to say the least.
Senate Inquiry recommends more money to do more of the same: The 3rd National Fire ant Eradication Program: Response Plan 2023-27
In October 2023, the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee called for submissions to an inquiry of ‘Red Imported Fire Ants in Australia’.
I made a submission to the Inquiry on 30th November 2023 (see Appendix) and appeared before the Committee in Brisbane on 4th March 2024.
The Executive of the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries who was also the chair of the National Fire Ant Eradication Program’s Steering Committee made a submission to the Inquiry. Without a Proof of Freedom protocol, without a functioning information system to provide accurate performance data, he claimed the program had eradicated a number of areas of infestations and with no measure of the extent of the infestation, claimed the program had contained the spread of fire ants to a relatively small area of south-east Queensland and, as always, blamed the program’s poor performance on funding delays. The Senate Committee gave him exactly what he asked for.
The Senate Committee’s response to the inquiry in February 2024 was not about addressing the program’s poor science, poor management and poor governance and the waste of ~$1b on a failed eradication attempt. The Senate Committee recommended bullying all Australian governments into committing uninterrupted funding to implement the findings of the severely constrained 2021 review of the program to do more of the same: to support the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries to dump the responsibilities and costs for finding, killing and controlling the spread of fire ants onto Councils, industry and the public to achieve the extremely unlikely ‘Fire Ant Free Olympics in Brisbane in 2032’
The Senate Committee recommended reviewing the current level of funding of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program (not its failed science, management and governance) to determine if it was sufficient to eradicate fire ants by 2032 (not contain and suppress then) and if not, investigate appropriate levels of funding required for eradication and that the Australian and all state and territory governments commit to providing uninterrupted funding required to achieve eradication (with no mention of insuring the proper use of public funds.)
The Senate Committee recommended funding the program’s Fire Ant Suppression Taskforce (FAST) to support self-treatment by residents, local governments and landholders in affected areas and to ensure they understand their General Biosecurity Obligation to report fire ant nests and to control the movement of fire ant carriers.
The Senate Committee was dumping the responsibility for finding, treating and containing fire ant infestation onto the public, industries and councils: the inevitable consequence predicted by US fire ant experts in 2001 if the program did not implement tight movement controls and comprehensive aerial baiting.
The Senate Committee recommended improving transparency and accountability with timely publication of program plans, reviews, reports and data: a recommendation made by the program auditor in 2013 but never implemented.
The Senate Committee recommended the Commonwealth and States and Territories increase movement controls and spot checks at border crossings to implement movement controls: recommended by US fire ant experts in 2001 but never implemented.
The 3rd National Fire ant Eradication Program: Response Plan 2023-27
Inevitably, the failed Second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program 2017-27 was replaced in July 2023 with a third National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program: 2023-27: a ‘Horseshoe’ Containment Program with a budget of $593m
Continuing the unscientific practice of working eastward from the western edge of the program’s operational area (not the edge of the infestation which has never been defined) the program intends to inspect just 17% of a 10km horseshoe-shaped band at that edge and treat a 15km wide strip of that band with ‘up to’ three round of treatment each year for two years when the scientific recommendation is three times as a minimum.
The program’s Fire Ant Suppression Task Force (FAST) would dump the costs and risks of fire ant surveillance and treatment in the majority of the 800,000ha infested area that stretched from the Moreton Bay Regional Council in the north, Redland City, including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), in the east, Gold Coast City in the south and extending through Brisbane, Ipswich, and Logan cities to the Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Scenic Rim Regional Councils and Toowoomba city onto Regional Councils, the public and industries living and working in that area.
Government officials misreporting government programs is not official misconduct and it continues
In March 2003 I made a public interest disclosure to the Queensland Crime and Corruption that the public and national funders of the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program were being misled by reports that over-stated the progress of the program and did not report serious issues threatening the program.’ The Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission found no substance to my claim of official misconduct.
The National Anti-Corruption Commission came into operation on 1st July 2023. Corrupt conduct is officially defined in the National Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2022 as:
I made a submission to the NACC on 25th September 2023 that chairs of national oversight committees from 2001 until now, with governance responsibly for the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, mis-reported the findings of independent reviews to Ministerial Council and the public.
