The Select Committee on Victoria’s Recreational Native Bird Hunting Arrangements received a record number of submissions and heard around twenty-five hours of evidence in public hearings. Touting his report in a social media video, the Committee Chair made a point of melodramatically thumbing a printed copy of his report to highlight its volume of evidence.
The thing is, not all evidence is equal. The Select Committee had a job not just to read and listen to the evidence but to test and assess its veracity. While it is clear that the author of the Select Committee Report failed to do that in a general sense, particular examples illustrate the depth of that failure and point to, at best, incompetence and, at worst, malevolence behind it.
If it was too difficult for the Select Committee to do its job properly in the ridiculously short timeframe they had to work with, their Chair should have gone back to the Parliament and asked for more time.
The Select Committee Report, at least in part, bases its observations and findings about the behaviour of animal rights activists (referred to in an Orwellian flourish in the report as ‘rescuers’), hunters and the Game Management Authority on the evidence of two men, Mr Laurie Levy and Mr George Bucchorn.
Mr Levy heads the ‘Coalition Against Duck Shooting’. He was tripped up on factual inaccuracies numerous times during his public hearing, and much of his written material to the Select Committee was salacious (and in some instances potentially defamatory). Given his years of passionate advocacy, it was wholly appropriate that the Select Committee called Mr Levy as a witness. However, any reasonable observer would be more likely to characterise his testimony as ‘entertaining’ than they would as ‘credible’.
Mr Bucchorn’s short tenure as head of compliance at the Game Management Authority included overseeing the well-examined compliance failure at Koorangie in 2017. Mr Bucchorn had previously had his credibility as a witness questioned by no lesser body than Victoria’s powerful Independent Body Against Corruption (IBAC); Jack Rush QC once described his testimony as “the height of ridiculousness”. Given his background, his submission to the inquiry that was so scurrilous that it had to be redacted, and his lack of any contemporary knowledge of the issues, calling Mr. Bucchorn as a witness before the Select Committee was a significant error of judgement on the Chair’s behalf.
In public hearings, both Mr Levy and Mr Bucchorn gave evidence to the Select Committee that the Chair knows to be false. In Mr Levy’s case, this false evidence was even included by the Chair in the Select Committee’s Final Report (our emphasis).
Laurie Levy explained to the Committee that his group’s tactics had changed following the shooting injury of a rescuer:
In the early days we raced duck shooters for wounded birds when they came down. We could move a lot faster than the shooters because we just wore a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt and they were bogged down in waders and guns and everything else. But we do not do that now, because one of our rescuers, in 2009 – and this was not connected with racing a shooter for wounded birds – was shot in the face. She had nine pellets lodged in her face. She was rushed down to the Horsham Base Hospital and – when I first heard the news, I know the damage a shotgun can do to somebody’s face – she was just so lucky.
When asked if rescuers are now advised to ask shooters to retrieve birds before attempting retrieval themselves, Mr Levy replied yes.
Mr Levy gave this evidence on 16 June 2023.
On 29 June 2023, SSAA Victoria provided a video to the Chair of the Select Committee, along with an accompanying statement. The Video was taken at the Koorangie State Game Reserve at 7.21 am on 18 March 2017. It clearly shows Mr Levy racing a hunter to a downed bird (the hunter is seen being restrained from continuing the pursuit by an enforcement officer), illegally entering the water, stealing the bird, and failing to dispatch it immediately and humanely. Mr Levy was charged for this offending and pleaded guilty to it in the Swan Hill Magistrates Court in February 2018. SSAA Victoria received acknowledgment of receipt of the Video and statement from the Select Committee.
Also, on 29 June, Mr Bucchorn gave evidence to the Select Committee and relayed a story about the same incident (our emphasis).
I encountered that with Laurie himself on that morning of the duck opening. We positioned ourselves next to them. It was prior to 7:20. A hunter launched himself out of his tent, saw a duck and shot it but wounded it. Now, that duck fell into the water basically at our feet, and I was standing there thinking, ‘What do we do now?’ Laurie just launched into the water, even though it was a breach of the legislation, and rescued that duck and took it straight to their vet clinic…
Mr Bucchorn’s evidence was not correct. The time was 7.21 am; the hunter was hunting along the shore and waited until legal shooting time. The bird was in its last throes of life, and an enforcement officer, presumably under the direction of Mr Bucchorn, prevented the hunter from retrieving the bird.
To make an innocently incorrect assessment of evidence is one thing. To deliberately prefer evidence proven to be untrue is quite another. The Government cannot base any decisions on the deeply flawed and misleading Select Committee report, particularly not decisions about something as monumental as a ban.
