While politicians and activists agonise over the merits of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, a far more insidious war rages on — not between nations, but between species. It’s the war we barely talk about, yet one we’re losing badly: the war against invasive pests. From farmland to forest, the frontlines are everywhere, and the casualties aren’t measured in headlines but in trees, crops, ecosystems — and billions of taxpayer dollars.
It’s a war not waged with drones or missiles. There are no captivating YouTube videos, no global meetings for leaders, and certainly no billion-dollar defence contracts. The enemy isn’t human — it’s beetles, bacteria, fungi, viruses, mites and moths, and they’re winning. They arrive quietly, stashed in cargo holds and potted plants, slipping through airport X-rays and past underfunded quarantine posts. And when they land, they don’t just nibble leaves. They wreck economies, unravel ecosystems, and — given enough time — rewrite demography, trade routes, and even the climate.
History is riddled with examples of biological battles fought and lost. Take 166 AD, when Roman legions returned triumphant from the East — and brought with them a microscopic stowaway. The Antonine Plague, likely smallpox, swept through the empire, killing up to ten million people, including the co-emperor. The military faltered, the treasury ran dry, and public confidence in the imperial project crumbled. It wasn’t the barbarians at the gates that marked the beginning of Rome’s fall — it was a microbe with no respect for borders, walls, or gods.
Fast forward to the Middle Ages and along came the Black Rat. It hitched a ride on the Silk Road out of Asia, carrying flea-infested passengers that unleashed the Black Death on Europe. Between 1347 and 1351, a third of the population dropped dead. Farms were abandoned, cities emptied, and armies vanished. The economy crashed so hard that forests regrew, and global carbon levels fell, triggering a century of cooling. The first major climate event brought on by humans wasn’t industrial — it was rats cleaning out half the population.
Then there’s the naval shipworm — Teredo navalis — a mollusc with a taste for maritime real estate. It snuck into Europe in the 1600s aboard Dutch trading vessels and promptly started munching through Amsterdam’s wooden sea walls and London’s dock pilings. It didn’t need to fire a shot. Ports failed, fleets floundered, and shipyards scrambled to invent underwater masonry. Maritime dominance didn’t shift because of a stronger navy — it shifted because a tiny worm ate through the foundations.
The further the Europeans went, the nastier the pests they imported and exported. Empires, obsessed with controlling nutmeg and clove prices, smuggled plants across tropical islands like drug mules. The result? Fungal outbreaks like “quick decline” wiped out plantations across Southeast Asia. Entire economies cratered. Colonial powers had to redraw their trade maps, their naval priorities, and their imperial plans — all thanks to a leaf fungus with zero diplomatic training.
Or take the potato. Imported from the Andes and turned into the bedrock of the Irish diet. By the early 1800s, a third of Ireland’s population was living on spuds and little else. Then in 1845, a fungal pathogen — Phytophthora infestans — slipped in via Belgian shipping routes, and the potatoes began to rot in the ground. Not in one village. Everywhere.
Over the next six years, a million people starved, another million fled, and the island’s population never recovered. Entire counties emptied out. Farms were abandoned or swallowed into grazing estates. The disaster supercharged Irish nationalism, discredited British rule, and triggered a diaspora that permanently altered demographics in places like Boston, New York, and Melbourne.
Even the French, who take their wine more seriously than their politics, weren’t spared. In the 19th century, an American aphid called phylloxera hitched a ride across the Atlantic and sank its jaws into French vineyards. The result? Total viticultural collapse. Grapes shrivelled, estates went bankrupt, wine prices soared, and rural economies slipped into a boozy depression. Thousands of vineyard workers and smallholders were forced off the land, triggering waves of rural unrest and mass migration to the cities. The political fallout was swift: calls for government intervention grew louder, and with them came the first major push for state-backed agricultural subsidies and protectionist policies — cornerstones of French rural politics to this day. The French eventually found salvation by grafting their noble vines onto resistant American rootstock — but not before phylloxera left a hangover that lasted decades.
