The framework already exists. What is missing is the decision to use it.

The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements — established in the wake of the 2019–20 Black Summer fires and handed down in October 2020 — is the most authoritative document ever produced on Australia's disaster management failures. Across 80 recommendations and 22 chapters examining coordination, resilience, and response, it set the template for every major reform that followed. It did not make a single recommendation requiring any government to protect, evacuate, rescue, or coordinate a response for animals.

What the Commission Examined

The Commission's terms of reference were genuinely broad. It examined national coordination between governments, climate risk and adaptation, the legal framework for Commonwealth emergency intervention, evacuation planning, health, mental health support for responders, communications, and the long-term funding of disaster recovery. It received 1,772 submissions from communities, experts, emergency services organisations, and government agencies — including submissions from organisations working in wildlife conservation. It acknowledged in its opening description that the fires had produced "loss of life, property and wildlife and environmental destruction." The word was there from the first sentence.

Chapter 16 — Wildlife and Heritage acknowledged that the 2019–20 fires were an "ecological disaster," that over 330 threatened species were in the path of the fires, that wildlife rescue efforts were fragmented and informal across jurisdictions, and that emergency services explicitly prioritise "people, property and the environment — they provide protection in that order." Environment — and the animals within it — sits third in the triage queue, with no mandatory welfare obligations attached.

The Specific Omissions

The omissions are structural, not incidental. The full list of 80 recommendations contains one reference to wildlife: Recommendation 16.1, which directs governments to improve "the collation, storage, access and provision of data on the distribution and conservation status of Australian flora and fauna." This is a data management recommendation. It says nothing about what to do with that data during a disaster, who is responsible for animal welfare when fires or floods strike, or how rescue volunteers should be coordinated, trained, funded, or protected. It is, in effect, a filing system — not a response framework.

Chapter 7 — Evacuation — makes no mention of livestock, companion animals, or wildlife. Chapter 11 — Emergency Planning — does not require any jurisdiction to have an animal welfare component in its disaster plans. Chapter 15 — Health — recommends mental health support for human responders, but the 80.6% of animal rescue volunteers who experience lasting psychological trauma from disaster work are entirely outside its scope. The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), established to implement the Commission's recommendations, inherited a mandate with no animal welfare obligations built in.

Why the Silence Sets a Dangerous Precedent

Royal Commissions carry extraordinary institutional authority. When the most comprehensive disaster inquiry in Australian history fails to recommend animal welfare obligations, that silence becomes the default — reproduced in every policy framework, emergency plan, and funding instrument that flows from it. NEMA's remit, the revised Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, national emergency coordination protocols, state-level planning templates: all were developed in the Commission's image. None include animal welfare as a measurable obligation. The 2026 Final Implementation Report — due to close out the RC's recommendations formally — will confirm completion of a reform agenda that never included animals.

The Commission was not blind to the problem — its own Chapter 16 described the crisis in detail and acknowledged the need for better integration. The gap is not one of knowledge. It is one of will: the will to convert an acknowledged need into a legislated requirement. That conversion is exactly what a National Animal Disaster Plan would achieve, and it requires a specific legislative instrument to do it — because the Commission's own record shows that acknowledgement without recommendation produces nothing.

Collapse

In Australia, animals are property. Not in the colloquial sense — in the strict legal sense. Under common law, domestic animals are at all times the property of their owners, and wild animals are either Crown property or become property when caught or killed. That single classification — confirmed in the High Court in Yanner v Eaton (1999) 201 CLR 351 — is the structural reason why no government in Australia is legally obligated to protect, rescue, or plan a coordinated response for animals in a disaster. Property does not have rights. Property cannot make a claim on the emergency management system. Property can be left behind.

How Australian Law Treats Animals in Emergencies

Australia has eight separate state and territory animal welfare Acts — one per jurisdiction, each with different standards, different enforcement agencies, and different obligations. There is no federal animal welfare Act. The closest thing to a national framework is the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy, which was disbanded in 2013 when the National Australian Animal Welfare Advisory Committee was abolished. The body responsible for coordinating its successor has no dedicated funding, meets infrequently, and has no published mandate to address disaster response. Meanwhile, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Australia's peak disaster coordination body, operates under a mandate that contains no animal welfare obligations. It is not required to consider animals in any planning document, any emergency declaration, or any funding instrument it administers.

The practical consequence is documented in statute. The State Emergency and Rescue Management Act 1989 (NSW) s 3(1) defines "rescue" as "the safe removal of persons or domestic animals from actual or threatened danger of physical harm." The definition has two crucial features. It includes domestic animals — but only as a secondary class, without any mandatory obligation to act. And it excludes wildlife entirely. Wild animals are not persons. Under the Act's definition, they cannot be rescued. This is not an accident. It is the direct expression of property law in emergency statute. In jurisdictions where wildlife rescue organisations are not formally embedded in the emergency management framework — which is most of them — wildlife rescuers gain access to firegrounds on the basis of informal agreements, not legal right.

