One of the more persistent myths circulating in the debate over Victoria’s duck hunting season is that hunters effectively privatise public wetlands during the season, locking out birdwatchers, kayakers, and families who would otherwise be enjoying them. It’s a compelling image. It’s also wrong, and Victoria’s public safety laws and a comprehensive audit of Victoria’s State Game Reserves make clear just how wrong it is.
What the public safety laws actually do
The offence provisions in the Wildlife Act 1975 that govern wetland access during duck season do not prevent people from entering wetlands or protesting in a lawful manner. What they do is establish three narrow, safety-driven restrictions.
The first is a restriction on entering the waters of a State Game Reserve, or the land within 25 metres of the shoreline, during specified times, namely:
- From midnight of the first day of duck season until 11 a.m. of that day.
- From 2 hours before sunset of the first five days of the duck season (including the first day) until 11 a.m. of the following day
- For the remainder of the season, from 2 hours before sunset of each day of duck season (including the first day) until 10 a.m. of the following day.
- From 2 hours before sunset of the last day of the duck season until 30 minutes after sunset of that day.
Only people holding a valid Game Licence endorsed for duck hunting and a valid Firearms Licence can enter those zones during those times. Outside those hours, which is to say, for most of the day, anyone can be there.
The second restriction prohibits approaching within 10 metres of a person who is carrying a firearm or hunting game birds in a specified hunting area. This is pure safety common sense (although it would make more sense from a ballistics perspective if it was at least 50 metres).
The third prohibition, which applies at all times and all locations, is against hindering, harassing, interfering with, or obstructing a person engaged in hunting – things like deliberately scaring birds away, standing in someone’s firing line, or interfering with a gundog.
These restrictions have been designed to address safety issues while imposing minimal impacts on all wetland users. That is the explicit stated purpose. The law does not create hunting-only zones for the duration of the season. It creates narrow time-windows around active shooting, and a modest exclusion zone around people actively discharging firearms. A birdwatcher can sit on the bank of a State Game Reserve wetland at 11am on opening day and do exactly that, entirely within the law.
What State Game Reserves actually are
The hysteria from duck hunting opponents frequently implies that Victoria’s State Game Reserves are some kind of exclusive duck hunting clubs, land locked away from public benefit. The GMA’s state-wide audit of 199 reserves (there are now 200) tells a very different story.
Victoria’s State Game Reserves (SGRs) cover over 75,000 hectares of public land, an area equivalent in size to the Alpine National Park. If all the wetlands in the system were at full level, they would represent approximately 40,000 hectares of public waters.
These reserves exist, at least in part, because duck hunters helped to create and fund them. The first State Game Reserves were purchased using licence fees collected from duck hunters who identified early on that the draining of wetlands was seriously impacting waterbird habitat and populations. Jack Smith Lake was proclaimed in 1958 and the network has grown since, paid for by the people now accused of monopolising it.
More than 70 SGRs support threatened species listed under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988, and there are 18 SGRs listed under the Ramsar Convention as wetlands of international importance. Ramsar listing is not given to duck shooting paddocks. These are internationally significant conservation assets, and they are also State Game Reserves where hunting is permitted, because the two things are completely compatible.
The audit found that these reserves support camping, water sports including boating, kayaking and water-skiing, birdwatching, and fishing. The reserves most utilised in the state were the coastal morasses of Gippsland, assessed as supporting four or more recreational activities.
The “Kakadu of the South” delusion
Some opponents of duck hunting have taken to describing Victoria’s wetland estate in sweeping, romantic terms, invoking comparisons to Kakadu National Park, as if these 200 reserves are a contiguous, World Heritage-quality wilderness waiting to be unlocked for the nation. This kind of rhetoric does real damage to honest policy debate, because it fundamentally misrepresents what the SGR network is, and it betrays a basic ignorance of how waterfowl dynamics actually work.
The State Game Reserve system is not Kakadu. It is not even a coherent landscape. The current system contains 19 different wetland types, spread across 12 of Victoria’s 28 existing bioregions, from the coastal saltmarsh swamps of the Gippsland region to the deep freshwater marshes of the Victorian Riverina. It ranges from Ewing Morass in Gippsland at over 6,800 hectares to Koonik Koonik in the south-west at just four hectares. It includes internationally listed Ramsar wetlands, shallow seasonal swamps that may not hold water for years, saline lakes, tidal estuaries, and everything in between.
