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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4400 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

Under the regulations, the ethics committees are currently composed of four categories of members - veterinarians, scientists, animal welfarists and independent persons. The committee members are appointed by the licensee, so they tend to include employees of the institution or fellow researchers. It has been an ongoing concern to animal welfare groups that their representation on these committees has been fairly tokenistic. They have had little influence on decisions made by the committees because they have never had the numbers on individual committees, and decisions are by majority rule.

This Bill, therefore, overhauls the provisions in the Animal Welfare Regulations and the Act relating to animal experimentation ethics committees to give greater recognition to animal welfare concerns. My Bill changes the composition of these committees so that the membership of these committees must comprise equal numbers of the current four membership categories, plus a chairperson who is not directly involved in research or teaching using animals.

The other major reform is that the Bill changes the way that decisions on the approval or variation of research or teaching programs are taken. Such decisions will now have to be made by the consensus of all members of the committee, rather than by majority vote as at present. The criteria for approving programs have also been amended to explicitly mention that the objective of the program must be to improve human or animal welfare and that the program will not cause unreasonable pain to any animal.

The Bill also requires the committee to undertake annual inspections of research or teaching programs and increases the penalty for licensees who undertake unapproved programs from $1,000 to $5,000. A number of amendments consequential upon the change in the composition of the committee relate to the appointment of a deputy chairperson and the quorum for the committee.

Let me point out that this Bill is not about stopping animal experimentation. I must accept that some experimentation on animals has been useful in the past in advancing scientific knowledge. I believe, however, that the need for animal experimentation is rapidly diminishing over time, due to advances in research technologies. The use of animals in teaching is also not really necessary, given that it is relatively easy to replace teaching experiments with models or video- or computer-based simulation.

What this Bill does is put more pressure on researchers to argue that the potential benefits of their research justify the use of animals and that the impact on the animals is minimised. I do not expect that the Bill will cause ethics committees to become bogged down in endless arguments over the ethics of animal experimentation. This has not been the case so far. The role of the ethics committees is already set out in the Act and regulations, and the Act already allows the use of animals for scientific purposes. Appointees to ethics committees in the past have treated their job with the appropriate seriousness and respect for the legitimate research and teaching interests of the institution.

The committees are usually more concerned about examining whether any alternatives exist to the proposed animal experimentation and, if not, minimising the pain and distress suffered by animals and improving general standards of animal care and housing in the institution. The introduction of consensus decision-making on committees is also not unusual, because in some cases committees already attempt to get agreement from all

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