Page 3930 - Week 12 - Thursday, 20 October 2005
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the animal welfare amendments. Both the RSPCA and Animal Liberation notified my office that the amendments had not been talked about for years and that they had not been approached with the latest drafts for their opinions.
In addition, the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, which would normally provide this sort of advice in a more efficient form and which includes members of the RSPCA and Animal Liberation ACT, apparently has not met since December last year, which is in quite stark contrast to the monthly meetings that the relevant department has held with it in the past. The apparent reason for this is that the chair stepped down in February and, despite its having been nine months now, the government is yet to appoint a new chair. A recent member of AWAC stated:
ACT’s AWAC has been an extremely energetic and productive advisory committee since it was established under the (Animal Welfare) Act in 1992, producing numerous Codes of Practice and other advice to government. The fact that we haven’t met since February—
I think the member meant December—
has meant, among other things, that we have no idea what has happened to our amendments to the Act. More generally, it means the Government has had no advice from the statutory committee from which it is supposed to seek such advice to inform it of the implications of any of its decision making, in any area, on animal welfare.
I would appreciate it if the Minister for the Environment would follow up for me why it is taking so long for an AWAC chair to be appointed and when it will next meet, as I believe that it is a worthy committee providing useful advice to the government. Please note that the RSPCA and Animal Liberation ACT are eagerly awaiting the Chief Minister’s response.
Following on from these strict liability offences and public acceptance issues is the concern about human rights. Noting that the Attorney-General has issued a declaration of compatibility for this bill with our Human Rights Act, I still question how the nine strict liability offences with heavy penalties can be justified in human rights terms. This has been a matter of debate within the scrutiny of bills report on the bill. Although the government says that it is very difficult to justify every single strict liability offence in the bill, as there are so many, it is yet to justify each of those offences that carry penalties of imprisonment or fines of more than $6,000.
Scrutiny of bills report No 19 states that the penalties of imprisonment for strict liability offences may be found by the courts to be incompatible with human rights and, as such, they should be justified in terms of section 28 of the Human Rights Act, which provides that “human rights may be subject only to reasonable limits set by territory laws that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”.
In closing, I note that the other main issue with this bill that does appear to have been appropriately dealt with by the government is that of the defences available to strict liability offences and, as such, I feel no need to go into this area. Due to these concerns about the ad hoc nature of strict liability offences being created in our legislation, and the varying and sometimes extreme penalties, I will be moving shortly for the bill to be
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