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Nats 2017 No 16
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The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (Victoria) was incorporated as a public company on October 1, 1973. We exist to promote the shooting sports and protect firearm owners' interests.

With more than 40,000 members, SSAA Victoria is a leading body representing licensed firearm owners in Victoria. SSAA Victoria has more than a dozen branches and more than 30 sub-clubs and disciplines within the organisation.

SSAA Victoria News

A path forward for duck and quail hunting

The Victorian Government’s decision to continue with native bird hunting under new rules has met approval from the state’s leading shooting body. SSAA Victoria Hunting Development Manager David Laird said, “We are reassured that the government has listened to the evidence and committed to a path forward for native bird hunting that provides certainty and addresses community concerns”. Last year, a select committee of Victorian upper House MPs conducted and inquiry into native bird hunting, resulting in a report making eight recommendations. Most of the MPs on that committee recommended that hunting continue. “Many of those recommendations will be challenging for hunters, but the only one that we cannot live with is a ban on hunting,” Mr Laird said. “Along with some hyped rhetoric, the inquiry did hear genuine concerns about sustainability and animal welfare. Those concerns are being addressed through key initiatives such as the Adaptive Harvest Model and the Waterfowl Wounding Reduction Action Plan,” Mr Laird said. Mr Laird also called on the RSPCA to work with hunters to improve hunting. “After pulling their horns in a few years back, the RSPCA’s rhetoric on ducks over the past couple of years has drifted further and further away from the factual and closer and closer to alignment with the radical extremist animal rights movement. The elected government now has had its say and the RSPCA needs to respect that,” Mr Laird said. SSAA Victoria thanked the thousands of Victorians who supported hunting over the past 12 months. “The response (to the Select Committee) from hunters and ordinary Victorians, in general, has been nothing short of exceptional,” Mr Laird said. “It is really on us as hunters not to show the Government and the community that their trust is well places and hunting and hunters will continue to live our tradition with respect for the wildlife, the wild places and the community.”
You can read the Victorian Government Media Release here.

Fighting to save public land access for outdoor recreation

Today’s Weekly Times includes opinion pieces from SSAA Victoria and the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) about a proposed large new National Park on Melbourne’s doorstep. [caption id="attachment_8296" align="aligncenter" width="861"] Opinion pieces from the Weekly Times [/caption] The so-called “Great Forest National Park” proposal would see around 300,000ha of forest in the Victorian Central Highlands locked up in a National Park. The proposal received a boost just before Christmas with the release of an interim report from the Victorian Environment Assessment Council (VEAC).   SSAA Victoria is a 43,000-member strong, independent grassroots organisation with members and facilities throughout Metropolitan Melbourne and Regional Victoria. The VNPA is a small organisation of around 1,500 members that shares an inner urban office building with the Greens and other radical, fringe activist groups. VEAC is a government body established under legislation with a stated objective to

(p)rovide independent and strategic advice to the Government of Victoria on matters relating to the protection and ecologically sustainable management of the environment and natural resources of public land.

In reality, VEAC’s sole, unofficial ‘KPI’ is to provide Governments with the justification to create more National Parks. There is an old saying that when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. VEAC’s ‘nail’ is public land that is not (yet) locked up in the National Park estate. On its website, VEAC brags that (at the time of its and its predecessor's inception),

Just over one per cent of Victoria was protected in national parks and wildlife reserves...Fifty years later, around 16 per cent of land in Victoria is protected in national parks and other parks and conservation reserves.

In March last year when, the (then) Environment Minister ordered VEAC to conduct a rushed ‘desktop’ investigation into the very area that Greens-aligned activists have been agitating for ten years to have turned into the so-called ‘Great Forest National Park’, and for that investigation to be delivered before the shutdown of public land logging came into effect, you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what that report would say.   The ‘Great Forest National Park’ proposal kicked off around a decade ago and was driven by anti-logging activists in the Central Highlands. Native Timber Harvesting in Victoria officially ceased on January 31 last year. The key protagonist for the Great Forest National Park wrote in a celebratory post on X (formerly Twitter) on New Year's Day.

