Victoria’s leading shooting and hunting organisation has taken aim at the Invasive Species Council (ISC), accusing the group of inflaming culture wars at the expense of evidence-based policy and the wellbeing of regional communities.
SSAA Victoria represents over 45,000 members who actively support responsible and ethical hunting and shooting. Responding to a Facebook post in which ISC CEO Jack Gough disparaged recreational hunters, SSAA Victoria’s Hunting Development Manager David Laird said:
“Rather than inflaming cultural division, Mr Gough might consider leaving these conversations to those who understand the realities on the ground.”
Mr Laird outlined the real and measurable benefits recreational deer hunting brings to Victoria:
“Hunting delivers genuine triple-bottom-line benefits to the state,” Mr Laird said. “Every year, recreational deer hunting contributes $201 million to the Victorian economy, supports 1,761 jobs, removes around 140,000 wild deer, and supports the wellbeing of tens of thousands of hunters and their families.”
“That may seem trivial to Mr Gough from a café up in Newtown, but in Victorian towns like Orbost, already paying the price of extreme environmental policies and deindustrialisation, those jobs mean a lot.”
The ISC’s post contained a number of false and misleading claims, including:
Claim: Deer in Victoria are “protected” by game status
This is one of the ISC’s favourite mistruths, and it has been corrected many times. In Victoria, wild deer can be hunted on public land every day of the year with no bag limit. On private land, they can be taken with virtually no restrictions.
Game licensing exists to manage hunters, not deer. It enables access to public land, facilitates data collection and education, and generates revenue to offset the cost of regulation. It poses no practical impediment to deer control.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is either deliberately misleading the public or fundamentally ignorant. In either case, they have no place in serious conversations about deer management.
Claim: Public land hunting is a risk to public safety
This is pure scaremongering. There are over 60,000 licensed game hunters in Victoria, 52,000 of whom are licensed deer hunters. In many of Victoria’s national parks below the snowline, deer hunters are the most prevalent users during late autumn, winter and early spring.
There is no evidence that recreational hunting compromises public safety. What does compromise effective deer control is the behaviour of ideologically driven lobby groups like the ISC, who sow distrust and division instead of working constructively with others.
The facts are clear: recreational deer hunting is safe, effective, and socially and economically valuable. The real barrier to progress is not hunters, it’s the dishonest campaigns of fringe lobby groups more interested in ideology than outcomes.
You can view the ISC Facebook post below:
