Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to 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.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is a disgraceful campaign.

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

We hear from the minister in the chamber that it is a disgraceful campaign. The Treasurer himself strongly criticised one of the organisations PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling their campaign ‘ignorant’ and saying that farmers should have the right to pursue compensation for any losses. Australian Wool Innovation, AWI, has not only been pursuing PETA, which is the organisation that everybody focuses on because it is easy to attack them—it is an American organisation, and in this case the government and industry are happy to attack American organisations—but attacking Australians as well. It is dragging ordinary Australian activists through the courts, using the legal process to try to intimidate and silence them from expressing their view.

It is concerning enough that an industry body should seek to attack and silence Australians who simply seek to express their own personal view about opposition to a particular practice. Some people may want to keep pursuing and promoting that practice; other people believe it is unnecessary and it is cruel. I think they are entitled to express their opinion. But apparently not in Mr Costello’s brave new world. Not only is it okay for the industry to use its taxpayer supplied so-called research funds to try to silence people but also the Treasurer now wants to use—or misuse, I would say—the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to have fully taxpayer funded legal action to try to silence anybody that seeks that put forward their view about a practice that they believe is unnecessarily cruel.

Mr Costello, in what is becoming a fairly common practice for this government, engages in the completely misleading sophistry of saying, ‘This is not an attack on freedom of speech. People can still say what they like.’ They can be as so-called ignorant as they like. But, of course, after having said what they like, they run the risk of the taxpayer funded Australian Competition and Consumer Commission being sooled on to them to try to silence them and to try to have the industry hitting them up for economic damages. This might be understandable if people were going in and stealing product, breaking machinery or anything like that—there may then be grounds for court action—but when consumers simply say, ‘I don’t support this particular practice; I think it is unethical and, if you agree with me, don’t buy the product of that practice,’ they run the risk of having a body that is supposedly set up to protect consumers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, attempt to silence them. The Treasurer wants to use that body that is meant to protect consumers against unethical conduct by businesses to silence those people. That is what the Treasurer wants to do.

The simple fact is that mulesing is cruel and there is any amount of evidence that demonstrates that. I know some argue that it is necessary, but it is clearly cruel. There are alternatives to mulesing that exist already, but they are more expensive. So, understandably, from purely an economic point of view, some in the industry do not wish to use them. The irony is that the industry is still committed to phasing out mulesing by 2010—a clear indication that they acknowledge that it is a practice we would be better off without. The only reason that they adopted that commitment to phase out mulesing by 2010 is the very campaign that people like Senator Abetz want to say is disgraceful. If these people had not spoken out and said, ‘We think this is unacceptable,’ the industry would not have acted at all. Yet somehow or other, because they have done so, Australians are being dragged through the courts and now the Treasurer wants to come in and display this grotesque abuse of power by trying to use a consumer protection organisation that is taxpayer funded to drag them through the courts. There is no difference between this campaign and campaigns from the past.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s the way they do it.

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

You can stand up in favour of using taxpayers’ money to silence people’s right of free speech as much as you like, Senator Abetz. Frankly, if the wool industry genuinely supports this sort of activity—antidemocratic measures which use the power of the state to muzzle free speech and protect businesses against people voicing their concerns about particular practices—they deserve to be boycotted, not for animal cruelty but for supporting the misuse of power by the state and antidemocratic powers. This sort of campaign is no different from the dolphin-free tuna campaign or campaigns against battery eggs or ivory products or even campaigns for GE-free food. (Time expired)