On 19th February 2024, the NACC’s A/Director Assessments informed me that the Commission is satisfied that my referral does not raise a corruption issue: as such, no further action will be taken.
Mis-reporting continues:
The new governance committee of the 3rd National Fire ant Eradication Program 2023-27: Response Plan is the National Management Group. It is chaired by the ex-Executive of the Queensland Departmental of Agriculture and Fisheries who had chaired the program’s Steering Committee. The Group’s first public Communique in February 2024 continued the practice of misreporting the progress of the program, by reporting inputs but no result or value for money: what the auditor in 2013 had criticised.
The National Management Group said it recognised the significant ongoing efforts of the program to eradicate fire ants from Australia under the new 2023-27 Response Plan, but did not report the details of those efforts, their results or their value for money.
The National Management Group reported it had been updated on the development and implementation of responses to manage fire ant detections in northern New South Wales: in accordance with the program’s Standard Operating Procedures without specifying which procedures were involved, the details of those responses, their results and their value for money.
The National Management Group noted the substantial amount of work the program had completed to bring the program back on track following the recent extraordinary wet weather events in South-East Queensland, but no details of what went off track and why or the details and effectiveness of the recovery work.
The National Management Group was provided with an overview of the work undertaken by the program to increase fire ant compliance capability as a key deliverable in the Fire Ant Response Plan 2023-27: but no details of that work or any measures of its effectiveness.
Recognising the importance of curbing human assisted movement as part of eradication efforts, the National Management Group reported the program was increasing the number of the program’s compliance officers by four-old: without reporting the intended total number.
The National Management Group noted, but did not evaluate, the work undertaken by the program to address and implement recommendations from the 2021 Strategic Review of the program which were to dump the costs and responsibilities for addressing the fire ant infestation onto Local Councils, industries and the general public in south-east Queensland.
Appendix: Submission to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee re red imported fire ants in Australia. Dr Pam Swepson. 30th November 2023
My involvement with the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program
An officer in the Queensland Department of Primary Industries since 1987, in February 2001 I was seconded to the emergency response team in the week fire ants were first identified in Brisbane. My role was to liaise with communities and industries already affected by the pest. When the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program (NRIFAEP) was created in August 2001, I became the program’s Community Engagement Manager, then Senior Policy Officer – responsible for drafting program progress reports for the public and national funders. I based my reports on operational managers’ regular reports. I soon became aware that statistics in final reports never added up and serious issues threatening the program were not being reported.
In 2002 I raised my concerns with the program Director and the Director-General. In March 2003 I made a public interest disclosure to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) that ‘that the public, the Parliament, the Premier, the Governor and the Commonwealth and other States and Territories are being misled by reports that over-state the success of the program by omitting to report serious issues that continue to threaten the success of the program.’ I listed six serious issues. The CMC changed the terms of my disclosure to the program director misreporting to the Director-General, took three years to investigate it to find no substance to it. During that time, the Premier claimed he could not intervene into the program while it was being investigated: consequently, the mis-reporting continued and serious issues threatening the program have never been addressed. I escaped the Department’s vicious campaign of reprisal, aimed at retrenching me, by accepting a senior position in the private sector in April 2005.
When I retired in 2015 the program was still mis-reporting. I thought if I did not tell the public the truth, who would? I went from being a whistleblower to an activist. I up-dated my detailed knowledge of the beginning of the program by accessing all subsequent program reports and reviews and commenced posting blogs about the truth of the program on my website. www.swepson.com.au My evidence here is based on that work.
Term of reference: An evaluation of funding provided for the current or any proposed fire ant response plans.
The national funding formula for addressing incursions of invasive species – 100% of funding for an eradication program, in the national interest, but none for a State or Territory to contain and suppress an infestation within their borders, also in the national interest, creates an incentive for States and Territories to mount unscientific eradication program to access national funding. This is the case with the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program.
