The final long weekend of Victoria's 2025 recreational duck shooting season ended last Monday, June 9, as it started, extremely quiet with very few shooters. It highlighted the shocking misuse of public funds which are used to prop up recreational duck shooting seasons for duck shooters who make up just 0.2 percent of Victoria's population, the Coalition Against Duck Shooting Campaign Director, Laurie Levy, said today.
"With Victoria's crippling debt of about $170 billion, Premier Jacinta Allan should have the vision to immediately replace duck shooting, which costs Victorian taxpayers around $11 million annually, with a First Nations nature-based, cultural wetlands tourism industry, which would inject millions, if not billions of dollars into regional Victoria's economy.
"Instead, Premier Allan is focused on her multi-billion dollar Big Build trains fetish, which is highly detrimental to Victoria's financial wellbeing. She has also ignored Labor's 2023 Parliamentary Inquiry, which called for duck shooting to be banned."
"New South Wales is light years ahead of Victoria, with a lucrative First Nations cultural tourism industry which, according to ABC News, October 2024, generates over $3 billion annually and aims to increase this to $91 billion by 2035, Levy said.
"Apart from Victoria, birdwatching is booming in Australia. International birdwatchers spent $2.6 billion on travel that involved birdwatching in the year to June 2024, according to Tourism Research Australia.
"Premier Allan denied regional Victorians the chance to be inundated with overseas tourists when Labor cancelled the Commonwealth Games; and her lack of vision is presently denying regional Victorians the opportunity to establish wetlands and native bird tourism.
"In the 1980s, a visionary Labor Premier John Cain and two ministers, Joan Kirner and Evan Walker, had the idea to protect Victoria's penguins and they established a thriving, world class penguin tourism industry, Levy said.
"Victoria's future Labor Premier needs to have a tourism vision. Approaching the 2026 Victorian election, it's important that the Labor Party changes to a Premier who bans the dying activity of duck shooting, which is incompatible with nature-based tourism, and instead promotes a First Nations nature-based, cultural wetlands tourism industry," Levy concluded.
