In summary:
• We run political campaigns to support candidates who support us.
• We respond to inaccurate media articles.
• We promote shooting interests both politically and through the media.
Victorian State Elections
Prior the 2002 Victorian State election, the CFCV ran an intense political campaign and did the same for the 2006 Victorian State election
We also supported opponents of candidates known to not support the shooting sports. Our campaign was candidate, and not party, specific. Two days before the election, we ran full page advertisements in the Herald Sun, The Age and Weekly Times advising shooters on how to vote to protect their sport. This gave them a unique opportunity to vote solely on the shooting issue. We backed this up by direct mailing tens of thousands of shooters in certain electorates. We also moved 200 shooters to polling booths to hand out how to vote material in support certain candidates. We repeated much of this for the 2006 state election, which resulted in greater attention from the candidates who missed out on our support, because of the fact that election was a more even contest (you may recall the 2002 state election was a landslide after the poor campaign run by the Liberals). Prior to the 2006 state election, the ALP, Liberals, Nationals and Country Alliance all released pro-shooting policies - a first in Victorian politics. All of these parties support duck shooting which is the number one target for our detractors. As a result, we have seen several pro-shooting intitiaves put in place, such as the retention of duck shooting, a firearms consultative committee, a feasibility study into a multi-discipline shooting centre and funding for firearm safety. We are working on other initiatives which we hope will be announced as they surface.
We exist to stop this happening to you! (photo courtesy SSAA)In our 2002 campaign, we polled candidates on their attitudes towards firearms. We developed a strategy that was designed to build support for shooters by supporting individual candidates which we repeated for the 2006 election
Predictably, the strategy attracted a lot of media attention first time around.
The major political parties now realise we are not aligned with either side, which is a bonus because it means we are not a threat to them provided they maintain sensible policies.