Andrew spoke in Parliament about the need for better animal welfare protections and a national Independent Office of Animal Welfare. You can watch or read his speech below.
“Animal welfare is one of the issues that I’ve spoken about most often in this place, and it’s the one issue that’s most consistently generated the biggest feedback from the community. No wonder one of the biggest highlights of my parliamentary career will forever be the passage of the legislation to finally set an end date for the cruel live sheep export industry.
So good on the Albanese Government for delivering that and also for including $42.5 million of transitional industry assistance in this week’s budget for the phase-out which includes funding for onshore processing capacity.
But sadly, this is a rare bright spot amongst the animal welfare crisis in this country. For instance, there’s still the puppy mills and the kitten factories: intensive industrial facilities which treat animals as nothing more than breeding machines from which to profit at the expense of health and welfare.
Obviously, these need to be banned. In the racing industries, too, cruelty remains commonplace. For example, in horse racing, there’s the urgent need to ban the steeple chase, which is still legal in Victoria despite its shocking cruelty. And the use of the whip, I’d add, which is outlawed in some countries as well in as well as in some jurisdictions in the United States.
I’ve also been a consistent advocate over many years to finally end greyhound racing because the only way to end the systemic cruelty in that industry is to, in fact, end the industry.
To its credit here, the Tasmanian Liberal Government is seeking to progress legislation to that effect, despite the Labor opposition doing everything it can to thwart the ban.
Fancy that! The one issue the Tasmanian Labor Party has decided to differentiate themselves from the Liberal government on, is that they’ll stand up for unconscionable and unpopular industrial-scale animal cruelty. No wonder no one votes for them anymore.
Meanwhile, on the farm, there’s a lot of very decent farmers and animal breeders, but there’s simply no conceivable way to justify practices like caged eggs, nor so-called free-range chickens at 10,000 birds to the hectare and the continued use of sow stalls and racks. That’s appalling.
You know, a couple of themes run through these matters. Firstly, that there is often a fundamental tension between the pursuit of profit and animal welfare. that self-regulation doesn’t work and that the worst combination is gambling and animals.
One part of the solution is of course better animal welfare protections because state and territory governments have shown time and time again that they simply can’t be trusted in this space.
And to that end, and in closing, I call again for a national Independent Office of Animal Welfare.”