Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today World Animal Protection released a report calling for national leadership in animal welfare. It highlights the repeated exposes of animal cruelty involved with live baiting in greyhound racing, puppy farms, live export and intensive production and processing facilities for pigs, chickens and ducks. The report observes that 'government regulations and their enforcement are failing to meet modern community expectations of animal welfare.' When the Abbott government was elected in 2013, it set about dismantling and defunding national frameworks for animal welfare. World Animal Protection proposes as the remedy for this lack of national leadership and coordination an independent office of animal welfare, with independence from the Department of Agriculture being essential. The department's core responsibility for ensuring profitable primary industry means that it is ill suited to have carriage over animal welfare oversight and regulation, especially in relation to livestock. It is inherently conflicted because improvements in animal welfare are often not consonant with increased productivity and profitability and vice versa.

I am pleased to say that it is a core part of Labor's national policy platform to establish an independent office of animal welfare. This, together with the bill introduced this week by my Labor colleague the member for Hotham to ban cosmetic testing on animals, means animal welfare is an area where Labor's national leadership is in sharp contrast to the government's total lack of interest. In refusing to ensure that repeated violations of ESCAS are punished and refusing to regulate the export of greyhounds to countries with no animal welfare laws—just to name two things—the Minister for Agriculture has shown contempt not only for defenceless animals but also for the Australian community which cares about them.