Animal Welfare Legislation Amendment Bill 2009
The object of the Animal Welfare Legislation Amendment Bill 2009 is to amend three prior Acts of the Parliament—the Apiaries Act 1985, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979 and the Exhibited Animals Protection Act 1986—by giving the New South Wales Minister for Primary Industries the power to recognise interstate court orders that prohibit certain persons from keeping animals so that interstate orders will be enforceable in New South Wales, ensuring that such individuals are not repeat offenders here; by providing guidance and transparency in licensing matters and refining the appeal mechanisms resulting in improved animal welfare, reduced costs and less red tape; and by providing for exemptions for registration for a person who brings bees into New South Wales following a crop, if they stay for less than three months and are properly registered in another State.
The real benefits of these amendments are generally administrative and practical, not really for the animals’ welfare, except in a minimal way. The amendment to the Apiaries Act 1985 will make it easier for out-of-State bee owners to come to New South Wales on business. Bees do not really care what State they get their flower nectar in, as long as they get it. But the pollination services required by interstate agricultural interests will be more easily obtained with these amendments. Beekeepers will benefit from the resulting freer mobility and fewer obstacles for their bees without borders, and that is sensible. But let us not pretend the bill is about animal welfare.
If we were actually interested in the welfare of bees we would encourage the agricultural industry to minimise the use of chemical insecticides, which are deadly to bees. We would encourage the creation and preservation of bee-friendly habitats in urban environments by allowing more public space to grow wild, rather than be mown down, cut back and cemented over. And since bees need a wide variety of nutrients in their diets from all sorts of plant life, including what are considered “weeds”, we could let more native plants grow naturally: a diversity of native plants and flowers in our gardens and public places would provide bees with good food sources throughout the growing season. And we would encourage farmers to avoid seeds coated with systemic insecticides, which are toxic to bees. There has been a huge die-off of bees globally recently, which should be sounding alarm bells to all nations because we are dependent on the pollination carried out by bees for a large proportion of our food crops. But this bill is not about the welfare of the bees.
The honey bee is not a native bee in Australia, according to the Australian Native Bee Research Centre. It was brought to Australia in 1822 to produce honey for the new colony. The Australian native bees have evolved with the wildflowers for millions of years and are very capable of pollinating them but do not make commercially exploitable amounts of honey. Most of them are tiny, delicate, nearly inconspicuous bees that have great difficulty competing with the highly efficient commercial bees that have been introduced from Europe. This bill does not help them either.
The amendment to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979 allows the Minister for Primary Industries to recognise interstate court orders that prohibit certain individuals from keeping animals. I question putting any Minister for Primary Industries in the position of judging people who have previously mistreated animals because the framework within which he or she works, that of Primary Industries, by definition perceives animals as pests, research subjects and commodities with or without economic value.
I do not recall the current office holder being interested in the welfare of the animals of the Northern Rivers area who were terrified or run over by the vehicles of the Repco Rally tearing up their natural habitats for three days in September. Nor was any concern expressed by the Minister over the welfare of the birds and wildlife in the Sydney Olympic Park where in excess of 250 trees are being torn up on the streets where the V8 Supercar races will be held—against the will of the surrounding residents, local councils and bird conservation groups.
The Minister’s advisor regarding feral animal management was thrilled to have shot an elephant in Africa recently—a species with highly developed family life, social organisation and proven intelligence, an awesome creature which, in my estimation, should never be hunted and killed for “sport”. But this amendment hopes to minimise the potential for people who have committed acts of animal cruelty interstate in the past from repeating their crime in New South Wales, and that is laudable.
The third amendment, to the Exhibited Animals Protection Act 1986, would empower the Director General of Industry and Investment NSW to consider the past actions and capacity of those applying for licences, approvals and permits to exhibit or supervise the exhibition of animal in zoos, circuses and other establishments that publicly exhibit animals in New South Wales.
Regarding people who keep animals for exhibition, such as travelling circuses, I loved these travelling circuses when I was a kid. Nothing was more exciting for us than when we would see the big vans pulling into town to set up the big tent. But my love for the circuses was well before I had any idea of how the animals they have for show are trained and kept captive in miserable conditions. When I learned the details, I could never overlook their suffering again. If we wanted to help progress the efforts toward a more compassionate treatment of animals, we would seriously consider banning travelling circuses from having exotic animals at all. I well remember learning as a young child Ralph Hodgson’s poem:
‘Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years
If the Parson lost his senses
And the people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.
Yet the amendment appears on its face to make sense otherwise. The bill is, after all, supported by the RSPCA and the Animal Welfare League, on my contact with them—those overworked, underfunded bodies that pick up the pieces when people shirk their responsibility towards the animal kingdom. With more than 13,000 complaints of animal cruelty investigated by these agencies in 2008 in New South Wales alone, we should be doing a lot more for animal welfare than making minor adjustments to the current legislation and bureaucratic systems.
Having got that off my chest, however, I will support the bill.
