PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF

DEER DIARY Sean Kilkenny

At the start of the year, I spoke about how 2025 would bring challenges to public land access for recreational deer hunting in Victoria, due to the cessation of native timber harvesting and the relentless push for the so-called ‘Great Forest National Park’.

The Great Outdoors Taskforce had also been launched and was underway. It provided a unique opportunity to help influence the direction of land management in a changing environment. It also came with a risk that could manifest in attempts to bring about large-scale land tenure changes, materially impacting how state forests have been used up until now. This risk was similar to that posed by the Great Forest National Park concept, which sought to convert an unprecedented amount of state forest into a national park, altering its use profile and leaving many bush users unable to continue using the bush in the same sustainable way they had been. This included, but was not limited to, recreational deer hunting with a gundog or over the hounds.

The Australian Deer Association had spent over a decade advocating on this issue to ensure public land access would not be diminished; it now also had to share its focus on the Great Outdoors Taskforce and the vast swaths of state forest in Northeast Victoria and East Gippsland that were now under threat.

Fortunately, 2025 brought about good news in this advocacy space with the Allan Labor government confirming that the Great Forest National Park concept was dead and buried and that there would also not be any large-scale changes to existing state forests that were previously used in the native timber harvesting industry.

Part of the government's response to the Great Outdoors Taskforce was to support the recreational use of state forests by investing in a Great Outdoors marketing campaign to highlight recreational opportunities. The Australian Deer Association has already begun advocating for the inclusion of recreational deer hunting in this campaign.

For too long, recreational deer hunting has not been appropriately recognised, celebrated, and championed by any government, unlike its cousin, recreational fishing. This is a benchmark that we aspire to reach and the tide is slowly starting to turn.

Throughout 2025, we continued to encounter the usual anti-hunting misinformation campaign being run by those ideologically opposed to recreational hunting or firearm ownership. There is no better example of this than the attempt to have game status removed from wild deer. Despite years of government clarification, including a parliamentary inquiry that noted game status didn’t inhibit or prevent wild deer management, the campaign to remove it and the public land access for recreational deer hunters to national parks continued to rage on.

However, the Victorian government, as part of its response to the Wildlife Act 1975 review, finally put the issue to bed by responding to the review's recommendation to remove the game status of wild deer by rejecting the recommendation and, once again, reiterating that game status does not impact the effective management of wild deer. Instead, it enables public land access, such as the impending access to the Snowy River and Errinundra National Park due to be unlocked for 2026 and onwards!

These policy outcomes will continue to deliver benefits to the over 50,000 licensed recreational deer hunters who travel the country and world to hunt in Victoria, ensuring that they and the generation that follows can enjoy our sustainable way of life.

In the meantime, our nationwide advocacy work will continue in earnest, as there is always more to do.