Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to acknowledge that we are speaking to this bill in our role as the voice for animals in Tasmania and as the voice for all Tasmanians who care about the welfare of animals.
Mr Winter is correct that the Greens, Labor and the Liberal Party have fundamentally different positions when it comes to supporting the racing industry in Tasmania – horses, harness racing and greyhounds – but we approach this bill in the spirit of trying to improve the lives of animals living in Tasmania. Currently too many of them are treated with cruelty and neglect, treated as necessary wastage of an industry which is set up for profit and exists only because it is funded by Tasmanian taxpayers. In that spirit, we are looking at opportunities to do everything we can to improve the lives of animals. We have had, leading up to this bill, over the last five years in particular, in the last 10 years, a succession of extreme acts of neglect, animal welfare abuse, race fixing, team driving, all manner of integrity problems in the horse racing and greyhound racing industries. What we are seeing is a successive failure from the Office of Racing Integrity, and Tasracing, and successive Liberal racing ministers, to do anything about it.
We have seen big industry trainers get bigger – Ben Yole and Anthony Bullock, in the horse racing and greyhound racing industries. We have seen smaller industry trainers and racers increasingly get pushed out and sidelined. We have, repeatedly, seen animal cruelty – documented only by animal activists and put into the media by good-hearted journalists who have followed the details of stories – replete in the way this industry has been managed under the Liberals and the Labor governments for decades now.
This bill could be an opportunity for genuine reform, but I have to say, the Greens are deeply concerned that it is just tinkering around the edges and is not doing the job that it purports to do. After all the hoo-ha and big talk, we are deeply concerned that what we are going to end up with is a system that is – quite possibly in some respects – worse when it comes to integrity and, at least, no better when it comes to animal welfare standards.
We have grave concerns about the capacity of an integrity body to function to protect animal welfare when it is located within Tasracing, which has as its CEO, Mr Andrew Jenkins, who previously referred to welfare advocates as a selfish minority and who has also refused to meet with greyhound welfare advocates because of their opposition to the industry.
How can how can Tasracing, under the leadership of Mr Jenkins, possibly change their attitude? How can a minister and the government possibly have any confidence that that would happen when you have a CEO like this – who so disrespects the animal activist community and animal welfare community that he refuses to meet them and he belittles them?
This is the person on whose shoulders rests the responsibility, according to the act, for implementing, monitoring and coordinating compliance with animal welfare standards and integrity standards, including training of people to those standards. This is the man, under whose leadership the Tasmania Racing Integrity Unit will now lie with the stewards, the racing officials and the veterinarians, and all the other people who are responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the racing industry and ensuring, as they ought to, that it is done with the best animal welfare standards in the world – which are not the ones that we have in Tasmania – and with full transparency and openness.
We do not have confidence that that is possible. What we have is the fox in charge of the chickens; and now, the chickens have moved from the Office of Racing Integrity- which was manifestly problematic, and I will go into that- and come in under the welcoming arm of Mr Jenkins and the Tasracing culture, which has been toxic for animals and their care.
This bill is regulated first and foremost to promote, to develop, and to market the racing industry; to attract sponsorship; to make money. That is the job of the bill, at the first start; and it is wholly at odds with protecting the animals that the industry uses to make money. We know that too often, those animals – greyhounds, racehorses – suffer, and live and die a life of pain and in mental distress.
Before I continue, I thank and acknowledge the people who have got this bill to being here today. In its inadequate, manifestly not appropriate standards place that it is, in terms of animal warfare, it is here on the back of the relentless activism and advocacy of Animal Liberation Tasmania; Let Greyhounds Run Free; Grey2K USA, the RSPCA; GREAT;[?Greyt Greys Rescue? 4:01:16] and the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds.
It is also here with the huge support of the fight for justice and the true welfare for animals in Tasmania, all animals domesticated and those that are used for industries to make profit, native animals – these people care deeply, and they are the majority of Tasmanians.
The majority of Tasmanians want to have animals living without neglect – not living in pain – and living their happy best lives. The majority of Tasmanians – including the 13,500 people who signed the largest ever E‑petition that has been tabled in this parliament – want to end the subsidising of the greyhound racing industry. We know from the statistically significant independent poll of Tasmanians that was done, that more than 75 per cent of Tasmanians want to end our public funding being funnelled into an industry which is predicated on misery of animals.
We know that we are speaking not just as a voice for animals, but on behalf of the majority of Tasmanians who want to end the public funding to the racing industry and want to have true animal welfare conditions enacted in law in Tasmania.
As the bill stands, it has been designed to make sure that animal welfare issues are deprioritised and that they are subservient to the priority – which is that the industry needs to function to make money and to attract sponsorship. That is very clearly written and it is pretty clear in Tasmania Racing’s functions, which are about promoting the Tasmanian racing industry locally, nationally and internationally and promoting the development of an efficient and effective racing industry. We are appalled that the word ‘humane’ is not there, upfront, under the general functions of Tasracing. It is very clear that it is an industry which sees and uses animals as wastage in order to get efficient profit making and effective racing conditions for racing industry proponents.
