Page 3948 - Week 11 - Thursday, 26 September 2019
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I am confident that this bill will have negligible impact on the overwhelming majority of pet owners across the ACT. This is because, as we know, pet owners in general are responsible people who look after their pets. Why else do they have them? Most of us have pets, if we have them, because we want them, and we want them to be safe and well.
This bill tightens and clarifies our animal welfare standards and provides stronger sanctions against those who break the laws maliciously and wilfully rather than those where there is an occasional accident. This will, hopefully, both deter irresponsible behaviour and assist with enforcement. The result of this will be improvement in the lives of pets and other animals across the ACT. The Greens will be supporting this bill plus our amendment.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (11.13): Canberra is a pet-loving community. We love our dogs, our cats, our guinea pigs, rabbits, ferrets, horses et cetera. No-one supports animal cruelty. The Canberra Liberals will be supporting the government’s bill today because it is, at its core, about animal cruelty.
We do have some concerns, which I will address further in comments relating to the amendments that have already been circulated in my name. I will seek leave to move those a bit later, and I will speak in more detail to each of those amendments at the detail stage.
What we are concerned about is overreach, because some clauses in this bill step away from community expectations and might criminalise some common, responsible and humane activities. We do not condone animal cruelty, and I do not know anyone who does. But we know that there have been some terrible, abhorrent cases of animal cruelty, and they must be dealt with very strictly and strongly.
When I was finally briefed by the directorate, it was made clear that the main thrust is to crack down on animal cruelty. The bill updates the ACT’s animal welfare laws. It promotes the welfare of animals, it deters cruelty to animals, and it punishes those who abuse animals. These are things that everyone can get behind and support.
Another key feature of the bill is that it recognises animal sentience. It recognises that animals feel emotion and subjectively perceive the world around them, that animals have an intrinsic value and deserve to be treated with compassion, and that modern animal welfare legislation considers the mental as well as the physical wellbeing of animals.
Anyone who has a pet knows that animals can feel emotion and subjectively perceive the world around them. But the concept of this animal sentience was qualified in the minister’s explanatory statement, which talks about the five animal freedoms. Those freedoms are freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, injury or disease, freedom to express natural behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress.
I must confess that, in some ways, this was something I had to grapple with, because the law and our community have historically treated animals as property, and
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