Once, Bill was stung in the white of his eye by a paper wasp while eradicating melaleuca. Then there was the time he was bitten by a venomous pus caterpillar. Clearly he's hurting more than the melaleuca. Burning it is not an answer. Adapted to fire, melaleuca puts out millions of pinhead-sized seeds when stressed.
Herbicides work but are labor intensive.
The tree won't die unless we peel the bark off and apply herbicide directly to the cambium, a paper-thin layer of tissue directly under the bark. The larvae of a beetle that eats melaleuca was released here a while back, but they dropped from their cocoons and drowned. Just last month, the USDA let 350 adult beetles go loose here. Another promising control on the horizon is a bug currently quarantined and undergoing continued testing. You can begin to imagine how bad the melaleuca monster is when a wasp-like defoliating sawfly is the good guy.