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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2807 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

Exemptions already exist to allow State-by-State regulation of such things as firearms, fireworks, gaming machines, pornographic material, laws relating to quarantine and laws relating to the protection of plant or animal species from extinction. There are also specific exemptions on environmental grounds. The Beverage Container Act of South Australia, for example, which established the container deposit scheme in that State, is included. A law of Tasmania which regulates the possession or sale or capture of crayfish under a minimum size is also included. The crayfish law was challenged in the High Court as a barrier to interstate trade, but this case was lost. The precedent therefore is already there for a particular State to set its own laws for regulating goods and activities in that State, particularly on environmental grounds or for health and safety reasons, without these laws being a barrier to trade or being anti-competitive. The proposal to ban the sale of battery cage eggs is not anti-competitive, because it does not discriminate between eggs on the basis of the location where they are produced. ACT-produced eggs will be treated equally with eggs from other States.

I want to go over some of the points that other speakers have made in this debate. Mr Humphries talked about the code of practice. He said the code is important and we must not undermine the code as it exists. The code was developed largely by industry for industry. I believe it is essentially about getting blood out of a stone. It is about how we can maximise egg production from hens in a minimum period of time, with minimum care, minimum supervision and minimum respect for their needs. It is about minimum standards with maximum output. I ask the Assembly what century we are living in, what decade we are living in. We are supposed to be a civilised society. Where is our concern for the welfare of the hens?

Mr Humphries is concerned about a price increase as well. Are we seriously going to gloat about the price that these eggs are costed at when the price to the chickens involved in that production is so high? The community has already expressed their outrage at this. Over the years we have seen petitions from some 14,000 people.

Mrs Carnell: Why do they not buy free-range eggs, then?

MS HORODNY: Mrs Carnell asks why they do not buy the other eggs. I will address that in one second. The standards of the community, Mrs Carnell, are changing all the time. We have very different standards in our society today to those we had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. We have different safety standards in cars. We have seat belts in cars now. That is an additional cost to all of us. It is one that we as a society decided was worth bearing because there was a benefit to us. Our standards on occupational health and safety change all the time. Building standards change all the time, Mrs Carnell. These things change. That is why we are here. We are here to legislate for those sorts of changes. We made a decision as a community some 10 to 15 years ago that we would not accept asbestos in buildings. That was an enormous cost to the community. It was an enormous cost to individuals who had to complement the investment that the Government made in their homes by making all sorts of changes to their building. That was a cost that was considered worth it because of the health implications to the community of not making those changes.

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