Kedgley Sue: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is pleased to support this bill. It is the first bill to deal with animal cruelty even in a very modest way in the past 11 years that I have been in this Parliament. We particularly support the introduction of the new charge of reckless ill-treatment and we congratulate the Minister on overseeing legislation with this charge. We hope it will make it easier for the SPCA and Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry inspectors to make successful prosecutions for animal abuse. 
However we remain deeply disappointed that the provisions of this bill do not apply to the literally millions of animals that suffer from animal cruelty on a daily basis as a result of farming practices such as sow crates and battery hen cages. Frankly it is absurd that the provisions of this bill do not apply to the thousands of pigs that are locked up in cages where they cannot even turn round or to the 3 million hens that are kept in cages for all of their lives. In fact the provisions of this bill will not apply to any farming practice that is legalised by a code of animal welfare. This legislation will not apply to anyone who has a code of animal welfare and that applies to the intensive farming of cows. It is interesting too that the whole of Parliament will rally around and support a bill that lengthens jail sentences and gets tough on individual acts of cruelty to animals when at the same time most parties in this House continue to turn a blind eye to even more serious cases of institutionalised cruelty to animals such as battery hen cages and sow crates. Animal welfare commentator Peter Sankoff pointed out recently that politicians hate only some kinds of animal cruelty and they are perfectly happy to promote other types. This bill is a classic example of that. 
The Green Party does not believe that by simply increasing the length of sentences we will decrease the number of cases of animal cruelty when we consider that only 11 people—yesterday the 11th person was convicted for cruelty to thousands of chickens—in the history of New Zealand have ever been jailed as a result of animal cruelty charges. Although 10 years ago Parliament increased the sentences for animal cruelty from 3 months to 3 years the number of people being prosecuted did not increase. In fact nobody has ever been sentenced to 3 years in jail for animal cruelty—most offenders get just a community sentence if at all—so one wonders what will be the purpose of extending sentences to 5 years. But we do hope that the new charge of reckless ill-treatment in this bill will have some real effect. 
This brings me to the major reason why there are so few prosecutions for animal cruelty in New Zealand. It is because there are so few animal welfare inspectors and so few resources. Even last year more than 14000 complaints were made about animal cruelty but only 44 prosecutions were actually laid. The reality is as others have pointed out that we have only seven full-time Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry inspectors undertaking prosecutions for animal cruelty even though we have over 100 million animals in New Zealand. Also 92 percent of complaints about animal cruelty are made to the SPCA and this effectively means that the Government has abdicated its duty to monitor animal welfare to inspectors from a charitable organisation the SPCA—60 percent of its staff are volunteers many of whom work only part time. 
The SPCA informed us during our hearings on the bill that it is unable often to undertake prosecutions because it is so short of funding. It is interesting that the SPCA is the only enforcement agency in New Zealand dealing with criminal offences that has to finance itself through donations. In our view there is little point in increasing penalties for animal cruelty crimes if the enforcement agencies are so under-resourced that few prosecutions are ever made. We are informed that only 3 percent of the cases that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry investigates result in convictions and that only 0.3 percent of the cases that the SPCA investigates result in a prosecution. We are therefore extremely pleased that some money has been found in the latest Budget to increase the budget to carry out prosecutions for animal cruelty and that some of that money will make its way to the SPCA. Again we congratulate the Minister of Agriculture on managing this Budget allocation. 
There were some very interesting submissions on this bill during the select committee process. Federated Farmers came in and they proposed that the entire new clause relating to reckless ill-treatment should be thrown out of the bill because it could expose owners of production animals to prosecution. Horror! In fact they need not have worried because almost all production animals are already protected by codes of animal welfare so as I have said the bill will not apply to them. But the attitude of Federated Farmers was extraordinary. Their view is that animal welfare standards should not apply to the entire farming sector. In fact in their submission they said that it should be made clear in the bill that it applies only to domestic animals and not to production animals. In other words they are saying that there should be one standard in one law or regulation for individual companion animals and that there should be a completely different and lax law for farm and production animals because the farming sector generates so much of our wealth. 
That is extraordinary particularly as some terrible instances of animal cruelty have been carried out by farmers. The Crafar farms have been mentioned but there have been incidents where farmers have literally starved their animals to death. It is completely intolerable that the farming lobby should argue it should be completely exempt from the standards in this bill. Then the pig industry had the gall to turn up and tell us that it had been shocked by recent incidents of animal cruelty and that it abhorred—those are its words—any incident of cruelty towards animals. Can members believe that? That was from the pig industry. When questioned about that extraordinary statement representatives from the sector said that they did not consider keeping a sow in a crate for months on end where it could not turn round to be cruel. They tried to argue that if the pig code allows sow crates and says that they are legal then somehow in law they are not seen to be cruel; they are seen to be promoting animal welfare. It is extraordinary that the pig industry is suggesting somehow that keeping sows in stalls is promoting animal welfare but that is what the industry said. 
Others have said that this bill was drawn up because of the public’s incredible response to some terrible incidents of cruelty to companion animals but the truth is that there was a huge public response to the video footage showing the way that production animals mainly pigs are treated in New Zealand when it was screened on  
Sunday 
 last year. There was an absolute public outpouring but still nothing has been done. The pigs are in their cages. The drafting of the pig code is dragging on. It was supposed to have been completed last year but now we are halfway through this year and there is no sign of the pig code. It looks as if the pigs will remain in their cages. On the one hand we are busily congratulating ourselves on this wonderful new legislation that deals with animal cruelty but at the same time we are procrastinating being evasive and doing nothing about pigs in cages. That is an utter example of institutionalised cruelty to animals and we are turning a blind eye. I am not allowed to use the word “hypocrisy” in this Parliament but otherwise that is the word that would spring to my mind. 
Finally I say that it is interesting and I think that pig farmers will have to wake up. Even in Australia a major pork producer has shifted its 45000 sows from stalls to group housing. The owner has said that there is no point in trying to defend a production system that in the eyes of the consumer is indefensible.