The Northern Victoria region's new Animal Justice MP hopes the duck hunting season will be cancelled this year and the activity will be banned altogether in the near future.
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"We're really optimistic about it, actually," newly elected MP Georgie Purcell said.
"All we need to end duck shooting is for Labor to change their position and we think they are potentially close to doing it."
The upper house MP pointed to the banning of the pursuit by Labor governments in Queensland, NSW and WA and said campaigning by the party had seen a significant shift among Victorian MPs.
Ms Purcell has written wrote to Sonya Kilkenny, the minister for the newly created Outdoor Recreation portfolio, to make her case, saying that while waterbird numbers had increased due to the unseasonally wet conditions of the past two years, long-term there had been a "population collapse of about 90 per cent" over the past four decades.
The letter also referred to "fatal woundings of threatened species, illegal and improper killing methods, failure by shooters to retrieve downed birds and the dispersal and abandonment of nesting swans from their young due to gunfire", which Ms Purcell said she had witnessed over 11 years as a volunteer duck rescuer.
Polling showed around 85 per cent of Victorians consistently supported a ban on duck shooting, with the strongest support in regional areas, it claimed.
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But the Bendigo-based CEO of shooting association Field and Game Australia Lucas Cooke dismissed the arguments about animal cruelty and poor hunter behaviour as "subjective and ideological".
"Hunter behaviour by and large is very positive," he said. "The same arguments can't always be made of protesters."
He also disputed the relevance of the East Australian Waterbird Survey (EAWS) - one of the key sources of evidence considered by Victoria's Game Management Authority in setting bag limits and dates for the duck shooting season - which found waterbird numbers remained well below the long-term average in 2022, with six out of eight duck species showing significant long-term declines.
Field and Game Australia was eagerly awaiting research and modelling by Victoria's Arthur Rylah Institute, which extrapolates waterbird numbers from a different methodology, with samples more focused on "where ducks like to live", Mr Cooke said.
"We would suggest this year is as good a year as you get for ducks and we would've thought there was no need to restrict the season."
A full duck shooting season would run from March to June with a 10-bird bag limit.
EAWS author Professor Richard Kingsford told the Bendigo Advertiser the long-running survey didn't provide "accurate estimates of where every bird is" but "it's not right to say that we don't track duck numbers".
"Our numbers indicate long-term trends and what happens with floods and droughts," he said.
Professor Kingsford acknowledged Mr Cooke was correct in claiming the researchers judged the impacts of duck hunting were "not nearly as significant" on the birds' numbers as the loss of wetland habitat.
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