Page 1477 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 11 August 1992
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Enforce new social standards on circuses. Say that we as a community now insist that we have larger cages for animals and more exercise time and better conditions for those animals. But do not say that the circuses must, by virtue of their very existence, be cruel to animals. Say how they are cruel and enforce those standards.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (9.55): Madam Speaker, I wish to rise briefly in this debate to make a couple of general points and then to respond to a rather more technical argument about definitions. I must say at the outset that when Mr Lamont argued in the Labor Cabinet the case for his amendments he certainly convinced me in my head, but it took the Liberal Party stunt to convince me in my heart that what we were doing was right. I went out and saw those elephants in that semitrailer. Mr Berry and I were having lunch over our papers up on the fifth floor. We saw that semitrailer down there and we went down to have a look. When I saw those elephants, shackled, hobbled, in close confinement, up to their fetlocks in faeces, weeping and moving from side to side, Madam Speaker, I was distressed, and I thought - - -
Mr De Domenico: So were the elephants, Mr Connolly.
MR CONNOLLY: Indeed!
Mr De Domenico: When they saw you, they were distressed.
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, Mr De Domenico makes my point. As I said to the media at the time, the elephants made the point far more eloquently than I ever could. I heard Ms Szuty, in her remarks earlier on, refer to the dignified and awesome sight of an elephant. She was referring to seeing them perform.
Madam Speaker, it was pitiful, in my view, to see these dignified, awesome animals hobbled, in close confinement in the back of a truck, up to their fetlocks in faeces. These pitiful local politicians were running a publicity stunt around them. A candidate, a would-be member for Canberra, was running around, doing stunts, feeding them food, to get a bit of cheap publicity for a Federal election campaign. It was a pathetic exercise; but it certainly convinced me, in my heart, of what Mr Lamont had already convinced me in my head, namely, that we as a society can do better than to tolerate that sort of thing with - again to borrow Ms Szuty's quite appropriate words - dignified awesome animals like those elephants. So, Madam Speaker, I believe that what is being proposed in this substantive amendment is a forward step for our society and that we as a society can do better than to hobble these animals and display them for amusement.
Having said that, I want now to move into a more technical argument which Mr Wood foreshadowed. It has been proposed by the Opposition that we should expand upon the definition of cruelty. It is proposed to move a very extensive one-page expansion of what we mean by cruelty. As Mr Wood said, the Liberal Party regularly calls for simple legislation, and my friend Mr Humphries regularly says, "Let us have simple legislation; let us not have technicalities; let us put it in plain English". That is a very sensible call from any spokesperson on legal matters. What this Bill proposes to do is to simply create an offence of cruelty and, in effect, leave it to the courts to define cruelty in the circumstances, because cruelty, generally speaking, is a term that is capable of understanding
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