Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight I would like to pay tribute to the organisation Voiceless, an Australian based animal rights organisation that seeks to increase awareness about reducing unnecessary cruelty to animals. Recently I was fortunate to attend an event at the Sherman Galleries in Sydney where Voiceless announced the awards recipients for their 2006 grants program. Some $145,000 is provided annually by the Voiceless organisation to a whole range of groups and individuals in the community who have put forward proposals for grants of up to $20,000 each—each of which having a common theme of trying to promote greater respect and compassion for animals. It was particularly rewarding to attend the awards ceremony because it gave a reminder of just how many groups of people there are in the community doing all sorts of different things to raise awareness about animal cruelty, to encourage greater compassion and respect towards animals and to make people aware of the easy ways we can improve our behaviour to improve the lot of the non-human animals that we share the planet with.

The range of organisations that received grants was many and varied. Many of them were public education type campaigns, producing and printing booklets and other materials for communicating to the community particular practices that were unnecessarily cruel to animals. Some grants were also for organising conferences to further promote improving the effectiveness of animal welfare legislation in Australia. The whole event was a reminder of just how many people there are working through organisations such as Compassion in World Farming, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, the Vegetarian Society, various animal liberation groups, including the RSPCA of course, a range of academics and many others that are all working in different areas and in different ways trying to reduce animal cruelty.

In the political arena whenever animal welfare issues are raised everybody says that they do not support cruelty to animals and they want to do everything they can to reduce it. It is easy to get nice-sounding words but getting genuine action in that area is a different matter. In the time I have been in this place, which is now close to 10 years, I think the level of interest and commitment in a political sense towards animal welfare issues, if anything, has gone backwards. If you compare the almost total lack of interest and engagement with animal welfare and animal rights issues in any systematic sense in the federal parliament today with the 1980s when we had the Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare that operated for a number of years—a committee that was established by the Democrats and produced some very valuable and ground-breaking reports for their time—it is a disappointment. However, this does not in any way match the views of the wider community where there is a growing level of support for a whole range of different animal welfare organisations.

It was quite ironic that, on the same day that these awards were being announced by the Voiceless organisation, the Treasurer chose to announce a measure purportedly aiming to make it easier for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to take legal action against people who sought to promote boycotts against Australian farming produce, which is particularly modelled and focused on concern about the impact of the boycott that has been promoted for some time towards Australian wool as a protest against the continual mulesing of sheep.