Page 4087 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 16 Sept 2009
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MRS DUNNE: You may not like it, but they are less likely to predate one another and they are less likely to be predated on by other species. Every type of egg production has its pluses and its minuses, whether it is cage production or other types of production.
Mr Stanhope made an interesting point in his speech. He said that, while a large proportion of people say that they do not support cage egg production when they are surveyed on this, they go into the supermarket week after week and support cage egg production with their pocketbooks. More than 70 per cent of people in the ACT and across the country purchase cage produced eggs.
It was very interesting to listen to talkback a few weeks ago when there was a bit of brouhaha about what Woolworths was and was not doing in relation to cage egg production. People rang commercial radio stations, especially in Sydney, and said, “I’m sick of being made to feel guilty for my consumer choice.” Elderly people in particular buy eggs because it is a cheap source of protein. People on pensions do not have the luxury of saying, “Will I buy the macrobiotic?” They buy the no-name, no-brand cage eggs because they are substantially cheaper than the flash, free-range produced ones that people like us in here might choose to buy instead.
We cannot go about cutting off the options of people who are less well off than we are, and this is what this bill aims to do. It will not actually achieve it, but that is what it aims to do. The thing is that if we outlaw the selling of cage eggs in the ACT, the same thing would happen here as happened in Sweden when they outlawed it there. There was a bit of an increase in the amount of free-range and barn eggs produced in Sweden, but most of the eggs sold in Sweden came from Romania and Spain where the birds were raised in cages and the animal welfare conditions were much worse than they were in Sweden. The net result was a negative for the birds. That is why we do not think it is reasonable to have a ban.
In addition to that, the second plank of this bill is a legislative requirement that the responsible minister—in this case, the Chief Minister—take up an advocacy position. I do acknowledge that Mr Stanhope in his role as the minister with responsibility for agriculture, and previously Mr Smyth in his role as minister for agriculture, have advocated for changes in relation to animal welfare in relation to cage eggs. I think that they have done a good job and I congratulate them on it, but I do not think that it is appropriate to have a legislative plank that requires such a thing.
The Chief Minister is already doing it and he has undertaken to do it again. If the Assembly thinks that this is important, the appropriate course would be for us to pass a motion in this place calling upon him to do it and to report back on a regular basis. But this legislative provision is inappropriate.
Moving on to the signage, we oppose the signage because it is so selective and it is so discriminatory. The signage the Greens have put forward in relation to egg production in the ACT is absolutely wrong. It only addresses cage egg production. It does not look at the pluses and minuses of egg production by way of barns or by way of free-range egg production.
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