“Now Lizzy… A rifle in the wrong hands can be you know, really dangerous.“

[Character, Mick Taylor, in the 2005 Australian film, Wolf Creek, co-produced and directed by Greg McLean]

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“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures“

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  (1803-1882)

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Strange Truths of the NSW Game Council

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• Established in 2002 under the Game and Feral Animal Control Act 2002 introduced by the Carr Labor Government
• Annual budget of $3.8 million, of which $2.5 million comes directly from New South Wales taxpayers
• Received more than $12 million in NSW Government funding since 2002, including $2.7 million in 2011, despite NSW Government promises that it would become self-funded
• 16,000 recreational amateur hunters are registered with the Game Council of NSW
• Licenses amateur hunters to use firearms, dogs, and bows to hunt in 400 State forests and Crown land areas
• In the 12 months to 30 April 2012 the Council estimated licensed hunters took 15,663 animals, mostly rabbits, from public land. This represents a public expenditure of $159 per feral animal killed on public lands.   [Ed: Imported Gourmet Farmed Cervena New Zealand Red Venison Striploin retails for a premium of AUD$108 per kilo, so $159 for a feral rabbit is far from ‘economical hunting’]
• Since being established there has not been any assessment of the effectiveness of recreational hunting in controlling feral animals in a single State Forest.
• It head Daniel Boon man has been found to have trophy hunted an endangered African elephant for sport and personal gratification
• The NSW Game Council is a political minority interest group that has become a law unto itself
• The political wing of the NSW Game Council is the NSW State Shooters and Fishers Party (perhaps as Sinn Fein is to the IRA).
• In May 2009, Robert Brown MP of the Shooters Party lobbies for the Game and Feral Animal Control Amendment Bill 2009 to be passed into legislation in New South Wales, so that many of Australia’s native fauna across NSW (including National Parks) would be condemned as ‘game animals’ just like in colonial times.  The Bill is rejected.
• In June 2010, NSW State Shooters and Fishers Party MP Roy Smith, dies suddenly aged 56, and is replaced by wildlife trophy hunter, Robert Borsak, holding the balance of power in the NSW Upper House.
• In April 2011, The Shooters and Fishers Party presents its “shopping list” of ‘game demands’ to the freshly elected O’Farrell NSW Liberal Coalition Government, in return for the Party’s legislative support in the Upper House.  Demands include introducing recreational shooting in NSW national parks and for shooting to be encouraged as a school sport (Columbine, Virginia Tech, Dunblane and Sandy Hook aside).
• In June 2011, sure enough, with the Shooters Party’s supporting O’Farrell’s public sector wages cuts, the government has opened up more than 140 State Forests for recreational hunting for an unprecedented 10 years.
• In July 2011 Shooters’ Party proposes its Firearms Amendment Bill 2011 to allow firearms and ammunition in National Parks, children to have ready access to air rifles without a need for a permit, allows a person to own purchase air rifles without restrictions, and to ease safety regulations on shooting clubs and firearms sellers.  The Bill is rejected.
• In June 2012, the O’Farrell Government does another deal with the Shooters Party allow shooting in national parks and other reserves, in exchange for support for State energy privatisation support.  Amendments are made to the Game and Feral Animal Control Act 2002.
• In November 2012, the O’Farrell Government does another deal with the Shooters Party to allow duck shooting licences in return for their support to privatise two major ports.  Now the power over issuing duck shooting licences shifts from the National Parks and Wildlife Service to the pro-hunting Games Council.   Amendments are made to the Game and Feral Animal Control Act 2002 and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974.  This is one step short of reintroducing Open Season Duck Hunting in NSW, long banned by the Carr Government in 1995.
• In September 2012, illegal shooting of kangaroos in the Deua National Park camp is reported, which was subsequently verified by the Office of Environment and Heritage which reported:  “After it was reported to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the investigating park Ranger sighted two kangaroos that had been shot. One animal was euthanised. The matter is under investigation by NPWS and NSW Police.”
• Recently, the Shooters and Fishers Party announced that they plan to introduce legislation to repeal the Native Vegetation Act 2003, the law that controls broadscale land clearing and regulates logging activities on private land.

 

Robert Borsak, NSW Shooters & Fishers Party

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“Hunting is ingrained in human consciousness and genetics by at least 1.5 million years of evolution, according to the latest scientific evidence, and in the modern perspective, fishing is one of the nation’s most popular pursuits.”    ~ Robert Borsak – NSW Shooters & Fishers Party, 2012.

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“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

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~ Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

~  Stevenson, Adlai E.

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<<We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm.

There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that!

Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that.

If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment!  Because it’s judgment that defeats us.>>

[Quote from character Colonel Walter E. Kurtz out of the epic Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now of 1979, directed by Frances Ford Coppola.  Watch extract: ^http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxLFdJLSho8]

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“The joy of killing!  The joy of seeing killing done – these are traits of the human race at large.”

~ Mark Twain, ‘Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World’ (1897), American Publishing Co., Hartford.

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