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Peter Hylands notes that:

"The purpose of setting out these numbers for the public gaze is to allow people to understand the scale of the killing, both commercial and harms data together, is to describe the vast scale of it all. Even if the numbers differ by a million here or there because the data is poor or outcomes unknown, the numbers are still vast, and without doubt, completely unsustainable. While Kangaroo and Wallaby species are in the forefront of the horrific killing, Australia’s birdlife is also dealt with at large scale, impacting numerous and very beautiful bird species. Australia will have to make up its mind if it wants to conserve its wildlife or have much of it destroyed in our lifetimes”.

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Notes on table

• Population estimates in each state typically conducted in the previous year to quota, therefore we have aligned population estimates, on which the quota is based, with the year of quota.
• Data does not include joeys until end total.
• Commercial exploitation in Victoria in the years 2014-2019 (Kangaroo Pet Food Trial KPFT) is not included in this table and will be reported separately. These figures were not included in any Commonwealth Government data.
• Commercial exploitation of Kangaroos and Wallabies in Tasmania is not included as no standard reporting occurs despite frequent requests to various Commonwealth Environment Ministers that this aligns with Australia’s regulatory framework. As is stands, Tasmania, is essentially lawless.
• This table represents a ground up rework of all the data, most of which is as reported to the Commonwealth Government and includes population data removed from the public gaze in the period 1981-1999. It should be noted that these numbers sometimes differ slightly to those reported in state based reports on which much of our work is based. Even the Commonwealth population data for states does not always add correctly to reported Australia total (reported numbers have been used in this table and not corrected – differences are mostly small).
• Joeys are not included in the data, to give an idea of the scale of death of these young animals, in 2026, based on our forecast of actual take, 400,000 joeys in Australia will die a cruel and painful death in the name of commercial exploitation. The number of joeys that would have been killed for commercial gain in extremely cruel circumstances since 1980 if targets had been met would have been a staggering 55.5 million.
• For the years 1980-2026 the actual kill when compared to the available quota was 48 per cent, for the years 2013-2026 this had fallen to 23.7 per cent, describing dwindling populations and significantly exaggerated population estimates.
• Adding to these horrors, for the years 1980-2026, a broader range of Macropod species have been targeted through harms permits, so if we include Tasmania we can probably add another 55 million adult Kangaroos and Wallabies and the 14 million of their young to the actual kill numbers.
• All up that is 341,623,359 protected native animals that would have have died since 1980 if killing plans had been met. So all up 128,216,933 Kangaroos and their joeys will have died in the period as a result of commercial exploitation. Shocking indeed. It is not surprising that so many Australian landscapes are now empty.

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Harms permits

As a point of clarification harms permits are non-commercial permits to kill native and ‘protected’ Australian species. Harms permits are issued in addition to the commercial kill. To make the situation even more confusing harms permits have different names in different states, Authority to Control Wildlife, Damage Mitigation Permits, Protection Permits and so on. In a relatively new twist or discovery, harms permits are being converted to commercial in at least some states. This all adds to the confusion. Commercial kills on mainland Australia are tracked by a tagging system so within reasonable accuracy we know how many animals are killed (joeys are an estimate). For harms permits the majority rule is that they are issued, so if we can get the data, we know how many, but when there is no follow up to check what happened, so in some states nobody knows the actual outcome, and that includes the Australian Government and its national environment minister. This alone is deeply shocking.

Here are some examples - after a great deal of effort from us to sort New South Wales Government harms permits by species and year, so we discover that in 2018 the New South Wales Government had issued 5,912 permits (for 6 species) to kill 887,993 Macropods (this was additional to the commercial kill). In NSW in 2025, licences to harm protected native animals were issued to kill 439,620 Kangaroos within the commercial shooting  zones, the majority of regions in which Kangaroos live (excluding national parks). Licensees who submitted reports by early May 2026, reported 187,220 Kangaroos were killed in 2025, these licences were to kill 321,917 (73 per cent of total harms) Kangaroos giving a shortfall of 134,697 animals. A number of licensees had not reported at the time of writing, with this group of licences authorising the killing of up to 117,703 Kangaroos.

In Tasmania which differs from the mainland and where things get really hard to track, for the Forester Kangaroo (should be listed as an endangered species), in the years 2015 through to August 2019, 35,664 Forester Kangaroos were killed under permit, about 21,000 of those were used for commercial purposes from converted harms permits. Property Protection Permits and Commercial Purposes Licences are two distinct applications processes with different assessment criteria. The Tasmanian Government says that all permits issued require the holder to provide a return (record actual kill) within 28 days of expiry of the permit, or in the case of permits longer than 12 months, within 28 days of the end of the calendar year, and within 28 days of expiry of the permit.  Tasmania again, in the years 2019-2022 it appears that protection (harms) permit returns show that 2,264,179 Wallabies (2 species) were killed using the multi-year Tasmanian harms permit system.

In Victoria, where the numbers describe allocations that reverse the Victorian Government’s policy of shifting ATCW permits to commercial permits. This reversal of policy also occurred in 2024 and fudges over the actual take, so understanding exactly what had happened becomes impossible, the Victorian Government targeting 90,200 Grey Kangaroos (2 species) with ATCWs in 2025 PLUS issuing permits to kill a large number of the rapidly vanishing Red Kangaroo and the state’s Wallaby species.

If you were not confused you will be now.

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