Page 1068 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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issues we need to debunk some of the issues that are brought forward in Ms Le Couteur’s amendments.
The Canberra Liberals will not be supporting Ms Le Couteur’s amendments because they fail the first test of honesty. They do not recognise the events that happened the other day and they do not condemn them. I think it is a bit rich that in paragraph 2(c), for instance, Ms Le Couteur calls on the government to detail all inspections of Parkwood facilities over the last two years, including details as to whether Parkwood complies with all applicable laws and codes of practice. I think the same question could be asked of those people who broke into the facility the other day. I think it is very rich for the Greens, who were so loath to even come across with a mild denunciation of these events, to raise this issue of whether Parkwood complies with the law, when they condone the breaking of the law and they condone the breaking of the law in relation to the CSRIO event, and only after a great deal of time were they forced to come up with a mild denunciation of this event.
We saw a number of things at this event. We know the area where the conveyer belts were broken into and there was a large amount of criminal damage which will affect the economic future of this business. In addition, if the footage that we saw on the web is to be believed and was actually taken on the night, the people who took the video footage were guilty of wide scale animal abuse because they were banging the cages—it is quite clear on the video footage—to get the chickens to react, to get them to squawk, to get them to move around. The chickens are quiet unless someone comes in there and deliberately and disturbs them.
If that video footage was actually taken at Parkwood—and there has been no proof that it was actually taken at Parkwood—the people who broke in there, broke the animal welfare rules by going around there and banging on the cages and disturbing the chickens at night when they would be roosting, need to be condemned and they need to be condemned by everyone in this place.
The Canberra Liberals cannot support the Greens’ amendments here. Apart from the dishonesty, there are clear issues here that require the government to keep money on the table, to continue negotiations to convert to another form and in a way that is not acceptable and that will be of considerable cost to the ACT taxpayers.
There are other issues here which we cannot support which came out in the comments that Ms Le Couteur made the other day. She said, “It doesn’t really have a very big economic impact.” I think the figure that Ms Le Couteur used was that it brings only $3 million of economic benefit to the ACT economy. There is now a dispute as to whether there are 14 or 60 employees. My understanding is that the figure is closer to 60. Yes, some people are contracted for peak times, and some of that is when they depopulate the cages and repopulate them, and there are people who are not full time on the books but there are other people who are contractors. In addition to that, there are people who drive trucks, who transport eggs from the distribution centre around the country.
Quite frankly, it shows a complete lack of understanding of the individual circumstances of people employed to just discount it and say, “Well, that’s $3 million
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