Victoria has more wetlands than any other state, which is why it's considered Australia's duck hunting capital.
Currently there are around 28,000 registered duck hunters in Australia - 26,000 of whom reside in Victoria.
In 2014, Victorian duck hunters took around 450,000 ducks from the wild - a figure that's a major sticking point for critics of the practise.
"If that's the case, duck shooting must be having a huge impact on local populations of native water birds," says Laurie Levy from the Coalition Against Duck Shooting.
"Water birds are at their lowest number, or their second lowest number, that should have rung alarm bells.
"I always saw the opening of the duck hunting season as a terrible injustice for our native water birds."
For David McNabb, general manager for Field and Game Australia, he sees the issue very differently.
"We've got three key elements that we work and represent our members in and that's conservation, hunting and the clay target shooting sports," he says.
"There's over 17,000 members scattered in every state and territory around Australia. There's a real respect for your game, as a hunter.
Source: The Feed
"It's hard to describe to people who haven't been exposed to hunting. There's a real privilege here, with putting those game birds on the table and taking them out of the system.
"This is woven into the social fabric of what we do: this is how we got all the food on our table not that long ago.
"We've just become removed from it, so I think it's really important to get our families back out into the Aussie bush and to really enjoy this environment."
Professor Richard Kingsford is Australia's leading water bird expert and has been surveying the Australian wetlands for the past 30 years.
"The overarching trend that we've seen is essentially one of decline," he says.
"Right across the board we've seen long term declines of up to 50, perhaps up to 60 and 70 per cent, in total numbers of water birds."
