Everyone knows that access to guns, especially in the home, significantly increases the risk of domestic homicide. Today in Parliament, Abigail fiercely opposed a bounty hunting bill, condemning it as a reckless and dangerous proposal that undermines public safety, animal welfare, environmental science, and decades of hard-won firearm reform.
Abigail said:
I contribute to debate on the Game and Feral Animal Legislation Amendment (Conservation Hunting) Bill 2025.
I endorse the comments made by my Greens colleague Ms Sue Higginson, who laid out exactly how harmful the bill would be for the environment, for land management, for animals and for public safety. The bill is dangerous and unfounded, proposing to open over 50,000 hectares of public land to recreational shooters and bring back a bounty system, a practice long discredited as inhumane, cruel, unsafe and completely ineffective at preserving and protecting native species. Even more frightening than the prospect of the bill is the Labor Government's support for it after what appears to be a ridiculous backroom deal.
I would love to think that it had not been a deal—or maybe not, actually. Maybe it would be worse if the Labor Party had decided on the face of it that it was desperate to support this stand-up bill, and that it would prioritise it above all of the wonderful things that it could do instead for people, animals and the planet. Instead, let us take the Shooters at their word that there has not been a backroom deal. By aligning themselves with the Shooters and supporting this absurd proposal, Labor is setting a dangerous precedent, not only reversing decades‑old firearm law reforms but also turning its back on animal protection and the safety of our community.
Looking at the contents of the bill, The Greens do not know where to start addressing the sheer absurdity of its propositions. It seeks to legalise the so-called right to hunt for cultural reasons, for recreation and for the management of invasive introduced species. It expands hunting access across Crown land, which the mover of the bill described in his second reading speech as a step toward "collaborative community‑based conservation hunting". By enshrining the right to hunt, the bill attempts to co-opt cultural hunting to the benefit of recreational hunters, with contempt for First Nations peoples' fight to be allowed to maintain their connection to culture and country, not to mention enshrining the unfounded notion that recreational hunting is beneficial to environmental conservation and protection.
The bill proposes to abolish the existing Game and Pest Management Advisory Board and create a new statutory body, the conservation hunting authority, as well as a Minister for hunting and fishing. The authority would essentially see a return to the old Game Council, which was abolished in 2013 following scathing revelations of illegal hunting, systemic governance failures, political interference and proven risks to public safety and biodiversity. The conservation hunting authority proposed in the bill would have an absolute majority of representatives from hunting organisations, with not a single environmental or conservation expert. It would only promote research showing the so-called benefits of hunting.
The authority would be able to proactively provide propaganda in the form of advice and representations to the Minister. Members of the authority would receive remuneration for that, and the authority could employ public service staff under part 4 of the Government Sector Employment Act 2013 to enable it to exercise its functions. Under the bill, public sector land managers would also have to consider the so-called right to hunt when making land management decisions and would also have to consult with the conservation hunting authority before making those decisions.
If members thought that was not enough, the bill also seeks to create a genuine reason for the possession and use of otherwise-prohibited weapons for so-called conservation hunting by amending the Weapons Prohibition Act 1998. A few examples of prohibited weapons under schedule 1 to the Weapons Prohibition Act, which would make members laugh if they were not so serious, are bombs, spear guns, crossbows, taser guns, grenades, rockets, missiles, mines—jeez!—flamethrowers and an array of knives. The bill also permits the use of silencers, as has been said. That would make it harder to hear and locate gunshots, causing serious threats to public safety. Those propositions are a dangerous shift from evidence-based environmental and conservation science, and they betray decades of progress. As my colleague Ms Sue Higginson said in her contribution, not only is the bill logically dangerous but it also ignores conservation science and expert, evidence-based policy solutions.
Bounty programs and bounty hunters use inhumane and non-selective killing methods, causing immense suffering and delayed deaths for both target and non-target animals. Bounties have historically been proven to be wildly ineffective in actually managing populations of introduced species. There is considerable existing evidence to demonstrate that bounties are not consistent with the principles of humane and effective population control programs, which are based on monitoring impacts rather than focusing solely on kill target numbers. Contemporary best practice animal management emphasises the importance of determining the negative impacts of species of concern and reducing or minimising those negative impacts through evidence-based and humane methods, with ongoing monitoring to assess effectiveness and ensure that the most humane methods are being adopted.
Bounty programs fundamentally reject those principles, focusing instead on reducing numbers of a specific species by killing as many animals as possible within a particular location over a certain period. Studies have shown that bounties remove less than 10 per cent of target populations while wasting hundreds of dollars for every animal that is killed. In addition to that, evidence from previous bounty schemes in other Australian jurisdictions and across the world has revealed significant instances of unethical, cruel and fraudulent behaviours and practices. They include shooters reducing activity during breeding periods, to make sure they reap the most benefits from bounty incentives during the next year's so-called crop, and purposefully killing non-target animals for fun.
We cannot possibly ignore the correlation between firearm ownership and domestic and family violence. We have long known that having a firearm in the home significantly increases the risk of escalation of violence and homicide. Every 12 hours someone in the United States is shot and killed by a current or former intimate partner, and the mere presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500 per cent. Those are shocking figures in a country where firearms are far too readily accessible. Australia has very few homicide deaths from domestic and family violence involving firearms, which is undoubtedly attributed to our strong gun safety laws. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women sounded the alarm on the correlation between increased civilian access to firearms and gender-based violence in 1996, shortly before Port Arthur, and has continued to maintain that strong gun laws are a critical component of domestic violence prevention.
My colleague the Hon. Emma Hurst wrote to the Premier this week urging the Labor Government to not support this dangerous bill, highlighting that Labor's support for such an agenda would represent a fundamental betrayal of its stance against gender-based violence and its claims to be a progressive party for women. It is truly absurd that we could see the creation of a Minister for hunting and fishing, and a bounty council, before we see a Minister for animal protection and an independent office of animal welfare, or before we see dramatic long-term investment in women's safety, or even before we see a standalone Minister for disability, inclusion and justice. It demonstrates just how morally bankrupt the Minns Labor Government has become.
The ridiculous announcement made this week that was dressed up as being for domestic violence turned out to be for corrections officers and a recycling of existing funding. It was a rejection of the funding for frontline services for which the domestic and family violence sector has been calling out for decades. We know how dire circumstances are for women trying to flee domestic violence, how they cannot find anywhere to take them at the time when they are most at risk, and we are seeing homicides. Government members stand up and say the names of victims and claim that they are doing something about domestic and family violence. Then, when they actually do something, it is to support people having more guns to go recreational hunting. I do not understand how someone can be in the Labor Party at this moment and think that they are on the right side of history or on the right course. They are so definitively on the wrong course.
It is not okay to continue to prioritise things that are making lives harder, that are providing less support for people and that are taking us away from the kind of society that I thought we all wanted to live in. I call on the New South Wales Labor Government to stand on the right side of history and to reject any attempts from the shooting lobby to undermine the safety and protection of people and animals in this State. We must ensure that public money is invested in evidence-based policies that meet community expectations. The bill before us would take us backward in achieving this. The Greens oppose the bill, and we urge other members to do the same.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
4 June 2025