Mathers Mojo: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMathers Mojo: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2745. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOJO MATHERS (Green): I would just like to express my deep appreciation to the Government for stepping up and basically adopting a ban on animal testing for cosmetics. Having campaigned on this for a very long time and finding out about it only this morning I say that it is I think a real win for animals in New Zealand.I think it will be an incredibly important move to make because the reality is that we talked about a strong ethical framework for the animal ethics committee that approves the testing but the reality is that it does not make consistent decisions. With regard to the outdated LD50 tests one animal ethics committee had approved a number of these tests in the last few years whereas another one said that it would never use them or approve them because basically they do not meet the three Rs of research. Given that they make inconsistent decisions and given that assurances in the past that certain tests would never be used in New Zealand have been proved wrong with regard to the LD50 tests there is a real desire that we take this step and adopt a clear ban on the testing of cosmetics on animals. It is one that is hugely popular that the public supports that there is massive international support for and it is a really good step forward.I really appreciate the consistent support that Trevor and the Labour Party have given for a ban on the testing of cosmetics; it is really appreciated. I also appreciate the New Zealand First question around the testing of cosmetics. The amendment that the Government has put forward is much tighter than the one that I would have put forward in my Supplementary Order Paper 44. But none the less the principle that certain types of tests are not appropriate to be undertaken they are not ethically defensible is one that was really important to establish in the bill.I also just at this point want to pick up on another aspect while we are talking about animal testing. The committee after much discussion put my amendment that proposed to require animal ethics committees to consider or use alternatives not to approve a particular animal test if there was a suitable alternative available. I am pleased that the Government at least has stepped up to say that they must be required to consider the alternatives. Even if they are not required to they can still go ahead with an animal test.Section 100(f) inserted in clause 35 of the bill says they have to assess the suitability of using tests that do not use animals. Up until now animal ethics committees have not even had to consider that. So sometimes there are very standardised tests that do not use animals that are available to test the toxicity and other things. This was really highlighted during the whole debate on the psychoactive substances bill where the whole paper by the Ministry of Health proposed only animal tests to be used for testing psychoactive substances. In fact there were alternatives available for all of the necessary testing that was being proposed that did not use animals.You have to ask why animals have to suffer for the sake of a psychoactive drug or for the sake of a lipstick or any of these things. We really need to be moving forward to stopping any unnecessary testing. There have been incredible advances made in alternatives to animal testing with skin cell cultures replicas of organs and computer models. There are all sorts of things. All around the world they are shifting away from using more animal data which is often totally unreliable and are using alternatives. So we have taken some small steps in this bill. I will be leaving my Supplementary Order Paper to require alternatives on the Table because I do think that that is the stronger requirement.With regard to the concept of affordability some of these tests are at the moment more expensive because they are not established in New Zealand. Once we have established them once they have bought the computer models then moving forward it will actually be cheaper in the long run. That has happened overseas and that is what needs to happen in New Zealand. We have become too reliant on the old ways of testing. We are not being innovative enough to bring in these new forms of testing that do not involve animals and that is what the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill needs to be requiring.I would like to thank Trevor and talk about Supplementary Order Paper 47 which is the great apes Supplementary Order Paper. Thanks to the Labour Party for its support for that. This Supplementary Order Paper was basically motivated by Dr Jane Goodall’s work around the great apes and how her work has showed that they have the most incredible capacity for language development and using tools. They can learn sign language. They can communicate with people and express their actual emotions in abstract concepts. There was one very powerful video that I have seen of a chimpanzee. When her primary caregiver explained that she had been away for a while because she had had a miscarriage and lost a baby the chimpanzee made the sign for cry expressing sympathy. Even though chimpanzees do not cry it was able to express real emotion and identification.So basically their emotional and intellectual development is very much on par with human 2-year-old children and the question then becomes: should we be convenience killing any of these animals because it just should not be happening in New Zealand. People say: “Oh but it won’t happen.” but again zoos do convenience kill a whole range of animals when they have more than they require or the animals are redundant for their purpose or it is no longer fashionable for people to go and look at them. So there has been a lot of international outcry around the world where they have done convenience killing of animals. The purpose of this Supplementary Order Paper is really to protect the ones that are the most advanced emotionally and intellectually in terms of their development and it will be interesting to see what kind of support there is for that.Finally I want to touch on Trevor’s Supplementary Order Paper 48 which proposes to restrict the transitional arrangement from up to 15 years down to 7 years and we absolutely support that. The bill has moved forward from where it was previously so I do want to thank all the select committee members and the Government for the removal of having an indefinite time frame for practices that breach the Act like battery cages and farrowing crates. It is wonderful that we finally have a concrete time frame which means as I understand it that those farrowing crates which have been determined to be in breach of the Act will now have to be phased out within 10 years or at the most 15. But I would hope it is within 10 years because the industry has been widely signalled that these farrowing crates are not acceptable.We are in support of Trevor’s amendment reducing it down to 7 years because we do think they can do it. The suffering in these farrowing crates is horrendous. We have all seen footage and videos of the suffering that goes on in these intensive pig farms. It is just not acceptable. There are other ways of doing it and that is what we should be moving towards. We need to be moving towards free-range pig farming and these kinds of cages are things that are just not OK for that kind of suffering to be implemented.I just finally want to say that the bill talks about international reputation. It is all very well to have a law that sounds good on paper or reads well but at the end of the day it is the monitoring and enforcement that are really going to count and that is going to require more funding more resourcing and more proactive enforcement of what happens on farms. Thank you.