From today, trees like these will no longer be sites of battle, they’ll become places of sanctuary. Logging has ended in the Mountain Ash forests.

To the extent that there ever was a rationale for the Great Forest National Park, it has been removed, and its protagonists have claimed victory.   There has to be a limit to the extent of National Parks in Victoria. Arguably, we are at or close to that limit now. There has been half a century of the rapid creation of new National Parks and the removal of two significant industrial uses of crown land: logging and agriculture. For the most part, public land management in Victoria over the next Century will revolve around balancing recreational uses with conservation and amenity considerations.   With a significant review of Crown Land over the next couple of years, the Government needs to seriously consider whether there is a role for VEAC in the future or whether it, like public land logging, has run its race.   For over a decade now, SSAA Victoria has actively advocated against the creation of a massive new National Park in the Victorian Central Highlands that would lock out hundreds of thousands of active recreational users. The campaign will continue as long as these threats are present.

Scientific advisory committee recommends the removal of Hardhead from the threatened species list.

Victoria's Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) has recommended removing Hardhead (Aythya australis) from the State's Threatened Species List. A de-listing would clear the way for Hardhead to return to the list of game ducks that can be hunted. Hardhead were listed as vulnerable in 2013 on the basis that there were fewer than 10,000 mature individuals and that there was purported evidence of a continuing population decline. In a detailed nomination to the SAC, SSAA Victoria demonstrated that the population of Hardhead is considerably greater than 10,000 individuals and that there is no evidence of a continuing population decline. The SAC recommendation is in direct response to SSAA Victoria's nomination. The Association is grateful to the SAC for assessing the evidence and accepting the nomination. In doing so, the SAC has struck a blow for the integrity of the listing process. It follows from the SAC's recommendation that Hardhead should not factor as a trigger species for any wetland closures for the 2024 season. The Government now has sixty days to consider the SAC's recommendation. SSAA Victoria appreciates that duck season settings have already been announced and that timelines are tight; however, the Association is hopeful that the Government is able to consider the SAC's recommendations ahead of the duck season and then take advice from GMA on the appropriateness of including Hardhead in the bag for 2024 Field & Game Australia worked with SSAA Victoria to frame up the nomination for the SAC.

Victorian shooters in solidarity with bowhunters over the border

Victoria’s leading shooting body has slammed a decision by the South Australian Government to ban bowhunting. SSAA Victoria says it is speaking out because “bad ideas have a nasty habit of crossing borders”. SSAA Victoria’s Hunting Development Manager David Laird labelled the ban a “disgrace”. “Bow shooting is a legitimate form of shooting, and bow hunting is a legitimate form of hunting,” Mr Laird said.

A bi-partisan committee of the South Australian Parliament conducted an inquiry into bowhunting that reported in November 2021. That inquiry made eight recommendations to regulate bowhunting in South Australia. None of those were to ban bow hunting. “Prohibition is poor policy,” Mr Laird said, “There is a golden opportunity here for the South Australian Government to follow the Parliament’s recommendations and regulate bowhunting to address community concerns”.

Recommendations from the Parliamentary inquiry included introducing training initiatives and amending the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 to better regulate hunting. The South Australian Government has opted instead for an approach that would ban bowhunting by having the Governor sign off on a change in regulation. This means that the changes would avoid the scrutiny of the elected Parliament, where they would likely fail in the Upper House.

When SA Environment Minister Susan Close first announced the bowhunting ban in late 2022, the Minister’s rationale was “that was our election commitment (to RSPCA), we would ban the use of bows and arrows for recreational hunting”. This so-called election commitment was not made public before the election and is not included on the Government website outlining all of the commitments that SA Labor took to the March 2022 election. “The public is entitled to know what they are voting for,” Mr Laird said. “It’s ironic, given the vitriol we hear about the allegedly secretive gun lobby, that governments are making secret deals for support with the shadowy animal rights lobby”.


Read the South Australian Government's proposed banning process here.  
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