Thursday, 3 April 2025

Duck hunting

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (17:53): (1581) My adjournment is to the Premier, and the action I seek is that she cancels the 2025 duck-shooting season. Call it off. According to the most recent Eastern Australian Waterbird Aerial Survey, waterbird numbers have almost halved in the last 12 months due to a lack of rainfall, leaving them little habitat to breed. But this year the Victorian government has ignored this robust research, wilfully ignoring 40-plus years of scientific data showing catastrophic declines in waterbird populations. Instead, it is using its own experimental, unproven modelling. Even the Game Management Authority admits that because of drought stubble quail populations fell by 20 per cent in 2024 and again by a staggering 50 per cent in 2025. Kerrie Allen from the Regional Victorians Opposed to Duck Shooting says:

We thought it couldn’t get any worse, but this is a whole new level …

Quail can’t fly away like ducks do, so they can’t escape.

Once-healthy grasslands have died off, leaving the tiny birds nowhere to hide in the paddocks. While state and federal governments are spending millions of dollars proactively trying to safeguard wildlife from the looming threat of bird flu – the H5N1 strain of avian influenza – you are allowing, Premier, every shooter to disrupt and disperse birdlife from our wetlands and to kill nine ducks every day of this season. Almost half a million native birds could be maimed and killed between March and June.

This week campaigners from the Coalition Against Duck Shooting placed dead birds outside your office – 255 bodies of dead and abandoned waterbirds. Among them, as we see every year, were illegally shot threatened species, including freckled ducks, blue-winged shovelers and one blue-billed duck. These were recovered from just two sites. Because of the drought, ducks were clustering this year around some of the bigger wetlands that still contained water. They sought safety, but Premier, thanks to you, they found a slaughter.

Victoria is years behind the progress of other states. Duck shooting was banned in WA, New South Wales and Queensland in the 1990s to early 2000s on animal cruelty and environmental protection grounds. A ban in Victoria is long overdue. It is beyond madness to spend millions of dollars of public funds to support the inhumane recreation of duck shooters, who make up less than 0.2 per cent of the state’s population, while locking other Victorians out of our wetlands. In a year of drought a full 90-days shooting season with an increased bag limit is a reckless – a heartless – decision and it does not represent what most Victorians want: to see our wildlife properly protected for good. Premier, cancel the duck-shooting season.