The Victorian Government has confirmed it will not bring the proposed Animal Care and Protection Bill to Parliament in 2026. Victoria’s hunting community welcomes the decision – not because we oppose animal welfare, but because we always believed this legislation was built on the wrong foundations.
Reports emerged this week that the Victorian Government has shelved plans to introduce the Animal Care and Protection Bill in 2026, citing a crowded parliamentary agenda and reduced sitting days. The Bill was intended to replace the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1986 (POCTA) legislation that has served Victoria for four decades and, despite its age, has done so effectively.
The animal rights lobby is outraged. They call the delay a failure of political will. We see it differently.
We are not claiming credit for this outcome. No single organisation should, and it would be arrogant to try. But SSAA Victoria, in an alliance with other hunting organisations (Australian Deer Association, Field & Game Australia, the Australian Bowhunters Association, and Victorian Hound Hunters), engaged with this process seriously and at length, across multiple rounds of consultation stretching back to 2020. We said consistently what we believed, and we believe the concerns we raised were legitimate and well-founded. The Government appears to have concluded that the legislation, as drafted, was not ready for parliament.
We welcome that conclusion.
What we argued, and why
When the Victorian Government released the Exposure Draft of the Animal Care and Protection Bill in early 2024, SSAA Victoria led a formal joint submission on behalf of all five major hunting organisations. Our position was not opposed to animal welfare legislation in principle. We opened that submission the same way we open this article:
Victoria’s major hunting organisations fully support appropriate, reasonable and workable legislation to ensure animals are treated humanely and protected from wanton cruelty.
That remains our position today. The question was never whether Victoria should protect animals from cruelty. The question was whether this particular bill did that or whether it did something rather different.
Our core concern was structural. The proposed Act defined hunting and the deliberate killing of animals as, in effect, acts of cruelty, and then attempted to resolve that contradiction through a system of exceptions and carve-outs. We argued this was the wrong approach. An exception is not the same as an exemption. Exceptions can be challenged, narrowed, and litigated. They create ongoing uncertainty for people engaged in lawful activities. As our joint submission put it:
Where hunting is legislated by an Act that defines hunting and killing an animal as ‘animal cruelty’, there will remain a fundamental and unresolvable contradiction. While assurances have been given that hunting will continue, and be excepted from offences under the proposed Bill, such assurances will only carry real weight if hunting is made exempt from the Act.
We pointed to the precedent the Bill itself set – Traditional Owner agreements under Part 1-10 were granted full exemptions from the Act’s provisions, not just exceptions. We asked for the same treatment for hunting conducted under the Wildlife Act 1975 and relevant Codes of Practice. That is not a radical ask. It is a request for consistency and legal clarity.
We also raised serious concerns about the breadth of the proposed regulations. The Bill left enormous scope for future licensing requirements, restrictions, and obligations to be imposed through regulation, without parliamentary scrutiny. Our submission noted:
The complete lack of detail around the supporting regulations for the Act does not allow a fully informed response and leaves considerable scope for overreach and unintended consequences from the legislation into the future.
This matters because legislation of this kind tends to have a long life. POCTA has been on the books for nearly 40 years. Whatever replaces it will likely be in force for a similar period. The vague regulatory architecture of the proposed Bill was not a feature, it was a vulnerability, one that well-resourced and ideologically motivated groups would have exploited through litigation and advocacy over the decades ahead.
We also objected to the proposed role of the RSPCA as Authorised Officers under the Act. The RSPCA is an advocacy organisation with a clear and stated animal rights agenda. Giving it the coercive powers of a regulatory body, powers that in some respects exceeded those available to Victoria Police, was, and remains, inappropriate. A private organisation with no government oversight has no place exercising that kind of authority.
When we first engaged with the Government’s consultation in September 2022, SSAA Victoria flagged concerns about the language in the plan’s policy positions. One passage in particular revealed the underlying assumptions at work: in discussing the management of game species, the plan asked decision-makers to consider ‘alternative ways to reduce their numbers.’ As we wrote at the time:
The final sentence in that passage betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivations and values of game hunting. Whilst population control and management go hand in hand with sound game management, the driving principle of game management is the sustainable use of a valued resource, not pest control by some other name.
That framing, hunting as a regrettable management tool rather than a legitimate, valued pursuit, ran through the entire legislative project. It is the kind of assumption that produces legislation that can never quite accommodate hunting, no matter how many exceptions are written into it.