In 2001, international and national scientists said the two incursions of red imported fire ants in Brisbane were too entrenched to eradicate and recommended tightly containing and suppressing the infestations with systematic aerial baiting. Knowing the Queensland government would have to pay 100% of the costs of a containment program but only 10% of the costs of an eradication program, at a time when Queensland’s unemployment rate was over 8%, the Queensland government, with the support of the National Fire Ant Consultative Committee, announced an eradication program to create hundreds of jobs for unskilled workers. Chaotic management and an unsuitable workforce have resulted in high staff turnover and a boon for recruitment agencies. This situation continues.
Recommendation: National funding be made available for scientifically assessed eradication or containment programs of invasive species, both in the national interest.
Recommendation: Continued funding for programs be premised on evidence of progress and truthful reporting. This has never been the case with the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program.
The national program is oversighted by a national Consultative /Steering Committee, managed by the Australian Department of Agriculture and responsible to the Agriculture Ministerial Council (AGMIN).
A milestone set by AGMIN for the NRIFAEP in 2001 was a functioning information system to collect and report reliable and consistent performance data. It has never had one.
The first independent scientific review of the program in 2002 was concerned by the program’s lack of any sense of urgency, could not decide if the eradication attempt would be successful because the program did not have data on what areas had been treated or not and with what, listed many problems, made 23 recommendations and said if the ants were not virtually eradicated by 2004, the program should revert to one of containment.
Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN in April 2003 that the review team believed eradication was possible and the program had noted and addressed most of its issues.
In 2002 I reported to the Program Director and in 2003 I reported to the Director-General that the program did not have a functioning information system and was not reporting serious issues threatening the program. In March 2003 I made a public interest disclosure to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission that the program was not reporting serious issues threatening the program to the public and national funders. The CMC changed the terms of my disclosure and found no substance to it. The misreporting and the serious issues continued.
In October 2003, the program auditor reported, ‘The scarcity of performance measures against outcomes prevents a more objective evaluation of operational efficiency…. (with regard to) indicators of program and function area efficiency, there was no measure of respective effort or cost associated with key outcomes.’ Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN in April 2004 that ‘progress towards eradication to date has been excellent.’
The second science review team in August 2004 was concerned the Director was planning to reduce the number of treatments the area received each year and were surprised by the Director’s claim that the program was killing 99.4% of nests when they could see fire ants surviving near ‘ground zero’ that had been heavily treated. They too complained about the program’s lack of data. They said, ‘It is not clear what properties have been surveyed and not treated or treated and not surveyed (and) we would like clarification on these activities.’
In April 2005 Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN that the over-riding comments of the review were very positive, it drew attention to a number of areas of concerns and made 26 recommendations but that progress towards eradication had been excellent.
By June 2006 the third science review team could see that fire ants were making a resurgence: properties had become re-infested and infestations had been detected outside the treatment area. They said the treatment program had been ‘poor and ineffective’ and recommended starting the program again and doing what was recommended in 2001: treating the entire infestation (approximately 50,000ha) by air, six to nine times each year for two-to-three years at the cost of approximately $70-100m. They said if 40 new inliers and 40 new outliers were detected over the next 5 years, there was no hope of eradication.
In April 2006, Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN that only 6,000ha of the 72,000ha had been treated during 2005-6, and only twice instead of three times. But progress towards eradication had been excellent, large areas were now nominally free of fire ant infestation, the program was removing movement controls from large parts of the restricted area and the few remaining infestation were just the tail of the infestation.
In November 2006 Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN that the program was making satisfactory progress against agreed milestones and remained positive about the chances of eradication but did report that the program was at a critical stage: it was not clear if eradication could be achieved ‘with existing resources.’ This was the start of the program blaming poor performance on funding issues. The science review team categorically rejected claims that program failures were due to funding issues and squarely blamed management decisions.
In April 2007, the Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN it remained positive about the chances of eradications – with additional funding.
By 2008 the infestation was so huge the program could not fully treat it and computer modelling showed that the rate of detection was less than the rate of spread. Nevertheless, Consultative Committee reported to AGMIN that eradication could still be achieved with existing methods and the bulk of the original infestation had been eradicated. AGMIN ordered another review.