Leap forward to the modern era, and it wasn’t just Europe and America swapping pests and pathogens — they also cleared forests with industrial efficiency. Take the American chestnut, once the towering monarch of the eastern U.S. forest. So abundant it was dubbed the “redwood of the East,” it shaded homes, fed livestock, and supplied rot-resistant timber for everything from tannin vats to telephone poles. Then in 1904, someone imported a bit of ornamental Asian nursery stock — and with it came a fungal hitchhiker. Within decades, chestnut blight had turned four billion trees into skeletons. Timber mills shut, towns withered, and the U.S. had to scramble to retool its entire wartime supply chain. Millions of acres became ghost forests — all because someone in New York wanted an exotic tree in their yard.
And the hit list doesn’t end there. Billions more trees are under attack as a fresh wave of arboreal assassins sweeps the globe. The Mountain Pine Beetle has destroyed over 15 million hectares of forest across North America. In the southeast U.S., the Redbay Ambrosia Beetle is gutting laurel forests and threatening the $300 million avocado industry. In Europe, Ash Dieback has wiped out up to 90 per cent of ash trees in some regions. The Eucalyptus Longhorned Borer, an Aussie export, is chewing through plantations in California and South America. On the U.S. west coast, Sudden Oak Death is felling oaks and tanoaks by the million. In New Zealand, Kauri Dieback is killing off trees, some over 2,000 years old. And now, Beech Leaf Disease is marching down the American eastern seaboard, stripping native beech forests bare. Each is a slow-motion ecological disaster, rewriting landscapes tree by dying tree.
And that’s nothing compared to the crop diseases lurking in the shadows of global agriculture. Few inspire more dread in plant scientists than wheat blast and stem rust — two fungal heavyweights with the power to turn breadbaskets into wastelands and push food prices into riot territory.
Wheat blast is the newer assassin. It showed up in Brazil in 1985, quietly torching fields across South America for decades. Bolivia, Paraguay, northern Argentina — all hit. Then in 2016, it packed its spores and flew commercial: destination Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-largest wheat consumer. Within weeks, tens of thousands of hectares were scorched to stubble. The government panicked and banned wheat cultivation in some districts. When a single fungal outbreak forces policy changes in a country of 170 million people, you know you’re not just dealing with agriculture anymore — you’re dealing with geopolitics.
The terror of wheat blast is in its speed. It doesn’t wait for your crop to ripen — it kills before the grain even forms. It thrives in heat and humidity — not good for some key wheat-growing countries. Worse, it travels by seed, meaning you only need one grain for it to get away.
Then there’s wheat stem rust, the undead of crop pathogens. Known since the days of Caesar, it was once the scourge of empires — but largely put to sleep in the 20th century by resistant breeding. Until 1999. That’s when Ug99 surfaced in Uganda, shrugged off those decades of genetic prep work, and began marching east. It’s now in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and every time it mutates — which it does often — our defences grow thinner.
All it takes is one muddy boot, one lazy container wash, and a 2,000-year-old fungus with a new passport is loose in your paddock. Wheat prices spike. Borders tighten. Food riots follow.
It’s not that Australia hasn’t suffered major setbacks in the biosecurity wars. Take rabbits. Introduced in 1859. Within decades, they’d eaten their way across the continent. WA built three fences to keep them out — including one that stretches over 1,800 kilometres from Starvation Bay to Eighty Mile Beach. Didn’t work. They went under, over, and straight through. It wasn’t until the 1950s that biological science — not chicken wire — finally began to claw back control. Myxomatosis helped. Calicivirus in the ’90s helped more. But by then, the damage was biblical: bare paddocks, blown soils, billions lost.
Prickly pear? Same story. Introduced as a living fence in 1839, it was widespread by 1850, and by the 1920s it had conquered 25 million hectares. Fire, axes, poison — nothing worked. It turned farmland into cactus graveyards. Not until 1926, when we released the Cactoblastis moth, did the tide turn. Another brilliant late save — decades after the catastrophe.
Then there’s the cane toad. Imported in 1935 to control cane beetles. It didn’t. But it did go on to poison everything that tried to eat it, spread across northern Australia like wildfire, and become the country’s most iconic biological facepalm. This time, we skipped the science entirely and just let the mistake grow legs. Literally.
These biological insurgents should have been our big wake-up call. But no — our political leaders are too busy demanding their departments fulfil diversity and equity targets, draft climate change policies, and search for new headquarters. They live in hope that the holes in the border can be plugged.
So what have we learned from the latest biosecurity failure with the escape of the polyphagous shot-hole borer?
