Page 1761 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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Mr Stanhope: I raise a point of order, Mr Assistant Speaker. I must say I do not think it is appropriate for Mr Rattenbury to allege that the members of the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee are ditherers or that they are dithering in their consultation and their detailed consideration of these issues. It really is simply unacceptable to attack a group of community representatives in that way.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Chief Minister, there is no point of order. Mr Rattenbury.
MR RATTENBURY: Just to update the Assembly on that latest attempt to verbal from the Chief Minister, I certainly was not casting aspersions on that; I was casting aspersions on what the government has said about Ms Le Couteur’s motivations.
But there has been considerable support for Ms Le Couteur’s bill. Certainly the RSPCA have supported it. They said:
The legislation proposes a comprehensive approach to animal abandonment problems, covering issues such as breeding, selling, desexing, microchipping and advertising.
They went on to say:
… in a lot of ways it mirrors the RSPCA’s ideal policy on the breeding, sale and licensing of companion animals.
A number of other groups from the ACT have also given support for the bill, including Dogs ACT and the Animal Sanctuary Rescue and Foster Group, as well as groups outside the ACT from across Australia, such as the Animal Welfare League of Queensland, the National Desexing Network, Hunter Animal Watch and Dog Homes of Tasmania, which is the state’s largest dog welfare organisation. Support for the bill has also come from major NGOs that work on animal welfare and protection, such as Animals Australia and Voiceless, who said that the bill constitutes much needed reform in the area of animal protection in the ACT. So to suggest that there are deficiencies with Ms Le Couteur’s bill does not correlate with what experts in the field are saying.
Now, of course, we are open to the government putting forward amendments, and we would be very happy for the bill to be supported in principle today and for the Assembly to make a commitment that we want to move forward on important areas of animal welfare law reform and then engage in a discussion about sorting out some of those details, because that is what the detail stage is for.
This bill has been on the table since December and it is now May. We are prepared to accept that it has been tough for the government to get organised in those four or five months and come up with a set of amendments. So we are prepared to put this off today, to agree to it in principle and then adjourn it to a later day so that we can give them a little bit more time to get organised and make some suggestions and negotiate over them. We are quite open to that.
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