Three Categories, Three Legal Realities

Australian law does not treat animals as a single class. It fragments them into three categories — companion animals, livestock, and wildlife — each governed by different legal regimes, different responsible agencies, and different levels of protection. The result during a disaster is coordination failure built into the architecture of the law itself.

Companion animals (pets) are chattel — the personal property of their owners, subject to state animal welfare acts. Owners have a duty of care, but evacuation authorities have no obligation to accommodate animals or make provision for their welfare during an emergency. The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission noted this tension: it was left entirely to individuals "deciding what to do with pets and other animals during an evacuation." When evacuation centres exclude animals — which most do as a default — guardians face an impossible choice between their own safety and their animal's life.

Livestock and farm animals sit in intensive productive systems explicitly sanctioned by their property status. State farming codes require animals to be protected "as far as practical" — a qualification that becomes meaningless in extreme events. During the 2019–20 fires, over 60,000 head of livestock died on Kangaroo Island alone. These animals were held in enclosed paddocks close to fire fronts because their property status made this economically rational. No mandatory pre-positioning of veterinary response, no required evacuation planning for large animals, no government obligation to attend.

Wildlife sits in the most precarious category of all. Wild animals are either Crown property under modified common law, or capable of becoming property when taken. They are explicitly excluded from the statutory definition of "rescue" in the NSW emergency framework. A 2021 peer-reviewed analysis in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management — published by NEMA's own knowledge hub — found that "the incapacitation of wildlife rescuers and under-resourcing of the sector are an expression of the perceived worth of wildlife; as non-persons, wild animals can make very little claim on an emergency management framework designed principally to serve the interests of persons."

The Voluntary Framework That Isn't Working

In 2014, the Australia–New Zealand Emergency Management Committee (ANZEMC) endorsed the National Planning Principles for Animals in Disasters (NPPAD) — a set of 24 best-practice principles for integrating animals into emergency plans. The principles are thoughtfully designed. They are also explicitly "non-prescriptive." No jurisdiction is legally required to implement them. A 2020 national survey of 137 organisations with a stake in animal disaster management found awareness ranged from low to moderate, and implementation was rated at low to moderate. Six years of voluntary guidance produced modest, uneven uptake. Voluntary frameworks, however well-designed, cannot substitute for a legal obligation when the underlying property classification provides no incentive to comply.

The Legislative Fix

The fix does not require abolishing animals' property status — which would be a generation-long project requiring fundamental common law reform. It requires something more targeted: a standalone federal Animals in Disasters Act modelled on the approach taken in the United States after Hurricane Katrina. The US Pets Evacuation and Transport Standards Act 2006 (PETS Act) did not change how American law classifies animals. It simply created a positive obligation: emergency management authorities must account for the needs of people with companion and assistance animals in order to receive certain federal funding. That single requirement — attach accountability to money — changed planning behaviour nationwide.

Australia's equivalent would attach animal welfare obligations to the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA): no jurisdiction receives Commonwealth disaster funding without a certified animal welfare component in its emergency plan. Combined with a legislated mandate for NEMA to include animals in its national coordination frameworks, this would convert the existing voluntary architecture — the NPPAD, the state-level plans, the volunteer rescue networks — into a mandatory, funded, and accountable national system. The law does not need to love animals. It needs to require planning for them.

Collapse

These six recommendations are not aspirational. Each is grounded in existing Australian policy architecture, modelled on international precedents that have already been proven to work, and implementable within a single parliamentary term. The legislative tools are available. The funding mechanisms exist. What has been missing is the political decision to use them.

The Six Recommendations The Cost of Acting vs. the Cost of Doing Nothing

The Disaster Ready Fund already commits $200 million per year — $1 billion over five years from 2023 — to disaster resilience. The six recommendations above do not require a new funding instrument. They require the existing instrument to explicitly include animal welfare as an eligible and prioritised category. A dedicated animal welfare stream within the DRF — estimated at $30–50 million per year, or 15–25% of the current annual allocation — would fund Recommendations 3, 4, and 5 in full. Recommendations 1, 2, and 6 are administrative and legislative measures with minimal direct cost.

The comparison point is not the cost of action. It is the cost of the status quo. The 2019–20 fires produced $4–5 billion in documented agricultural losses and required $150 million in reactive wildlife recovery — all funded reactively, all emergency-appropriated, none of it pre-planned. A pre-positioned national framework, funded at a fraction of what we spend recovering from disasters, would reduce both the scale of loss and the cost of response. The WWF–Australia 2022–23 Budget Submission put it plainly: with environmental disasters forecast to become more frequent, investment in disaster preparedness now is measurably less expensive than recovery later.

Implementation Timeline Collapse

Every country reviewed here has experienced a catastrophic animal disaster. Every country reviewed here has, in response, taken some form of legislative action. Australia has had the largest, by any measure — 3 billion animals killed or displaced in a single fire season — and has produced no equivalent national legislative response. That is not a coincidence of timing. It is a pattern of political choice that this section documents, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

Comparative Framework Matrix

Notes: Comprehensive = an enforceable or operationally embedded requirement; Partial = limited by species, incident type, jurisdiction or implementation; Absent = no clear national mandate. Sources include Congress.gov, BC Laws, Canada.ca, legislation.gov.uk, NZ legislation.govt.nz, NSW legislation.nsw.gov.au and the AIDR Knowledge Hub.