But the deeper problem with the Kakadu comparison goes beyond misreading a map. Kakadu works as a conservation icon partly because its keystone values, landscapes, rock art and seasonal flood areas are fixed in place. You can visit them. You can protect them by protecting the land they sit on. Waterfowl don’t work like that. Game duck species in Australia are among the most nomadic vertebrates on the continent, tracking rainfall and inundation events across catchments and across state borders, sometimes moving thousands of kilometres in response to conditions. Their distribution in any given year is a function of where water is, not where reserves are gazetted. A dry Lake Tyrrell in a drought year holds no ducks regardless of its conservation status. A flooded farm dam in the Riverina might hold ten thousand.
This is precisely why Victoria’s duck management framework uses annual aerial surveys across more than 850 wetlands, farm dams, rivers, and sewerage ponds to track population abundance before each season. Victoria’s adaptive harvest management system exists because duck populations are not a fixed resource that can be managed by drawing lines on a map. They are a continental, rainfall-driven, highly mobile system that requires annual assessment and flexible regulatory responses.
To speak of this diverse and dispersed collection of 200 individual wetlands, scattered across the state in fragments of private farmland, as a “Kakadu of the South” is to show you fundamentally do not understand what you are proposing to protect, or how the animals you are proposing to protect it for actually live. It is not an argument about conservation. It is a slogan dressed up as one, and it sets expectations for what these places could become that have no grounding in either physical or ecological reality.
Why converting them to outdoor recreation reserves is fantasy
The suggestion floated during the Parliamentary Inquiry into native bird hunting, that State Game Reserves could simply be repurposed as outdoor recreation reserves if duck hunting were banned, also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these places are and what shape they’re in. The real issue confronting Victoria’s SGR network is not exclusivity. It is management. And the audit makes clear how significant those management challenges are.
A total of 132 State Game Reserves were assessed as not being utilised for any recreational activity other than waterfowl hunting. The reason is straightforward: most of them are not set up for general recreation, and many of them are barely accessible at all.
Ninety percent of State Game Reserves have no infrastructure whatsoever, excluding fencing and signage. No toilets. No boat ramps. No picnic grounds. No shelters. The nineteen that do have some infrastructure are the exception, and even those have limited facilities. The idea that these 200 wetlands could be converted into a network of outdoor recreation parks is the kind of thinking that emerges when you’ve never actually visited one or worse, you are looking for a sop to the people you are working to do over.
Access is the core problem. The audit found that fifty of Victoria’s State Game Reserves cannot be accessed at all due to ambiguous or undefined access points (signage was subsequently addressed under the Sustainable Hunting Action Plan), undefinable leased easements, or being completely landlocked by private freehold. A further 58% of State Game Reserves have no two-wheel-drive access, and car parking cannot occur on 40% of reserves due to no vehicular access.
Then there’s the management reality. Of the 200 State Game Reserves, 69% do not have targeted management plans. The audit identified landholder encroachment – illegal grazing, cropping, firewood theft, and rubbish dumping on 48% of reserves. Illegal grazing was found on 29 reserves beyond those with licensed grazing arrangements. One reserve in the far west had its entire swamp bed illegally sown to wheat crop, with public road access fenced off. These are the problems facing Victoria’s SGR estate. They are problems of under-management, deteriorating boundary fencing, and neighbouring landholders treating public wetlands as an extension of their own private holdings.
This is what the reserves look like right now, with a statutory mandate, an active user group, and government oversight. The notion that removing hunting, removing the community of people who use and care about these wetlands, and leaving them to Parks Victoria’s already stretched estate would result in thriving recreation areas is not a policy position. It’s a wish. Parks Victoria currently manages over four million hectares of parks and reserves. The SGR estate is a relatively small and highly dispersed component of that, and the audit found that management plans are absent for the overwhelming majority of individual reserves. Adding 200 somewhat problematic, landlocked, signage-deficient, encroachment-plagued wetlands to a to-do list, without the revenue stream and user community that hunting provides, would not unlock their potential. It would accelerate their decline.
The audit’s own summary concluded that landholder encroachment is the largest current threat to the health of Victoria’s State Game Reserves, and that reserve access is the main issue facing user groups, causing the most frustration among hunters in particular. The people who have the most invested in these reserves, who fund them through licence fees, who show up before dawn to use them, and who have the political incentive to advocate for their condition and management, are the same people the inquiry seemed most eager to remove from the picture.
The public safety laws do what safety laws should do: they keep people out of active firing lines for a few hours a day. They do not close wetlands to the public. And the reserves those laws apply to are not recreational gems being hoarded by hunters, they are largely remote, infrastructure-free, sometimes inaccessible wetlands, spread across 19 wetland types and 12 bioregions, that exist in the condition they’re in because hunters have bothered to care about them for seventy years. The question activists who claim to care about these places should be asking is not how to exclude that community. It is how to support it.
