It’s not every day we can bring you a tale of state bureaucrats spending tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money to literally go on a wild goose chase, but here we go. Anti-duck-hunting activists have extracted, through a prolonged freedom-of-information struggle, the story of how Game Management Authority boss Graeme Ford and his director of strategy, Simon Toop , went on a jaunt to Denmark four years ago, at a cost to taxpayers of $31,000, to check out some geese, who clearly hadn’t read the script. A pink-footed goose Victoria’s travelling bureaucrats didn’t get to see.
Credit: iStock As the centrepiece of the 10-day trip, Ford and Toop went out into the field with Danish counterparts for what must have been a chilly and wet two days and nights in the country’s north, hoping to catch some pink-footed geese to examine them for signs of wounding by hunters. But it turns out they’re capricious creatures, those pink-footed geese – or PFGs, as they’re known in the trade – who don’t like to fly in bad weather, so the two-person team from Australia went away disappointed. However, the field trip wasn’t a total loss, as Ford wrote in his travel report.
“We observed the logistics and challenges of working with wildlife in unpredictable weather conditions.” We bet they did. Still, Ford and Toop did manage to put the PFG disappointment behind them and glean sufficient “key learnings and proposed actions” to fill an 18-page report on their retu.