Page 4325 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2005
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Because we cannot necessarily capture every stray moggy that gets over the boundary does not mean that we do not have to try to preserve the bush capital that most Canberrans love. It might be a bit of a jolly—fair enough, let us have a bit of a giggle here every now and then; I do not mind that—but, at the same time, this legislation is part of a process of maintaining the bush capital, the bush capital that I like living in, the bush capital where native birds do come to the trees near my place. I hope that they will continue to do so. I am happy to confess that I am not a cat lover. I am not a cat lover because they prey on native animals and birds.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.14): I have hardly been able to contain myself all day in anticipation of this debate. I am glad that Mr Quinlan dragged himself out of his usual catatonic state and had something to say, but he was hardly what you would call a cat on hot bricks over the whole issue. This is a catastrophic piece of legislation. We have here today a coming together of convenience. This issue was raised in the last Assembly by the Greens, which wanted to have a cat exclusion zone.
Mr Quinlan: A good idea.
MRS DUNNE: I actually think that the people of Canberra would be better off if there were a cat exclusion zone in sensitive areas close to nature parks and nature reserves, rather than this cataclysmic piece of legislation we have today. What we are going to do is to create in every backyard an absolutely catastrophic landscape. There is going to be a honeycomb, or could we say a catacomb, of cat enclosures all across Forde and Bonner. It is going to be a visual eyesore, a complete and utter visual eyesore.
In addition to the visual eyesore, we have also had the presumption of the minister with the complete dog and goat act of a media release that went out today headed “Cat containment bill to pass today”. Not even he could contain himself; he had to come out before the legislation was passed. Something might go wrong, minister, and it may not be passed today. I cannot think what, but perhaps Mr Quinlan or Mr Gentleman will cross the floor. Here we have a whole range of issues that are so important in this area that we have created a huge bureaucratic nightmare to address them.
Addressing the impact of cats on native birds is, as Mr Quinlan said, very important, but it could have been addressed in a better way. It could have been addressed by having a cat exclusion zone. If you built a suburb and let people know that if they have a cat they probably would not want to live in this suburb, you would be better off. You would not have the great bureaucratic mess that we have here today. What do we have? We have, as Mr Hargreaves said in his media release trumpeting the great success today, legislation for the compulsory identification of cats by microchipping, a containment area and a compulsory phasing in of microchipping at point of sale for the rest of Canberra over a three-year period.
We have EFTPOS and now we are going to have “MOGPOS”. After every one of them is “MOGPOSed” we could have compulsory CAT scanning of all cats in Canberra. We have the seizure of stray cats—members of my staff wondered whether a seizure of a stray cat was different from any other sort of cat seizure—and we have temporary housing for seized cats, so we now have to have crisis accommodation for seized cats, and then there is the identification of their owners. Does that mean that the cat owners
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