Otago Regional Council staff presented to councillors yesterday a paper outlining the work the biosecurity department had undertaken over the past year.
It showed over the 2023-24 year, 467 rabbit inspections were completed in non-community programme areas against a target of at least 250 rabbit inspections, while a further 192 inspections were completed in community rabbit programme areas.
However, Cr Michael Laws asked for more detail.
"This report tells me in part what the council has done, but it doesn’t tell me how effective you have been.
"I have continued to raise the issue [of] how we’re doing with the money we’ve got.
"If I look at page 38 [of the agenda] — which says ‘ensure continuing control on feral rabbits’ — I don’t know how many rabbits there are still.
"This is my third term on this council.
"Are you actually going to count the rabbits or actually determine what the spread of them is?"
Report author Libby Caldwell acknowledged Cr Laws’ concern.
The council was engaging with an external consultant, who would complete a report analysing the effectiveness of its programmes.
"We’re doing quite a lot of work in that space. We’ve increased the number of rabbit night counts by 31 across the region.
"We have to provide this report to the Minister of Biosecurity.
"But there is no legislative requirement to ensure we are meeting these objectives."
Cr Laws commented that this discrepancy sounded "crazy".
Chief executive Richard Saunders said the council was working to provide more information, but some of it, by its nature, would be an "approximation".
"We can approximate the number of rabbits for the region based on the night counts — there are hot spot areas, and there are low spot areas.
"We will get trend analysis from the data from this year — but it’s impossible to get the exact number of rabbits. That’s like counting blades of grass."
Although it was still important to do this work, he felt the council was "definitely light in the ‘is it working?’ space".
"There’s a balancing act.
"My view is we should be putting more effort into outcomes."
Cr Gary Kelliher asked whether the ramping up in monitoring had led to a "heightened responsibility" from organisations.
Ms Caldwell said it had worked closely with territorial authorities and Crown agencies so it knew how to budget for pest control work if necessary.
Cr Andrew Noone wanted to know whether the regional council’s "good neighbour" rules had proved effective.
Ms Caldwell said enforcing these rules were slightly problematic.
"We need to receive a complaint to act on it, and they need to have an agreement [with their neighbouring landowner] in place.
"The good neighbour rule is complex."
Cr Kelliher told the Otago Daily Times it was vital the council as a regulator knew about the effectiveness of its pest control programmes.
He was "encouraged" council was doing work on this.
"But I would also like to see Crown entities and territorial authorities be less reactive in their own pest management processes."
