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Wednesday January 7, 2009

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Hinch Blog: Just macho madness

Posted by: By Derryn Hinch, 3AW Drive | 28 November, 2008 - 4:54 PM

I received several e-mails yesterday including purported copies of an advertisement for a Victorian Government project that I thought was so obscene, so misguided, so out of touch and in such bad taste, it had to be a hoax. Had to be a sick Internet joke.

So, I didn’t mention it on air until we checked it out. And it’s all true. To make it even worse it comes from the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Now, last time I looked in a dictionary the word ‘sustain’ meant to support life, to prolong life, to protect life.  Not any more. This government department has proudly announced it is working in partnership with hunting organizations to make it easier for them to kill deer and ducks and quail.

And it is urging landowners to increase their stocks of wildlife with lines like ‘Does your property have the potential to be modified to support populations of game species?’

It also has this helpful advice: ‘If your property borders an area of public land where species of game deer are present there is a unique opportunity to improve your lands and attract the game out into good hunting positions’.

I kid you not. Talk about ‘sitting ducks’.

This isn’t a sport. It smacks of those rich man’s African safaris where animals are set up for the big brave hunters to shoot –from a safe distance – so they can put a stuffed trophy heads on the wall of the den.

Imagine how Wildlife officials must feel after nursing orphan joeys back to life to be released into public sanctuaries while another department is urging farmers to lure them across into sport shooting paddocks.

I’m starting to wonder if rootin’ tootin’ Sarah Palin has got a new job as a copywriter Down Under. Wouldn’t surprise me, when the last time we saw her was a laughing, joking Thanksgiving interview where she’d shouted ‘wow, neat’ when it was pointed out turkeys were being beheaded behind her.

The department’s own website says the main goal of this project is to ‘increase the hunting opportunities for licenced game hunters’. I believe there are hundreds of thousands of Victorians who would be totally opposed to one dollar of their tax money being spent on even one advertisement for this project. Let alone paying for the staff who have dreamed it up.

And don’t be conned or sidetracked by some commentators trying to defend this as a worthy war on vermin. This is not about killing foxes that savage sheep.

This is about setting up killing centres purely for sport. Killing creatures for the hell of it. It has even less rationale than the Japanese killing whales for so-called scientific purposes. It is macho madness.

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