Beaumont Carol: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Procedure In Committee 
Beaumont Carol: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Procedure In Committee 
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CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to rise and speak on the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill. I spoke in its first reading and acknowledged Simon Bridges’ work. I do so again and I also acknowledge the Government for picking up this bill. 
I genuinely recognise the fact that resources have been put into this area. Despite what the MP for Coromandel said earlier comments from this side of the Chamber were around the fact that although people were pleased to see the changes put forward they were worried that without additional resourcing this was going to be only window dressing. The Government has come to the party and put in some additional resourcing over the next 4 years for animal welfare and law enforcement so I acknowledge that and say that it is certainly an improvement. 
I acknowledge the people who submitted to the Primary Production Committee on this bill. There were quite a small number of submissions actually—17—but I assume and I think with some good grounds that that is because there was general support in the community for what is contained in the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill. I acknowledge those people who took the time to submit and I recognise as we do from time to time that our select committee process in New Zealand is a very good process. It is an opportunity to improve legislation. In fact the select committee made a number of recommendations on the bill that improve it further. Three main areas of improvement are disqualifying people from ownership as well as custody of animals increasing penalties for the contravention of the disqualification order and enforcing the forfeiture of animals. Those are some of the improvements. 
I think that when I spoke on the first reading I talked about the important role that animals play in our lives. People have categorised those roles as domestic animals or farm animals. I acknowledge the contribution of Sue Kedgley and her ongoing work in this area. I think it is critically important that as a country that makes so much of its foreign earnings from animals and primary production we are always vigilant and assess whether the farming techniques and other animal handling techniques in this country are satisfactory. We should as my colleague Damien O’Connor said in his contribution aim to be the best in the world. In fact that is expected from New Zealand. 
I was fortunate enough prior to coming to Parliament to be a member of the Food and Beverage Sector Taskforce the previous Government set up. We looked at the important role that food and beverages played for the New Zealand economy and at the requirements that customers globally were putting on countries like New Zealand. These customers were both supermarket chains—which are very very powerful corporate bodies indeed—and individual customers in the countries we exported to. We were given the example of the requirements of Japanese customers. They wanted to know that our lambs grew up happily in nice paddocks in New Zealand and that they could be traced from birth until they were served on plates in Japan and through everything that happened in between. That may sound a strange thing for them to want but that was the requirement they had. All along that chain people wanted to know that the animal welfare elements were treated properly. Indeed there were also other requirements on us as a country. So there are economic reasons as well as the fact that it is the right thing to do for us to be concerned about the treatment of our farm animals as well as our domestic animals. 
I gave many examples of the role that domestic animals play in our lives not just as pets but in fact in a whole range of circumstances—for example in health and in therapeutic situations. I heard recently that there are now programmes in prisons about prisoners dealing with animals. Many humans have a particularly strong emotional response to animals. Of course the people who abuse and mistreat animals are committing a crime of violence just like abusing and ill-treating another person. They are often parts of the same spectrum so children who abuse animals often go on to abuse other humans.