Deer hunting: motions

The question put

That this house notes that: (1) deer hunting is the premier hunting activity in Victoria, with over 48,000 game licences held for the express purpose of hunting deer, both by stalking and hound hunting; (2) recreational deer hunting contributes over $200 million a year to the Victorian economy and provides around 2000 jobs, with 69 per cent of hunter expenditure coming from regional Victoria; (3) recreational deer hunting is the dominant below-snowline use of the Alpine National Park and the revenue from hunting tourism is vital to several regional communities; (4) Victoria’s recreational hunters kill around 140,000 deer annually, most of them female and most of them on public land; (5) the recreational deer harvest in Victoria dwarfs that of government-sponsored control programs, all whilst providing triple bottom line benefits to the state; (6) there are large tracts of public land that are national parks that are not open to seasonal hunting by licensed deer hunters, with no sound rationale for their exclusion; and calls on the government to open appropriate tracts of applicable national parks at suitable times to recreational hunters to increase opportunities for Victoria’s bur