Recently, as both houses of the NSW Parliament finally voted to repeal the ridiculous Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act, Reclaim Kosci co-founder and Snowy River Guide Richard Swain and I turned to each other and said something that would have seemed unthinkable seven years ago: thank you, John Barilaro.

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Not because we supported the law he championed - far from it. That Act entrenched one of the most destructive environmental myths in Australian politics: that a feral species deserved protection over the native animals and fragile landscapes of our largest alpine national park. It locked in years of ecological damage. It made effective control far harder. It set back nature at the worst possible time.

But in trying to protect feral horses through legislation, Barilaro inadvertently sparked the cultural reckoning that finally gave governments the courage to act on feral horses.

When the Act passed in 2018, it was framed as a debate about brumbies. In truth, it was something much bigger. It was about who we are as a country - and which stories we allow to override evidence. It was about our lingering attachment to a colonial fantasy of landscape dominance, even when the science was screaming that alpine rivers, wetlands and native species were being pushed to breaking point.

At the time, many of us feared the fight was lost for a generation. A law had been passed. A culture war had been declared. A small but highly aggressive lobby had secured what looked like permanent political protection.

Instead, the opposite happened.

The extreme, uncompromising defence of every single feral horse - and the........

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