In October 2009, the fourth scientific review of the program was alarmed that the Fire Ant Restricted Area was at ‘an all-time high’ of 93,000ha and said ‘Current surveillance methods are inadequate for defining the limits. Treatment methods are questionable. Fire ants cannot be eradicated using current techniques. Revert to containment and suppression for 18-24 months.’ And they were sceptical about the program’s proposal to use remote sensing surveillance technology to detect fire ant nests. They said fire ants would spread faster than the technology could find them. In April 2010 Consultative Committee told AGMIN they ‘believed that it was premature to cease the pursuit of eradication and proposed that the program be one of containment with a view to eradication’ and did not commission another independent scientific review until 2015.
In April 2011 AGMIN endorsed a program of suppression and containment for 18-24 months but requested the results of trials of the remote-sensing surveillance technology. Trials of the technology between 2012-15 identified thousands of rocks and cow pats as nests, found just 38 nests and missed actual nests.
In 2013, the auditor said program reports were just ‘narratives’ that did not report against a set of specific, measurable and fit-for-purpose performance indicators of key aspects of the program and did not provide trend analyses, making it difficult for the oversight committees to track the progress of the Program, or any robust cost-benefit/return on investment analysis to enable the oversight committees to assess the benefits of any program initiatives and to decide if they should proceed.
The auditor was concerned that ‘without complete, clear and accurate information to support decision making, governance committees may be unable to provide appropriate oversight and guidance to the program as required, leading to an increased risk of inappropriate decisions being made, or undue delays in the decision-making process or difficulties in being able to critically examine the performance of the program.’ And further ‘without fit-for-purpose performance measures and target benefits, including appropriate tracking of project benefits to realisation, there is a risk that the expected value of a project may not be achieved or that the program may be unable to demonstrate due care has been taken in utilising public money’ Consultative Committee did not commission another audit of the program until 2019.
In 2015, the independent review of Biosecurity Queensland, the agency implementing the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, noted that national funding arrangements do not support good financial decision making and government funds are always limited, but that Biosecurity Queensland creates problems for itself because it cannot mount credible cases for on-going funding because it does not collect performance data and analyse it to show how it has and will use funds and staffing to best effect.
In March 2017 the Queensland Audit Office reported that Biosecurity Queensland could not report on program effectiveness or efficiency because it did not have a functioning information system and did not collect data on specific, measurable performance indicators.
In December 2018, the program’s Risk Management Sub-committee said the program’s lack of any accurate performance data, poor operations and poor governance by the oversight committee posed extreme and long-standing risks to the program.
In 2019, the auditor noted the program’s lack of any outcome focussed performance indicators and the lack of an information system to provide data to support decision making.
The auditor said while there had been major changes to the program, Consultative Committee had not produced a long-term plan and did not have a set of outcomes focussed performance indicators, because the program did not have a functioning information system and did not collect reliable performance data. He recommended Consultative Committee start acting like a Board of Management and manage the budget short-fall.
In July 2023 the Queensland Audit Office said expert advice on the feasibility of eradicating the fire ants was varied and questioned the ability of the program’s information system to collect data on specific, measurable program performance indicators.
Term of reference: the effectiveness of eradication efforts and the spread of fire ants.
Without a functioning information system the NRIFAEP has no data to support any claims it has eradicated any areas of infestations or contained or slowed its spread.
But in terms of dollars and hectares:
The first National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, between 2001-2016 spent approximately $400m of public money and the infestation blew out from 40,000ha to approximately 400,000ha – given the boundary of the infestation has never been defined.
The second National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, planned for 2017-27. exhausted its $411.4m budget by 2022 while the infestation blew out to approximately 600,000ha – again given the boundary has never been defined.
Despite the program spending ~$1b of public money, fire ants now infest an area of eastern Australia, of approximately 800,000ha, that takes in the Sunshine Coast in the north, the islands in Moreton Bay in the east, Toowoomba on the Range in the west and highly likely into northern New South Wales in the south.
