Watch me wallabies feed mate
It cost Otago Regional Council $153,422 per wallaby destroyed in their latest wallaby control programme.
Otago Regional Council ratepayers have paid $2.76 million and had more than 26,000 hours of work for a wallaby control programme that killed just 18 wallabies.
The Taxpayer’s Union says the Otago component of the national wallaby eradication programme administered by Biosecurity New Zealand cost an average of $153,422.72 a wallaby “destroyed” (terminology used by officials).
It averaged 1459 hours of human labour a kill with 341,894 spent on aerial shooting, $34,089 on ground shooting, $71,028 on ground toxin and a staggering $2.3 million on
surveillance.
By comparison, in Canterbury the cost for each wallaby destroyed was $763.57 and just under five hours of human labour.
The Union says it would have been cheaper to charter a private jet for each of these wallabies to send them back to Australia. It had warned the $1.2 billion Jobs for Nature fund would be another slush fund with unmonitored, highcost, low-value spending.
