Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Duck hunting

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (03:32): (1549) It is 3:30 am and I am going to talk about duck shooting, because I rise in disbelief and disgust to direct my adjournment matter to the Minister for Outdoor Recreation. The action that I am seeking is for him to review the disgraceful tactics of the Game Management Authority (GMA) officers during the commencement of the 2025 duck-shooting season. This year was my 13th year on duck rescue, and at this point I feel like I have just seen it all. But then the Game Management Authority decided to step it up one more notch. Each and every year they attempt to find a new way to remove rescuers from the wetlands as swiftly as possible, including those who are licensed and can legally enter the water before 11 am. They pay all the money and do all the training so that they can be out there to rescue the birds. In the past they have used the rules created to reduce shooter cruelty, such as failing to kill wounded birds when they are en route to the veterinary tent, while ignoring the shooter who actually wounded the bird in the first place. But this year they were determined to ensure that we could not even get to those wounded birds, guaranteeing them a slow prolonged death by predation, infection or drowning, which can take days, if not weeks, suffering out there on the wetlands.

Duck rescuers go out there with one specific purpose – to help our wounded native waterbirds. They are doing a task that should not even be theirs, but it is one that the government and the authorities refuse to address themselves. But as soon as rescuers legally enter the wetlands, keeping their distance from shooters, as they always do, GMA officers are quick to swarm on them and give them immediate suspensions of their licences, this time, unbelievably, for having nets, as we have always done throughout the history of the duck-shooting campaign, claiming that they were a prohibited weapon under the Wildlife Act 1975. As shooters around Lake Marmal shot and killed protected and threatened species, including blue-winged shovelers and freckled ducks, and continuously wounded but failed to retrieve other game species – which is also an offence – the authorities turned their focus to those trying to help them and in doing so seized the one tool they have for capturing wounded but still mobile birds.

As I have spoken about in this place many times before, ducks can receive pellets to their bodies, organs, wings, legs, beaks and head, guaranteeing their eventual death, yet they can still be too fast to capture without the necessary equipment. It is downright offensive to accuse us of cruelty to waterbirds when it is happening right before their very eyes by shooters out there on the wetlands, and they turn a blind eye. An independent review previously found that the GMA was failing its responsibilities, including being unwilling and incapable of investigating shooters. It is clear that nothing has changed, and the minister must urgently intervene and order an investigation into compliance officer behaviour throughout the opening of this year’s duck-shooting season.