As many of you know, WA has strict laws about only keeping species which are native to our state, which is not much.
It may just be a poorly written sentence, but WA, with about one third of the continent within its boundaries, has a huge number of species which could be considered very desirable for keepers. You do miss out on most of the Morelia variations, the wet-tropics stuff and the gorgeous things like Water Dragons which are so common in the east coast environment most people don't even give them a second look, but if the pig-headed bureaucrats could be persuaded to lift their literal stranglehold on native animal keeping in WA, you would be able to have some terrific stuff.
The constraints placed upon keepers in WA are a total obscenity - they serve no conservation purpose at all - so many hundreds of thousands of the animals you CAN'T keep are killed in WA on roads and by land clearing for housing and industry that the relative few that would be taken from the wild to establish captive populations wouldn't even be a drop in the ocean of death they're in at the moment.
In WA you have a clique of all-powerful bureaucrats who have been in their jobs for decades, who have insulated themselves from any real scrutiny of their conduct by bullying and threatening keepers as targets for harassment if they are reactive, or question the conduct of the department. This behaviour renders most keepers passive - you do what the department says... OR ELSE. Keepers rightly feel they have a lot to lose if they challenge the actions of (especially a few of) DEC officers.
Keep trying, and seek to work with their political masters - it was the only way we got even the miserable regs you have now. Even then, we designed a racehorse at the committee stage ... they took it away for nearly a year and gave us back a camel!
J
