Page 1564 - Week 05 - Thursday, 7 April 2005

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The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the negative.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clauses 2 to 32, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Clause 33.

MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.23): I will be opposing this clause. This is the clause in the bill that deals with the blanket prohibition on live vaccines. The Chief Minister is correct in saying there has been considerable promptness in answering my inquiries. But the problem is that I am working through a mediator. The way things work at the moment is that I ask questions of an adviser in Mr Stanhope’s office who knows about as much as I do about animal diseases and their treatment and there is a sort of backwards and forwards and then he goes away and asks somebody else some questions and sends me an email.

On two occasions, including last night, I asked for a meeting with the government vet so that I could discuss this and so that I am not put in this position of opposing what seems to be a needless implementation in this clause. As yet, I have not been allowed, afforded, a meeting with the government vet. The Chief Minister’s office has been accommodating up to a point, and this is the principal sticking point with all of the interest groups. I will just quote from what has been sent to me by a representative of the Cattle Council:

While it does not appear at this time that there would be any interference on the use of the registered vet products I can reiterate the Cattle Council’s view that the APVMA—

the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority—

needs to be the final arbiter of product registration and regulations, and that State or Territory regulations should accommodate that.

What we actually see here in this clause, which I am opposing, is that it makes it an offence for any person to use essentially a live vaccine on an animal which has an exotic or endemic disease. But this can be overridden by a bureaucrat in the ACT bureaucracy somewhere, presumably in the Chief Minister’s Department. My concern is that the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, the national animal health organisation and the registered veterinary plans for dealing with exotic diseases already address whether or not we should use live vaccines, or a whole range of other things.

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