Case Study: USA — From Katrina to the PETS Act in 13 Months

The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act was not the product of a long policy development process. It was written, introduced, passed 349–29 in the House, and signed into law in thirteen months — directly in response to what happened to animals in Hurricane Katrina. What happened was specific and documented: a post-storm survey found that 44% of people who did not evacuate from Katrina's path made that choice because they refused to leave their animals. An estimated 100,000 to 250,000 companion animals were separated from their families. Between 70,000 and 150,000 died.

The Act's mechanism was straightforward: states and local authorities must account for the needs of households with pets and service animals in their emergency preparedness plans in order to receive FEMA funding. It did not create a new agency, override state powers, or require specific physical infrastructure. It attached an animal planning obligation to federal money that states were already seeking. Within three years, more than twenty states had enacted their own companion animal disaster laws. By the Act's ten-year anniversary, the structural change was measurable: Hurricane Gustav struck the Gulf Coast in 2008. New Orleans evacuated. People and pets rode coordinated transport with barcoded wristbands. The contrast with Katrina was explicit and reported.

The PETS Act has genuine limitations that Australia's equivalent should not replicate: it covers household pets and service animals only — livestock, wildlife, and most other animals remain entirely outside its scope. After Hurricane Florence (2018), an estimated nine million pigs were at risk in a region heavy with intensive agriculture. None had any form of federal planning protection. Australia's 125-year record of mass livestock and wildlife casualties demands a broader instrument than the PETS Act model. But the mechanism — attach welfare planning obligations to federal funding — is the right one. Australia's Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements exist precisely to replicate it.

The Most Recent Comparator: British Columbia's 2023 Act

The most instructive recent development is not from a large federal system — it is from a single Canadian province. Following the 2021 Abbotsford floods — described as the largest agricultural and animal welfare disaster in British Columbia's history — the province passed the Emergency and Disaster Management Act 2023. The Act explicitly requires animals to be included in emergency risk assessments and evacuation plans. It is the first legislation of its kind in Canada. The time between disaster (November 2021) and Royal Assent (November 2023) was exactly two years.

Australia experienced its defining animal disaster in the summer of 2019–20. As of 2026, no state or federal legislation has been passed requiring animals to be included in emergency risk assessments. British Columbia moved faster from a single provincial flood than Australia has moved after the largest documented terrestrial animal death event in recorded history.

New Zealand: Closer to Australia Than Expected — and Why That Matters

New Zealand shares Australia's Westminster legal tradition, comparable geography, similar disaster risk profile, and the same broad emergency management architecture. It is therefore the most directly transferable comparator — and its experience is a warning, not a model.

New Zealand's Civil Defence and Emergency Management Act 2002 created what researchers described as "a robust and forward thinking piece of legislation." Section 59 mandated the lead agency, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), to develop a national animal emergency management plan and to take all necessary steps to ensure those functions are provided. Peer-reviewed analysis published in 2020 found that, seventeen years later, no such national plan had been published. The work had been "dropped in favour of developing a strategy" — which also remained unpublished. Legislation mandated the plan. The plan was never produced. The mandate without accountability produced nothing.

New Zealand is now working to fix this: a new Emergency Management Bill is in development, and the 2025 public consultation explicitly identified animal welfare as "a notable theme." The NZ lesson for Australia is not that the existing legal framework is the model to copy. It is that legislation without mandatory deliverables, reporting requirements, and funding accountability reproduces exactly the outcome already seen in Australia with the voluntary NPPAD: good principles, negligible implementation.

Australia Is an Outlier — and That Is a Choice

The pattern across every jurisdiction examined is the same: a major animal disaster occurs; documentation of the failure accumulates; legislation follows. The USA moved in thirteen months after Katrina. British Columbia moved in two years after Abbotsford. The United Kingdom enshrined animal sentience in statute in 2022, creating a legal foundation for animal welfare to be considered in all new policy. New Zealand is reforming its framework with explicit attention to animal welfare in the current parliamentary term.

Australia's Black Summer fires occurred in 2019–20. The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements was handed down in October 2020. Its single wildlife recommendation addressed data sharing. No legislation has followed. More than five years after the largest documented terrestrial animal casualty event in recorded history, Australia remains the only comparable jurisdiction that has not converted its animal disaster experience into any form of national legislative obligation.

This is not a capacity problem. Australia has NEMA, the DRFA, the Disaster Ready Fund, state emergency management agencies, and a volunteer wildlife rescue sector of extraordinary skill and dedication. It has the institutional architecture. What it does not have is the political decision to use that architecture for animals. Every other country reviewed made that decision. Australia has not. That is not a default. It is a choice — and it can be reversed.

Collapse