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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (8 April) . . Page.. 654 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

At Ms Horodny's urging, I have been in touch with those organisations that have an interest in animals and plants and that give advice to the Government. I might point out that, of those committees, most members of the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee indicated that they had no problems with the legislation. The only members who expressed reservations about the legislation, and even those were fairly minor ones, were members representing animal welfare groups on the AWA Committee. The rest of the committee expressed no concern about the legislation. The Environment Advisory Committee supported the Bill without comment or qualification, and the Flora and Fauna Committee also supported the thrust of the Bill, although they made the point that it would be nice to have them consulted on individual declarations of pest plants or animals because of the expertise on that committee about individual pest plants and animals. That is a reasonable point of view and I think it would probably occur without needing to be built into legislation; but, if it is the wish of the Assembly to do that, I have no particular problem.

Mr Speaker, the Conservation Council wrote to me just yesterday saying that they are disappointed that there has not been consultation on this Bill. There has been, I gather, a change of director of the Conservation Council and that may explain why the present director is not aware of the consultation that occurred with the former director. My office has had a number of lengthy discussions with the former director of the Conservation Council about this legislation, so the suggestion that there has not been discussion about it with the peak conservation group in the Territory is simply not true.

I can certainly support some of the amendments Ms Horodny has put forward. I think they are acceptable. I think in some cases they are actually superfluous, but I do not have a strong objection to them and I intend to support them. There are other amendments which I would argue are not appropriate at this time. I would hope that the Opposition, in the absence of hearing from the Government, has not formed any firm view about what it should do with those amendments, which are quite significant to the operation of property agreements in rural areas of the Territory for issuing of rural leases and quite significant for the regime for declaring pest animals and plants.

In particular, I point out that the requirement to develop a code of practice under the Animal Welfare Act to be in place before a declaration of a pest animal can be made may sound to be a sensible provision but it has the effect of potentially extensively delaying a declaration about a pest animal for quite some time while a code of practice is being developed. Mr Wood, who I think originally introduced the animal welfare legislation in the Territory, would recall that codes of practice are processes which take quite some time to develop. It takes usually in the order of a year to get them right.

Mr Wood: You lot did not recognise that at the time.

MR HUMPHRIES: On the contrary, we were not keen on those codes at all to some extent, but we recognise that when they had to be developed they took some time to develop. If you have a pest animal or possibly even a pest plant which turns up quite suddenly in the Territory, you do not want to wait a year before you are able to declare it as a pest plant or pest animal. I know there has recently been a reappearance - admittedly, it is a reappearance rather than an appearance for the first time - of what

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