A path forward for duck and quail hunting
You can read the Victorian Government Media Release here.
The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (Victoria) was incorporated as a public company on October 1, 1973. We exist to promote the shooting sports and protect firearm owners' interests.
With more than 40,000 members, SSAA Victoria is a leading body representing licensed firearm owners in Victoria. SSAA Victoria has more than a dozen branches and more than 30 sub-clubs and disciplines within the organisation.
(p)rovide independent and strategic advice to the Government of Victoria on matters relating to the protection and ecologically sustainable management of the environment and natural resources of public land.
In reality, VEAC’s sole, unofficial ‘KPI’ is to provide Governments with the justification to create more National Parks. There is an old saying that when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. VEAC’s ‘nail’ is public land that is not (yet) locked up in the National Park estate. On its website, VEAC brags that (at the time of its and its predecessor's inception),Just over one per cent of Victoria was protected in national parks and wildlife reserves...Fifty years later, around 16 per cent of land in Victoria is protected in national parks and other parks and conservation reserves.
In March last year when, the (then) Environment Minister ordered VEAC to conduct a rushed ‘desktop’ investigation into the very area that Greens-aligned activists have been agitating for ten years to have turned into the so-called ‘Great Forest National Park’, and for that investigation to be delivered before the shutdown of public land logging came into effect, you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what that report would say. The ‘Great Forest National Park’ proposal kicked off around a decade ago and was driven by anti-logging activists in the Central Highlands. Native Timber Harvesting in Victoria officially ceased on January 31 last year. The key protagonist for the Great Forest National Park wrote in a celebratory post on X (formerly Twitter) on New Year's Day.From today, trees like these will no longer be sites of battle, they’ll become places of sanctuary. Logging has ended in the Mountain Ash forests.
To the extent that there ever was a rationale for the Great Forest National Park, it has been removed, and its protagonists have claimed victory. There has to be a limit to the extent of National Parks in Victoria. Arguably, we are at or close to that limit now. There has been half a century of the rapid creation of new National Parks and the removal of two significant industrial uses of crown land: logging and agriculture. For the most part, public land management in Victoria over the next Century will revolve around balancing recreational uses with conservation and amenity considerations. With a significant review of Crown Land over the next couple of years, the Government needs to seriously consider whether there is a role for VEAC in the future or whether it, like public land logging, has run its race. For over a decade now, SSAA Victoria has actively advocated against the creation of a massive new National Park in the Victorian Central Highlands that would lock out hundreds of thousands of active recreational users. The campaign will continue as long as these threats are present.Victoria’s leading shooting body has slammed a decision by the South Australian Government to ban bowhunting. SSAA Victoria says it is speaking out because “bad ideas have a nasty habit of crossing borders”. SSAA Victoria’s Hunting Development Manager David Laird labelled the ban a “disgrace”. “Bow shooting is a legitimate form of shooting, and bow hunting is a legitimate form of hunting,” Mr Laird said.
A bi-partisan committee of the South Australian Parliament conducted an inquiry into bowhunting that reported in November 2021. That inquiry made eight recommendations to regulate bowhunting in South Australia. None of those were to ban bow hunting. “Prohibition is poor policy,” Mr Laird said, “There is a golden opportunity here for the South Australian Government to follow the Parliament’s recommendations and regulate bowhunting to address community concerns”.
Recommendations from the Parliamentary inquiry included introducing training initiatives and amending the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 to better regulate hunting. The South Australian Government has opted instead for an approach that would ban bowhunting by having the Governor sign off on a change in regulation. This means that the changes would avoid the scrutiny of the elected Parliament, where they would likely fail in the Upper House.
When SA Environment Minister Susan Close first announced the bowhunting ban in late 2022, the Minister’s rationale was “that was our election commitment (to RSPCA), we would ban the use of bows and arrows for recreational hunting”. This so-called election commitment was not made public before the election and is not included on the Government website outlining all of the commitments that SA Labor took to the March 2022 election. “The public is entitled to know what they are voting for,” Mr Laird said. “It’s ironic, given the vitriol we hear about the allegedly secretive gun lobby, that governments are making secret deals for support with the shadowy animal rights lobby”.