The animal rights movement – where this legislation came from
To understand why we were sceptical of this Bill from the outset, it helps to understand where it came from. The proposed legislation did not emerge from evidence that POCTA was failing. No such evidence was presented. It emerged from a sustained, decades-long campaign by the animal rights movement to shift the legal and regulatory framework governing the relationship between humans and animals.
This campaign has a history worth understanding. In 2020, as part of the first round of consultation on this legislation, Rick Brown prepared a detailed analysis for the five hunting associations tracing that history. What follows draws on that work.
The starting point is the Bramwell Report of 1967, commissioned by the British Government to examine conditions in intensive livestock farming. The Committee concluded, sensibly enough, that domestic animals experience pain and distress, and recommended that animals should have sufficient freedom of movement to behave naturally. The subsequent Farm Animal Welfare Council gave these principles formal expression as the ‘Five Freedoms’: freedom from hunger and thirst, from discomfort, from pain and disease, from fear and distress, and the freedom to express normal behaviours.
The Five Freedoms were always intended as aspirational benchmarks for husbandry systems, not as legal standards, and certainly not as a basis for prohibiting the use of animals. As Professor John Webster, who helped formulate them, made clear: they should be understood as aspirations, not absolute standards for legal compliance.
But the animal rights movement had other plans. Professor Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975, coining the term ‘speciesism’ to describe the view that humans occupy a unique place in the moral universe — a view he considered indefensible. From this starting point, Singer argued that the interests of non-human animals should be weighed equally against those of humans. The logical endpoint of this argument, which Singer himself drew, is that the life of a pig has greater moral value than that of a human infant.
This is not a fringe position within the animal rights movement. It is its intellectual foundation.
The strategy adopted by animal rights advocates over the following decades was to use accepted and reasonable concepts, animal sentience, the Five Freedoms, welfare standards, as entry points for advancing a more radical agenda. As Professor Ron Gill of Texas A&M University has observed, most leaders of mainstream animal welfare organisations have backgrounds in animal rights advocacy and have adopted more palatable language for public consumption while pursuing the same underlying objectives.
The recognition of animal sentience in Victoria’s proposed legislation was presented as a benign and modern reform. But sentience was already the implicit foundation of POCTA, the current Act has always been premised on the recognition that animals can suffer. Formally enshrining sentience in legislation is not a scientific update. It is a platform. As the joint submission noted:
The recognition of sentience is a platform from which the animal rights movement openly intends to impose a radical ideology over the rules, regulations and practices governments impose on the owners and users of animals.
The vague regulatory architecture of the Bill, the broad ministerial powers, the undefined licensing regime, the requirement for decision-makers across government to ‘consider’ animal welfare principles, was precisely the kind of legislative foothold that enables this incremental expansion. Today, it is a carve-out for hunting. Tomorrow, it is a licensing requirement. The year after, a legal challenge to the Code of Practice for duck hunting. And so it goes.
A (then) member of the Victorian Government, Will Fowles MP, confirmed as much in correspondence with an SSAA Victoria member, stating he was proud of the Andrews Government’s ‘strong animal rights agenda’ and that there was ‘always more to do.’ The frank acknowledgment that this was an animal rights project, not a welfare reform, is precisely why we could not simply accept assurances about legislative intent.
What we want to see instead
The shelving of this Bill is not a vindication of cruelty. No one in Victoria’s hunting community wants to see animals treated cruelly. We say this plainly and without qualification.
POCTA is not perfect. There are aspects of Victoria’s animal welfare framework that could be updated and improved. We have always said we are willing to work constructively with the government on such improvements, through the Wildlife Act, the Game Regulations, and the Codes of Practice that specifically govern hunting activities. These instruments were developed by people who understand hunting. They are fit for purpose in ways that a generalised animal welfare act, drafted under the influence of the animal rights lobby, cannot be.
If Victoria is to revisit animal welfare legislation, and at some point it will, the process needs to start from an honest question: what specific problems does the current legislation fail to address, and what is the evidence for those failures? That question was never satisfactorily answered in this process.
Victoria’s hunters, shooters, and farming communities are not obstacles to good animal welfare. We are stakeholders in it. We have a direct and practical interest in the sustainable, humane management of wildlife and game. When we are engaged seriously and in good faith, we produce better outcomes.
The Government’s decision to pause this legislation is an opportunity to get the process right. We hope it is taken.
