Rabbits, Racism and What’s Really Harming Australia

If Pauline Hanson really cared about Australia, she’d be targeting invasive species not Muslims

These are the lawns outside the Australian Academy of Science’s Shine Dome. Built in the late 1950s to celebrate discovery and curiosity, I always think of it as a giant Jetsons spaceship which has landed right in the middle of Canberra.

And right there in front of it: dozens of rabbits. Calmly mowing the grass like it’s their job, like they belong there, like it’s how it’s always been. And that’s my point: we’ve normalised the abnormal.

The rabbits outside the Shine Dome are a symbol of our national failure to take seriously what’s really harming Australia. We’ve let invasive species become part of the scenery, as they chew through ecosystems, push native species to extinction, and impose enormous costs on agriculture and land management. Rabbits alone cost Australia’s agricultural sector $197 million per annum, and invasive species as a whole have cost our economy almost $390 billion over the past 60 years - that’s more than AUKUS!

Pauline Hanson is again pushing the idea of banning immigration from Muslim nations. It’s ugly politics, and it’s a deliberate distraction. If she and politicians like Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Hastie really cared about Australia, they’d stop scapegoating people and focus on invasive species. Because while they keep trying to manufacture panic about Muslims and people with brown skin, the real and measurable damage is happening quietly, every day, across our continent.

There’s deep irony in seeing rabbits grazing contentedly in front of the nation’s centre for science. Because rabbits are a science and a policy story. They’re a story about prevention, responsibility, and whether we face the truth about harm, even when the solutions are unglamorous, expensive and require hard work.

And while we are talking about irony, here’s another layer: the Shine Dome represents evidence-based thinking at precisely the moment that it is being routinely sneered at, underfunded, and attacked. We’re living through an era where lazy and selfish politicians pick on minority groups rather than what’s really needed for a better Australia - like the grinding work of protecting Australia from invasive species and weeds.

So here’s a better test of “Aussie values”. If you want a real measure of whether politicians love this country, ignore their social media rants and stunts. Watch what they do on invasive species instead.

Do they work to secure funding for prevention so new pests don’t establish in the first place? Do they argue for long-term control programs that actually work? Do they back the science, farmers, rangers, Aboriginal land managers and local councils who are left to fight these battles year after year?

Or do they chase headlines by targeting minorities, while the rabbits keep multiplying, the weeds keep spreading, and the extinctions keep ticking forward in the background?

Australia doesn’t need more racist and divisive fear campaigns. We need a serious national reckoning with the invaders already here, the damage already unfolding, and the science we keep pretending we respect while it’s quietly starved of attention and funding.

Rabbits outside the Shine Dome in Canberra.