Other functions, under section 59, are to attract sponsorship income and to assist racing clubs with the promotion and marketing of race meetings. This is clearly about making money. We have raised these concerns previously in the Greens’ submission that we made to the Murrihy Review in May last year.
We made the point about the double standards, the inconsistent treatment by the Office of Racing Integrity at the time, of industry participants and the casual regard that ORI has for animal welfare. That was shown up when harness racer, Gavin Kelly, challenged the steward’s insistence that he had to carry a whip and he had to use it to whip animals, which he believed was unnecessary. He was fined $1000 in 2020, after a steward’s investigation, but last year the stewards’ inquiry fined Sarah and Mel Cotton $400, suspended on condition of no similar incidents over the next two years for repeatedly beating a thoroughbred horse with a PVC pipe. You can see here that the standards are utterly different. When it comes to a harness racer refusing to beat his horse to drive the horse faster to potentially make a buck, that gets a big fine, but animal abuse such as beating a horse with a pipe, repeatedly gets a slap on the hand.
The industry has a huge paper trail of failures to do anything about clear breaches of the Animal Welfare Act and the rules of racing in Tasmania have long been wholly insufficient. We have seen that with the failure to step in and enforce penalties when there have been breaches.
Nearly a quarter of this bill, 60 pages, is devoted entirely to regulations about betting, yet we do not have anything like that or any commitment from the Liberal government that they will have the same level of attentiveness to fixing up the Animal Welfare Act and the regulations based on that act, which are wholly insufficient for protecting animals.
This bill is substantially based around the Monteith review’s recommendations. Mr Monteith did a review and we made a submission to that review in January 2022. I think the government’s language in media releases around this bill are that all the recommendations from the Monteith review have been supported, as if that shows that there has been a dedicated commitment on the part of the government to do everything that needs to be done and can be done in this space. That is not true. We want to put on record what happened around the Monteith review so that people who are watching understand that this bill is based on shaky foundations. The terms of reference were limited and misdirected. We have serious concerns that we raised at the beginning about the review’s consultation process and the discussion paper and how it set in train at the beginning a particular model which obviously suits the industry but does not suit people concerned about animal welfare.
One of the things the review did not do in the supporting documents was to explain to people why it was being established in the first place. We need to remember that it was because of the specific allegation that the acting general manager requested a fine to be withdrawn and deleted from the Office of Racing Integrity systems and that was a bad thing. There was also a range of allegations relating to the office’s dysfunction and the low morale of staff.
The culture at the time showed that the behaviour of some industry participants has been overlooked and the government is generally unwilling to be open and fairly acknowledge or be critical of the poor culture that exists in the industry, so to start off a report and not to put it in context told us quite a bit. It was followed up with a discussion paper which was concerning because it proposed a model for how the industry should be established before any consultation had taken place. That is not genuine consultation. Instead, it is a process that is designed to quickly bury the criticism that was exploding about the failure of the integrity functions of the industry and to establish a new framework that the racing industry was comfortable with, rather than establishing a framework that would meet community expectations.
The Monteith review discussion paper also did not mention the Joint Select Committee on Greyhound Racing in Tasmania that was established by the Greens. It was a fundamental inquiry and made a huge raft of recommendations, many of which have yet to be implemented. It was a consultation paper, a discussion paper, that was largely informed by racing industry participants.
We were also concerned that the principles outlining the discussion paper and the formation of the regulatory model which we have now in this bill was to separate the commercial and integrity functions of racing industry regulation. That at its fundamental basis is a misdirection for the Monteith review, because an integrity body should never be considered as part of an industry, it must be a check on the industry, and one of the faults of this bill is that the integrity committee is not an utterly separate committee and it is tied inextricably to Tasracing and also to the minister.
The Monteith review looked at the proposed powers and functions of the integrity body and the proposed principles for the framework of a better integrity body include compliance and enforcement functions. We raised the point very strongly that for an integrity body to be effective, it has to have its own compliance and enforcement capabilities. Our comments did not appear in the discussion paper or in the second discussion paper, and they do not appear in the bill before us. What we have in the bill is a functionally toothless integrity body without the powers it needs to provide serious sanctions on industry participants who violate rules and animal welfare standards.
