Tuesday, 9 December 2025

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (22:11): (2229) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Outdoor Recreation, and the action that I seek is urgent clarity regarding the government’s plan to abolish the Game Management Authority and merge it with the Victorian Fisheries Authority. Last week the government announced it will cut 1000 public service and executive roles and merge several departments in line with the Silver review. Among these changes is a recommendation to dissolve the Game Management Authority and integrate it into a new outdoors agency with the Victorian Fisheries Authority. While I have no objection to the GMA being abolished, I am deeply concerned that this merger risks sweeping the agency’s long-running failures and misconduct under a new name rather than fixing them. It is my understanding that the new body will not only retain the GMA’s powers but expand them, empowering it to blatantly promote hunting and shooting while operating with even less scrutiny than ever before. That is not reform, that is concealment. Instead of addressing the GMA’s issues, the government is now simply relabelling it, no longer even attempting to hide its obvious and indefensible loyalty to the shooting lobby. This move directly contradicts the 2017 Pegasus report, an independent review into the GMA that found noncompliance to be widespread and warned it was already at high risk of regulatory capture due to its too-comfortable relationship with hunters. The report recommended major structural overhaul to strengthen accountability. Instead the government is doing the opposite by embedding conflicts of interest and entrenching an agency culture shaped by the very industry it is supposed to be regulating.

We have seen the consequences of this broken model. Time and time again the GMA has failed to enforce game hunting laws, turning a blind eye to serious breaches while disproportionately targeting licensed duck rescuers. These are volunteers who enter wetlands for one purpose and one purpose only – to help wounded native waterbirds and perform a task that should fall to the government, not to the public and to volunteers. Yet they are the ones being penalised, fined and banned from wetlands while offenders walk away untouched. It is increasingly clear that this government is hell-bent on killing wildlife in any way that it possibly can, and with just months until Victoria’s annual duck and quail shooting seasons begin, these changes will only make a failing system even worse. I therefore urge the minister to provide transparency on how this restructure will protect our wildlife, rather than the interests of shooters and hunters.