Page 1067 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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For more than 24 hours after the serious damage to the egg farm, Le Couteur and Rattenbury—
I am quoting Mr Downie; I am not being unparliamentary—
obfuscated when asked if they condemned this violence. Indeed, initially Le Couteur took the opportunity to advance her opposition to battery hens. That is a perfectly defensible position and one which the Greens have the right to prosecute. However, our democracy does not give vandals (let’s not minimise their crime by calling them activists) the right to break and enter and damage property. Claiming to support the welfare of animals, the person or people who broke into the egg farm last week as finally acknowledged by Le Couteur and Rattenbury, endangered hens. But it took more than 24 hours, perhaps coincidentally shortly after I asked the Greens office whether they supported or opposed the vandalism at the chook farm and last year at the CSIRO, for a media statement in which Le Couteur opined, “Based on the details coming through, this appears to be a destructive and dangerous incident, which we condemn.”
It was interesting, Mr Speaker, to see the conflagration that was caused by this last week and the reluctance of you and your colleagues to condemn this. I did notice when it was reported on the ABC that you were reported as condemning the use of battery acid in this incident of vandalism but not the incident of vandalism itself. I find it spectacularly breathtaking that in the week after this incident the members of the Labor Party and the members of the Greens cannot bring themselves in this place to categorically and unequivocally condemn the actions.
Ms Porter has set the scene, but she could not actually mention the elephant in the room. Ms Le Couteur, for all her activism in this place and in this space about egg farming, is so transfixed by the idea that somebody is talking about animal welfare that she just glides over the implications of what happened at Parkwood the other day.
I have visited the Parkwood establishment, I have been through the biosecurity and I have visited the cages. I would say that I was not very keen at the idea, but I thought it was my duty and my responsibility to do that, and I was stunned that what I expected to see was not there. The overall impression you get when you go into a very large barn with a large number of chickens is how quiet it is. I come off a farm so I know these things: if animals are distressed they are not productive. If chickens are distressed they do not lay eggs. If chickens are distressed they make an awful lot of noise. And it was very interesting when I went into the barn at the time that I visited how quiet it was. There were half a dozen people there and we there for five or so minutes, maybe 10. Gradually the level of noise in the barn increased as more chooks started to make noise. The representative from Pace Farm said: “It’s getting too noisy in here. The chooks are starting to get upset. We need you to leave.
It was a really startling experience to go in and (a) see how clean it was and (b) hear how quiet it was. And these are great indicators from an animal husbandry point of view of whether or not the animals are distressed and therefore whether or not they are productive layers. Quite frankly, no farmer is going to put their livestock in a position where they are not productive. Chickens will go off the lay very easily if they are distressed. So I think that while we need to be mindful of the animal welfare
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