Term of reference: An assessment of the current and any proposed fire ant response plans for achieving the eradication of red imported fire ants.
Two unscientific fire ant eradication programs from 2001 to 2023, at the expense of a scientifically advised, cheaper and more effective fire ant containment and suppression program, have arguably done more harm than good. A third eradication program, 2024-28, is likely to do the same.
The scientific foundations of any pest control program are:
Failure to control human-assisted movement of fire ants – the main cause of spread.
In 2001 the Queensland Department of Primary Industries had authority under the Plant Protection Act to declare a quarantine area around a fire ant infestation and to control the movement of high-risk materials out of infested areas. Fearing a containment program would suggest Queensland was not confident it could eradicate the pest, and consequently threaten funding, and fearing a back-lash from industry, the Queensland Government allowed residents and businesses within the Fire Ant Restricted Areas to manage their own risk of spreading fire ants.
At the beginning of the program, approximately twenty biosecurity worked with community-minded high-risk enterprises to develop Approved Risk Management Plans and audit those plans. But during a time of massive property development in south-east Queensland, the inspectors could not identify all the high-risk businesses operating in an ever-expanding area. The program abandoned the use of Approved Risk Management Plans, downgraded its team of biosecurity inspectors and dumped the responsibility for containing the movement of fire ants onto industry and the public.
The Queensland Biosecurity Act 2014 imposes a General Biosecurity Obligation on all Queenslanders to take all reasonable precautions to not spread fire ants. Industry representatives at a program Stakeholder Forum in May 2018 said they were happy to accept their General Biosecurity Obligation if Biosecurity Queensland accepted its own by:
When the program was audited again in 2019, the auditor noted that the Queensland Biosecurity Act 2014 provides regulations to control the movement of fire ant carriers and penalty infringements notices for non-compliance. Consequently, he was critical of the fact, with the infestation then covering 600,000ha, the program had only 13 compliance officers and 5 vacancies. He said the program needed to keep compliance staffing at funded levels to meet compliance check targets.
With no estimation of the number of high-risk enterprises operating inside the program’s 600,000ha operational area, the reviewer noted that in 2018-19, the program conducted only 912 compliance checks on the transport of fire ant carries to outside the operational area, which was at least up from the just 534 checks conducted in 2017-18. The auditor found 30% of cases found non-compliant were not resolved within a month. Staff told the reviewer that most non-compliance was minor and not a significant threat. The auditor said that attitude was unacceptable. The auditor also noted, that for the first time, three infringement notices were finalised in November 2018 but, as yet, no offender had been prosecuted for non-compliance.
He said the program’s response to regulating the movement of fire ant carriers was inadequate and failed to understand the role of compliance inspections and the use of penalty infringement notices to make it clear that not meeting regulations and weakening controls is not acceptable and recommended the use of penalty infringement notices and prosecution provisions to improve compliance with movement controls.
The auditor also noted what had been apparent from the beginning: fire ants are attracted to land being cleared for the development of new suburbs and transport corridors in south-east Queensland. He made a priority recommendation for the program to develop regulations to impose costs on those responsible for creating suitable fire ant habitation.
The auditor was also concerned about the transport of fire ant friendly materials across the program’s operational boundary, including interstate, potentially enlarging the area of infestation and recommended the program introduce regulations requiring compliance officers inspect loads of fire ant carriers destined to cross operational boundaries, at their place of origin, and impose a levy to cover that compliance cost.
The auditor noted the program acknowledged the risk human-assisted movement created for infesting and/or re-infesting areas and was in the process of reviewing its biosecurity zones and movement controls but had not completed that work. The auditor recommended they complete that work urgently and Consultative Committee agreed to further investigate regulations to impose costs on those creating fire ant habitat, and to inspect loads of fire ant carriers crossing the operational area boundary. I do not know if that investigation has been finalised or reported.
In December 2020, CSIRO said the program’s movement control advice was not consistent with the Regulation and there was a worrying non-compliance with the Regulation in Queensland. In November 2020 the New South Wales government announced it would no longer accept Queensland issued interstate certification of fire ant free potted plants. In June 2021 the Victorian government made the same announcement.
