Page 1769 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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here today showing their support for this animal welfare legislation. I have been overwhelmed by the amount of public support for this.
We have talked a bit about consultation. As has been mentioned, I have received over 50 submissions on this subject. My understanding is that the ACT government, in its waste strategy, received considerably less than that. I think it was actually less than 30 submissions. I would contend that, as far as consultation has gone, we have done a good job. We have had a lot of responses.
We put out this paper in December last year and since then there has been a lively public debate on the subject. The Chief Minister has entered into it through press releases only, which I do regret. But there has been a public debate on it and the vast majority of the public has been incredibly supportive of the legislation.
After the comments we did make quite a number of minor changes to the legislation. I wish to very much thank Mr Georgeson, who used to be in my office, for his huge amount of work on this bill. It is very much a credit to his actions.
I would like to thank Ms Porter for her contribution today because she was the only person here who actually ventured to talk about some of the substantive issues in the legislation. Unfortunately, maybe she did not have the time, due to her illness, to read it all. She said that my bill was only looking at pet stores. That is not true. The bill looks at pet stores but it looks at lots of other things as well.
Mr Stanhope’s press release today basically demonstrates that the Labor Party, it would seem, has not even read the legislation. It says that the bill directly targets only Canberra’s pet stores, which are responsible for 14 per cent of sales. It lists a number of other areas which should be targeted:
… backyard and occasional breeders, those who breed by accident or through negligence and animals sold through newspapers or fetes, farmer’s markets or over the internet.
If either the Liberal or Labor Party read my legislation they would find that all of these are dealt with in the legislation. We do recognise that pet stores are not the only source of animals in the ACT. We have put a lot of work into trying to make legislation which covers the whole gamut of the pet industry, with the intention of improving the welfare of animals. That is the one intention behind this. This is not a political stunt.
This was part of my work program at the beginning of my time, in 2008, here in the Assembly. I postponed doing anything about this, as Ms Porter knows, because she had indicated her interest in this and I felt that that was reasonable. But we waited and waited, and we waited some more. We then felt that this was an important issue. As I mentioned, there are thousands of animals being abandoned and euthanased in the ACT each year. We want to do something about this real problem, so we have brought forward legislation.
I very much regret that it appears that it will not be supported today. We made the suggestion to the government, if they were not yet ready to support it in detail—they
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