This is serious, and not because of the threat to the NSW Lotteries' sale. Here's what the shooters want in their Game and Feral Animal Control Amendment Bill 2009:

1. Permission to shoot in national parks.

2. Expansion of the original bills list of birds and animals, both introduced and native, they can kill.

3. Approval of private game-shooting reserves.

4. A new offence of approaching or interfering with lawful hunters.

The expanded list of birds and animals they want to kill in national parks and elsewhere includes four species of kangaroo, 11 species of ducks, quail, the galah, the purple swamphen, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, two species of ibis, and the black swan!

In my column in The Herald today I suggest that the NSW Shooters' Party should strike a trophy for the first of its members to take out a family of black swan parents and chicks with one shotgun cartridge. And that would seem like an insulting suggestion if the shooters' party's claims and coercion were not such an insult to NSW.

You know, shooters often like to defend their barbarism and savagery by arguing that they have the age-old drive of the hunter, that they eat what they kill. If they get access to our national parks, and I fear that they will even if it is to shoot only introduced animals, should they be required to eat what they kill? All of it? At a public table so we can watch?