“It won’t be many years until we have feral deer on the front lawns of the Federal Parliament, with the current trajectory of deer figure numbers.”

That’s the warning from Invasive Species Council CEO and advocacy director Jack Gough.

He said the organisation had been watching as wild deer numbers in eastern Australia grew quickly, with some deer wandering into cities and towns.

In a recent video shared on social media, a motorist on Canberra’s Ginnindera Drive can be heard exclaiming as a deer bolts through several lines of traffic and narrowly misses his car.

It’s “shocking, but not surprising” footage to Mr Gough.

“Those numbers have exploded as a result of governments failing to invest enough to effectively control them when the numbers are low, so that [means] we’re seeing more and more feral deer on train lines, crossing roads, trashing and trampling forests and people’s gardens.

“This is an increasing problem, and if we’re not dealing with them out in the bush, they’re going to increasingly come into the cities.”

To control deer populations, about 35 to 50 per cent of an area’s population needs to be culled each year.

He said further efforts to study deer populations – to find the target number for each cull – were needed across eastern Australia.

“Something that people don’t realise intuitively is that just killing one extra animal often doesn’t make a difference on the ground,” he said.

“The reason these species are invasive is because of the speed at which they are able to breed and the speed at which they’re able to dominate those ecological niches.”

He said Canberra, along with South Australia, had “nation-leading” programs to control their deer populations.

Since 2021, the ACT Government has run an annual call targeting invertebrate species, removing hooved animals (such as deer) from key conservation areas, water catchments and semi-urban areas.

Mr Gough attributed part of the program’s success to its use of the “game changer” of aerial shooting.

“The rugged nature of a lot of the terrain in the Australian Alps, but also the ACT, NSW and Victoria, means that ground shooting can only ever be a supplementary addition.”

An ACT Government spokesperson told Region that the 2025 program removed 849 feral animals, including 527 feral deer.

In 2024, the program resulted in the culling of 357 feral deer.

“Populations of fallow, red and sambar deer across the ACT have increased in recent years and the areas they live in [have] expanded,” the spokesperson said.

“Feral deer were commonly found in more remote locations, however, in recent years they have increasingly been coming closer into urban areas.”

Deer are the focus of a culling program in the ACT that was launched in 2021. Photo: Peter Tremain.

Mr Gough described the southeast NSW coastal region as “the epicentre of failed deer management” in the state.

He said it meant deer were moving into other areas, including into the ACT.

“Deer are increasingly moving westward, and this is why people are starting to see them in places you haven’t seen them before,” he said.

“As you can see from the figures [in Canberra’s program], the numbers that they’re killing each year are going up because the numbers that are there are going up.

“Largely, that’s because of the constant migration from NSW.”

Mr Gough urged governments across Australia to commit to a proactive approach to managing deer populations.

“This is an increasing problem … and the risk of a serious incident when you’ve got increasing numbers of deer is very high,” he said.

He pointed to a 2024 report from the NSW National Resources Commission, which found more than 212 deer were struck by trains in the northern Illawarra region since 2010/11.

It also found there were 107 motor vehicle accidents involving deer in the Wollongong and Lake Illawarra area between 2005 and 2017.

Of the accidents, 90 were rated as serious, and one resulted in a fatality.