Page 1223 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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I know Mr Stanhope is concerned about the disconnect between consumers’ apparent concern for the welfare of animals, such as chickens, and their tacit endorsement of factory farming through their purchases such as cage eggs. I would like to suggest that the government also consider how it itself perpetuates myths about animal welfare to the general public. How many consumers who are told that the ACT laws protect animal welfare are aware of what really happens in factory farms? The truth about these animal welfare codes is that in many cases they justify the systemic abuse of animals.
As I have said, this bill merely readies the ACT legislation so that it can entrench standards when they are developed at the national level. There are some important points about this approach. Firstly, it means that the ACT will continue to adopt standards being developed through the Primary Industries Ministerial Council. As I have said, these tend to be standards that legitimise existing factory farming practices. By doing this, the ACT will also entrench standards which are lagging well behind many parts of the world.
The ministerial council recently reviewed the pig code, for example. This review largely reinstated the same system of factory farming. It decided to defer phasing out sow stalls for a decade. If sow stalls are in fact phased out in 2017, as scheduled, then Australia will still be 14 years behind the EU. The EU has not allowed new sow stalls to be built since 2003. Are these the kinds of laggard standards the ACT wants to adopt? As an independent territory, we can and should ensure that decent standards of animal welfare are met here.
Secondly, by relying on the national process, we are also deferring to their time lines. The government has tried to sell this bill as leading to improved conditions for chickens in the ACT. Actually, nothing will change for chickens here because we are waiting until the poultry code is reviewed by the ministerial council. I have been advised that currently there is no timetable for a review of the poultry code. Sheep, cattle, horses and goats are all on the list so far, but it will be many years before they even get to reviewing poultry. This is despite the fact that the code was supposed to be reviewed this year. What this means is that, for the quarter of a million chickens in the factory farm in the ACT, nothing will change.
In the meanwhile, as we have just heard, the government has decided to make mandatory some of the elements of the existing poultry code. Unfortunately, as I have said, the existing poultry code is already hopelessly out of date. It is out of touch with the science, it is out of touch with developments in other countries, it does not protect the welfare of poultry and it is out of touch with public sentiment.
Here is one example from the model code that we have now put into ACT regulations. When three or more chickens are kept in a single cage, they must each have a floor area of at least 550 square centimetres. This is in fact less than the area of an A4 sheet of paper. The chickens are permanently confined to this space. Another thing the regulation does is to encode some of the requirements of cage design. For example, cages have to support the “forward pointing” toes of chickens. In fact, these design elements were originally agreed to by the ministerial council back in 1995. So we are getting back to last decade here.
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