Page 403 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 1993
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2. REVERSAL OF THE ONUS OF PROOF
Clause 8 (i) of the Bill provides:
"A person shall not, without reasonable excuse, deliberately cause an animal unnecessary pain.
Penalty $10,000.00 or imprisonment for one year, or both".
This Clause is expressed so widely that it opens up a Pandora's box for the racing industry.
This is the spokesman for the racing industry talking.
Mr De Domenico: The chairman of the racing club - and at that stage the chairman of the TAB, too.
MR STEVENSON: Indeed he is, and was, Mr De Domenico. He said:
That pain is caused to racehorses daily is undeniable. Whether such pain is excessive or unnecessary should be a matter for the prosecution to prove. It should not be for the defendant to have to show that he had a "reasonable excuse" for inflicting the pain.
Again, jockeys, trainers, strappers, barrier attendants, float drivers and farriers are all put at risk of prosecution and thereafter forced to prove, in their own defence, that they had a reasonable excuse.
Section 20 provides that it is a defence to a prosecution for an offence under this Part that the conduct was conducted in accordance with an approved code of practice.
This again reverses the onus of proof. In addition the Bill will become law before any code of practice for the racing industry is even drafted.
This is untenable.
Members in the Liberal Party and I raised the matter that the Act would say farewell to the horseracing industry in the ACT unless amendments were made. We said that it was not good enough that at some time in the future there would be a code of practice that handled the problem. I must admit that after a couple of days and bringing up the matter again and again I thought we had an agreement that the Bill would not be gazetted until after the code of practice - in other words, the code governing the industry under the laws being introduced by the Act - was formulated.
It was much to my surprise that only this year did I realise that the gazettal had gone through almost immediately. The Bill was passed in August and gazetted in September. I could not believe that the horseracing Minister and other members in this Assembly had introduced a law that made horseracing illegal without introducing the code of practice beforehand. Is this good legislation? Is this the way that legislators should operate in this or any other parliament, or is this absolutely bizarre? It will be interesting to hear the comments of the Attorney-General, supposedly the senior lawman in the Territory, who should
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