In 2016, the Victorian RSPCA was, by their admission, actively compromising its vital role as the animal welfare regulator by engaging in naked political activism. There was probably no more significant example of this than when RSPCA Victoria’s CEO and veterinarian, Dr Liz Walker, attended a duck opening and posed (alongside animal rights activists and a Greens MP) with what was clearly a long-dead swan. The RSPCA then falsely inferred via social media posts that recreational hunters illegally killed the swan. That is not what happened, and it is inconceivable that a veterinarian of Dr Walker’s experience did not almost immediately know that assertion was false.
Later that same year, following a damning internal review into how the RSPCA missed a series of warnings about the appalling treatment of 23 horses at a property in Bulla, on the outskirts of Melbourne, Dr Walker apologised to the public and acknowledged that the RSPCA’s activism had compromised the vital work of their inspectors.
“We certainly understand that over the past few years, there have been issues which we have campaigned on, and their tone and the way we have done that definitely impacted on our trust with our stakeholders, and we apologise for that…it puts them (the inspectors) in an untenable position to have to do that whilst the organisation that employs them has in the past openly and very emotionally and stridently advocated against the existing laws”.
In the wake of public outrage and calls for the RSPCA to be stripped of its regulatory functions, Dr Walker’s show of contrition certainly calmed the waters.
By 2021, just five years after Dr Walker’s seemingly sincere apology, the RSPCA was well and truly back in the activism business. Last year, they engaged the “RedBridge Group”, a lobbying firm that claims on their website to “enable clients to influence governments, stakeholders and public opinion”.
As recently as this week, the RSPCA was out with media releases on the impending Victorian duck season, actively advocating against the existing laws and seeking to both misrepresent and flavour public opinion with a media release purporting to correct “myths” about duck hunting. This release was clearly a response to SSAA Victoria’s efforts in the media last week to correct blatant mistruths in the public discourse about duck hunting with verifiable facts.
The RSPCA release cites opinion polling (the detail of which it has not made public), but it neglects to acknowledge that, on its own polling, public support for a ban on duck hunting has declined by 30% over the past six years, with the sharpest drop off in support for a ban being amongst the 18-34-year-old age group.
The RSPCA release attempts to downplay the economic importance of duck hunting, but it neglects to acknowledge the Victorian Government analysis that duck hunting contributes $ 65 million a year and 590 jobs to the state’s economy.
The RSPCA release makes an absurd extrapolation on wounding rates in duck hunting, despite RSPCA having a representative on the government working group on wounding and knowing that such extrapolations cannot credibly or reliably be made.
The RSPCA release misrepresents the results of a 2020 GMA Hunter Knowledge Survey as material for recreational hunters’ identification of game duck species. As the RSPCA knows, that voluntary survey was in no way a “bird identification test” – neither the reports owners nor its authors made any such assertion, and it would be impossible for a reasonable person to read the report and draw such a conclusion. If a prospective duck hunter fails the Waterfowl Identification Test, they don’t get to go out and hunt – plain and simple.
The RSPCA release seeks to paint a game duck season as ecologically unsustainable, despite Australia’s two most eminent wetland ecologists, Professor Richard Kingsford and Professor Marcel Klaasen, clearly stating that, in the context of the governments Interim Harvest Model, it is.
SSAA Victoria urges Dr Walker and the RSPCA to revisit their damning internal review from 2016 and demonstrate to the public that they have learned from past mistakes by immediately abandoning their drift into activism, which they know clearly undermines their critical inspectorate function.