The functions of the commissioner, clause 9, allows it to make standards and also allows it to conduct audits and reviews to investigate allegations that have been made relating to integrity in racing and animal welfare; to conduct own-motion investigations and inquiries, including into integrity, animal welfare and systemic issues in racing and subclause (f) says:
If appropriate, refer matters to a public authority, the Commissioner of Police, the DPP, or any other person that the commissioner considers appropriate. [TBC]
We do not consider these to be sufficient enforcement powers. Referring matters to a body such as the police, the DPP or the RSPCA, for example, which is wildly under‑resourced already to be able to do its work, is not a sufficient response. It clearly needs to have powers to be able to bring penalties for the breaches of standards of animal welfare, and other standards of integrity that have been breached. Without that, there is nothing in the bill as it stands that we can see that gives us confidence that there will be a genuine capacity for industry players like Mr Bullock and Mr Yole, who are both out there again racing, doing their thing – how long has it been, a decade? I think it was more than a decade that Anthony Bullock did not have a dog kennel licence. Whoops. He was allowed to train and to house animals without having a kennel licence, and that was just let slide. After animal welfare advocates pushed, this was not something that was recognised and dealt with immediately. He was allowed to continue operating without a dog kennel licence.
This is the culture that exists in the Tasracing industry in Tasmania. It has existed for decades. We do not see anything in this bill that gives us confidence that that is going to change. A major reason for that is that, as it stands, animals in the racing industry in Tasmania are bred, and a large proportion of those animals are bred to be wasted. Just a small number of them are raced. Many of them live in pitiable conditions, and we have seen the video footage that has been taken. There is nothing substantial that gives us confidence that the way animals have been exploited for profit and industry growth so far will be changed, and that there will be future actions to prevent the recurrence of some of the grossest animal welfare abuses we have seen in recent years.
Madam Speaker, I do not have much longer now and I will say more of these things in the bill when it goes into the Committee stage, because we want to go to the Committee stage. So much of this bill rests on standards that are created by the commissioner. These in themselves rely on section 53, part 4 [TBC] – the Making of Standards by the Commissioner for Animal Welfare – that is based on animal welfare guidelines issued under the Animal Welfare Act 1993.
Under Tasracing, we have a Tasracing Greyhound Animal Welfare Manual that starts with some poppycock about man and dogs having lived together successfully for the past 6,000 years, and says that there is a long history of racing greyhounds both in Australia and internationally. This is a garbage manual that certainly does not protect dogs that live at Mr Bullock’s property, that live on concrete floors in the middle of winter, that go outside onto dirt ground and that chew their beds. We have seen the footage; we have seen no action; and there he is, back again, racing.
The standards are also based on the Animal Welfare Act that the Greens spoke long and strongly to try to amend. It had been nine years, and none of the Animal Welfare Advisory Commission Committee’s recommendations from 2013 have been adopted by this government. When the government brought an animal welfare amendment bill to parliament in 2022, we sought to amend it with important and germane amendments which are also germane to this bill: amendments inserting a definition of pain or suffering that includes distress, mental suffering and the physical suffering of an animal. It is critical that we recognise the sentience of all beings. The Liberal Party has refused to do this repeatedly, and it will be something that will continue under this government, through this bill, when we have a commissioner who is working to such a substandard piece of legislation.
Also, the Animal Welfare Act, which the animal welfare standards will largely draw from, is not required to take into account current animal welfare science. It does not have an offence for aiding and abetting cruelty or neglect. It does not have standards for the care and management of dogs regarding the regulation of puppy sales. It does not have provisions to make an offence for breeding to excess. It does not, as it stands, look after animals and care for animals that ought to be able to live their best lives.
The Liberal government has failed to make the changes that are based on science and community expectations, and which other jurisdictions have brought in – things like recognition of animal sentience. The ACT has done that. Other places have done that. The Victorian government has flagged that it will do that, and the Western Australian government has done that.
We are concerned that the bill as it stands is based on making standards that are tied to the Animal Welfare Act, and, given the structure of the bill as it has been created, we are concerned where that is going to lead, which is nowhere good for animals.
A question for the minister: What is going to actually change under this act for animal activists and animal advocates who are trying to get information, as they do at the moment, from the Office of Racing Integrity? Who would they approach? Would they approach the Tasracing Integrity Unit or the commissioner? How much information will they be provided with? Will they get more information than they currently do, which is not very much? Will it be more open and transparent? Or will there be less information released to the public and less information released to welfare advocates? Who would they ask about the disappearance of a greyhound? Who would they ask if they wanted to know whether a greyhound died at a track or after leaving the track because of an injury? Why is this information not available in real time to the public? Why do animal advocates have to go seeking this information?
The greyhound racing industry and the horse racing industry are both fundamentally paid for by the public purse at about $58 per capita in Tasmania every year – $30 million. It is a government business that is a loss‑making entity. We pay for that, and it is based on cruelty, neglect and abuse. I do not see enough in this bill to give me confidence, or the people I am speaking on behalf of, or the animals that suffer and die on the track and in their kennels, that anything is going to change.
The people of Tasmania want change. They want to end the funding of the greyhound racing industry. They want to make sure that all animals are loved and cared for. The Greens have a number of amendments that we will be moving and a whole bunch of questions to ask when we get into the Committee stage of the bill.