This pest, no bigger than a match head, landed in Fremantle in August 2021. It drills into tree trunks, infects them with fungus, clogs their vascular systems, and kills from the inside out. From backyards in Perth to the ferry decks of Rottnest, it’s now marching unchecked into the South West’s native forests. The state’s response? Priorities, dear boy, priorities. First we tackle climate change — biosecurity can wait.
It took over two years just to draft an action plan, finally released in January 2024 — by which time it was all over bar the sound of chainsaws. Word is the government was told in late 2024 that the bug had bolted and to spare the iconic Morton Bay figs in Kings Park. But with an election looming, they did a Putin — doubling down on a lost war. The trees became cannon fodder for the campaign. The white flag finally went up on June 26 this year, after the trees had become sawdust.
But the real scandal isn’t just the failure to act in a timely manner or the chaotic way the department went about it — it’s what didn’t happen that is worthy of a royal commission. When the borer was first detected, there was no rapid cost-benefit review of eradication versus control. In fact, there was no rapid anything. Months went by before the government even mobilised properly, sending a few uni students out to poke around backyards.
No one thought to send scientists to Southeast Asia to find its natural enemies. No rush to fund labs or recruit entomologists. No cash to Kings Park’s world-class researchers to hunt for fungal antagonists or parasitic wasps. Instead, we got press releases — of the Minister in high-vis visiting… wind farms.
Forget saving the forests — at this rate, we’ll be lucky to have any left for the greenies to hug. Because once shot-hole borer gets into jarrah, marri, tuart, peppermint, and banksia, there’s no fence big enough to stop it. No chemical to spray. The only viable defence is biological. And we’re already years behind.
If we lose those forests, it won’t just be an environmental tragedy. It’ll be a climate disaster. These ecosystems are carbon sinks. Let them rot and burn, and they become carbon firebombs. The emissions released will make a mockery of every subsidised wind and solar farm in WA.
This is a failure of political imagination, policymaking, and leadership of the highest order — made worse by the fact that since 2017, this state Labor government has presided over more than 20 major pest incursions: Queensland fruit fly, serpentine leafminer, red dwarf honey bee, Russian wheat aphid — and now the worst forest pest we’ve ever seen. Yet through it all, not one of our two Agriculture Ministers has managed to convince Treasury that biosecurity is a crisis worth serious investment.
And that’s what stings: WA should be the easiest place on Earth to defend. We’re surrounded by desert on three sides and ocean on the fourth. Just three highways cross our borders. It should be Fort Knox for quarantine. Instead, we’ve dismantled the old Agriculture Department and folded it into a mega-agency so shell-shocked and confused it no longer knows what it stands for.
Despite a $40 billion state budget, biosecurity spending is going backwards. Over the next three years, funding drops from $161 million in 2025–26, to $140 million in 2026–27, and just $136 million in 2027–28. Factor in inflation, and we’re slashing response capacity at the exact moment we need to ramp it up. Meanwhile, the same government is proudly spending $368 million on a single wind farm at King Rocks and pouring more into Warradarge. Here’s a memo: you can’t defend biodiversity with a turbine. If shot-hole borer hasn’t fired a shell across the government’s bows, then nothing will.
What we need is an external review of DPIRD with one job: carve out a standalone Department of Biosecurity with a growing budget and a clear mission — to fund 561 boots-on-the-ground professionals: researchers, pathologists, inspectors, mobile labs, strike teams, and above all, long-term investment in biological warfare of the fungal and parasitic kind.
While they are at it carve our grains research into another stand alone entity ready to hoover up a large part of the $600m of surplus GRDC funds and use that money to help protect our grain farmers for biological risks.
In a globalised world, the enemy doesn’t wave a flag — it arrives in potting mix, hides in shipping pallets, and hitches rides on muddy boots. Once it’s in, it’s in for good. This is a silent insurgency: no headlines, no medals — just dying trees, dead crops, collapsing ecosystems, and mounting trade bans. We know exactly what needs to be done. The only question is whether this minister — or the next, or the one after — has the guts to walk into the Premier’s office and say the truth out loud: DPIRD isn’t up to the job, and if we don’t rebuild biosecurity from the ground up, the next bug won’t just kill trees or wheat crops— it’ll kill our political reputation.