It can be argued that Consultative Committees, by persistently approving an unscientific eradication program, at the expense of a scientifically advised containment program in an area of property development that was creating massive habitat for fire ants, have done more harm than good: allowing the infestation to become so bad it now threatens most of the country. I believe all Consultative Committees from 2001 to now need to be held to account.
What to do next? A professionally managed fire ant management plan implemented by local councils.
Do not allow Biosecurity Queensland to manage any future fire ant program.
In 2001, the Queensland government was criticised for using national funding to create a jobs program for 400 unskilled workers.
In 2005, the program auditor said the workforce was difficult and costly to manage because the recruitment process did not select the most suitable candidates. Consequently, the efficiency of the program was compromised by poor attendance and a high rate of disciplinary incidents – resulting in varying rates of effort and quality across the program.
For over two decades, the NRIFAEP has created thousands of jobs for unskilled workers with no background checks and the latest proposal to employ another 350 unskilled workers is more of the same.
The National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, managed by Biosecurity Queensland and oversighted by a national oversight committee, has been a magnificent success in creating a jobs program, a boon to recruitment agencies, bait suppliers, and helicopter contractors but an utter failure at either eradicating or containing any infestation of one of the world’s worst invasive species because of poor governance, poor science and poor procedures.
Poor governance
Most of the 2019 audit of the program related to the Steering Committee appointed in 2017. The reviewer said for a program that had been operating for nineteen years, the deficiencies were astounding and the performance of the oversight committee appalling.
The program lacked outcome focused performance indicators – difficult to achieve without a functioning information system able to collect reliable and consistent performance data.
The oversight committee did not meet frequently enough or long enough to assess progress with actions.
The committee lacked expertise in governance, finance, communication, information technology and technical skills.
The Committee was too close to the program and needed to act like a Board of management to manage the budget shortfall, progress regulatory reform, consider the costs if remote sensing surveillance or reduction in treatments were not effective and consider the cost of permitting the public to self-treat.
Poor science
A review of the program’s science by CSIRO in 2020 said the program’s scientific principles were a mish-mash of poorly referenced biological details and management actions which have failed to respond to a major change in the fire ant population.
When first detected, the infestation was dominated by the polygyne type of fire ant which spreads relatively slowly as young queens build their nests close to their birth nest to create a slow spreading, dense infestation. That population has reduced over time and the program’s Scientific Advisory Group claims that as evidence of the program’s success. However, the polygyne type has been replaced by the monogyne type where young queens fly many kilometers from their birth nest to create their own and create wide-spread, low density infestations. CSIRO says this creates significant challenges for the program:
Poor procedures
In 2019, the program’s risk management subcommittee listed the program’s procedural risks:
What to do next?
Local councils with Invasive Pest Management Plans or Biosecurity Plans and licensed pest management companies were originally intended to be part of the program. Meetings were held with industry representatives and a representative from Brisbane City Council attended fire ant program management meetings. The Queensland Government chose not to involve them to keep control of the national funding.
‘Managing Imported Fire Ants in Urban Areas’, authored by Professor Bart Drees and Mr Charles Barr from Texas A&M, who both inspected the fire ant infestation in Brisbane in 2001, list the essentials of a fire ant management program.
2 Hold national over-sight committees of any future fire ant program to account for accurate and truthful reporting against performance indicators to AGMIN and the public.
Term of reference: The expected costs and impact if red imported fire ants are able to spread across Australia, on human health, social amenity, agriculture, the environment, infrastructure and regional workers.
The 2015-16 science review was unable to conduct a cost benefit analysis of continuing with an eradication attempt or reverting to a containment program because the program has no performance data. That remains the case.
The costs to human health, social amenity, agriculture, the environment, infrastructure and regional workers in the USA, which does impose quarantine restrictions on the movement of fire ant carriers, are huge. Two failed eradication attempts that have not effectively detected, treated or contained the spread of fire ant are likely to make those costs in Australia far worse.