Mackey Moana: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Mackey Moana: Animal Welfare Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 Why do I feel as if I have just sat through the public launch of Simon Bridges’ autobiography? 
I am very happy to take a call on the third reading of the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill. I have checked my diary; apparently today officially is the “Hon David Carter Day of Action”. He had a question in the House and a third reading speech all within the space of 2 hours. The Minister should be careful that he does not have a nose bleed—that is a lot of work in one afternoon. I think all we can ascertain from that is that there must be a Cabinet reshuffle on the cards. I congratulate the Minister David Carter. It takes a lot of gall for the Minister to be able to sit there in front of the man whose member’s bill he stole and to regale himself with the eloquence in which he did it. 
I commend the member Simon Bridges who did all the work for this bill. We heard the long story of the build-up of this legislation and how he was approached to deal with this very important issue. He developed the bill he took it through his caucus and he put it in the ballot. It was drawn from the ballot but with the snip of a Cabinet reshuffle in sight it was then stolen from him by the Hon David Carter— 
Hon Member 
: Unbelievable! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Unbelievable. But it is a very good piece of legislation and of course Labour is happy to support it at its third reading. 
Sandra Goudie 
: Oh doh! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: I am not quite sure what noises are emanating from the back benches of the Government but I think I will just ignore them. 
This bill is very important because we have a long history in New Zealand of inadequate penalties for animal cruelty. It takes about $10000 to prosecute a case of animal cruelty and it can take a number of years for a case to be taken through to conviction. As compared with 20 years ago when a third of the cases were taken by police now the SPCA finds itself having to take 90 percent of the cases which is undoubtedly a heavy load for a voluntary organisation like the SPCA. Along with other members I put on record our thanks to the SPCA for the good work it does in our country—the good work it has done and the good work it will continue to do. We are pleased to see that more funding will be going to the SPCA to assist that work and to prosecute cases of animal cruelty in general. 
I tell the Minister that $8 million is a good amount of money but again as my colleague Damien O’Connor pointed out that has to be put into context. There was $40 million provided for private schools so suddenly the $8 million provided for prosecuting cases of animal cruelty does not look quite so much like the generous appropriation that the Government is trying to make out it is. 
One of the points that Labour has been making throughout the course of this entire debate is that doubling the penalties for animal cruelty is a good idea but if the Government does not make sure that the provision is adequately resourced then it will not mean a single thing. Historically only 0.4 percent of animal cruelty cases have gone to conviction—0.4 percent. I think it is fair to say that there is very little disincentive to move away from animal cruelty when we look at the fact that 99.6 percent of cases never end up with convictions. So the resourcing of this legislation will be absolutely critical. As I said before we are pleased to see that more resourcing is going into this area. We certainly hope that this legislation will result in much tougher penalties for cases of animal cruelty. We certainly hope that it will result in more cases being taken through to conviction. 
Some interesting changes were made at the Primary Production Committee during the course of the bill. I think one of the interesting parts of the bill in general is the introduction of the provision for reckless ill-treatment of animals versus that for wilful ill-treatment of animals. One of the big problems in animal cruelty cases has been the necessity to prove intent. Of course that is difficult enough to do when we are talking about human beings who can tell us what happened; it is virtually impossible to ascertain intent when it comes to animals which was an important part of the requirement under the law. So the legislation draws a distinction between wilful ill-treatment and reckless ill-treatment. Obviously wilful ill-treatment if it can be proven is a much stronger offence but I certainly would not like to see the gap between those two offences open up wide. I would hate to see the offence of reckless ill-treatment of animals suddenly by default occupy exactly the position we have now or conjure up very low penalties which is also a problem we have now. 
The penalties under the law that we have are not even being used to their full extent so doubling them is good. We hope to see that decent penalties will be handed out. I certainly hope that those who are in a position to hand out penalties are noting the fact that Parliament is speaking with one voice on this legislation. We are saying very clearly to the courts that we want to see much tougher penalties for animal cruelty and for the mistreatment of animals. 
But I would hate to see the clause about the reckless ill-treatment of animals resulting in lower penalties. The clause is very good because it opens up a whole area for convictions that were very difficult to get in the first place. But if we end up again with few prosecutions or with very low penalties then the reckless ill-treatment of animals provision may end up just being a way by proxy of keeping the status quo that we have now—that is ineffective penalties. That is particularly important because it may well be that we know that the ill-treatment was wilful we know that it was intended but we just cannot prove it. So the provision of the reckless ill-treatment of animals may well be taken in very serious cases—and it is good that those cases will be taken. But I would hate to see the penalties under that clause being seen as very low because Parliament intended “reckless” to mean that someone did not intend to do it or that he or she was just being slightly negligent. That may not be the case; it may be that it was very wilful ill-treatment but that that test could not be met under the law. 
The other interesting work the select committee did was on the forfeiture of animals which is always a very difficult area. When one is deciding who should or should not own animals a decision is difficult to make when people move animals between different owners to evade the law. I think that the select committee came up with a very sensible way of dealing with that. It said that if someone mistreats an animal and that animal is on his or her property but he or she does not own it and if the owner is a very good animal owner who has no history of ill-treatment the authorities would not take the animal off the owner because the owner may not have known about the ill-treatment. The owner may not have had anything to do with it. Clearly the select committee did not want that unintended consequence to be carried through. 
That provision is very interesting because not too long ago in this House we had quite a robust and divisive debate about microchipping animals. When I read through this part of the legislation and the select committee’s comments on it I thought about how far we had come from those days when the Hon David Carter and probably Shane Ardern were screaming at us about what a terrible idea the microchipping of animals was. It was dreadful they said and it would not work. Well is the Minister going to repeal the microchipping provisions? No because that would be doing three things in one day and that is completely out of the question. 
This bill relies a lot on the fact that we know who the owners of animals are and that we are able to trace them. The Minister does not seem to think that it is important to know who the owner of an animal is but there is a clause in this bill for taking an animal from its owner. I suspect that if the Minister was taking an animal off someone who had mistreated it and that person said that they did not own the animal the Minister would say that it was not useful to have a microchip that said in effect “Well actually you do because you’re the registered owner.” 
Hon David Carter 
: In the animal’s owner. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: In the animal I say to the Minister—in the animal. The Minister is free to microchip any members of his caucus if he feels that is necessary. But we are talking about microchipping the animals not the owners. 
The fact is that we have come a long way from the debate on animal microchipping which allows the SPCA to track animals in a way that it could not do before. It allows animal control officers to track animals in a way they had not been able to before. Members on the other side of the House are now taking advantage of that situation but they were frothing at the mouth when we dared to suggest that we try to track animals so we could know where they were and what their history was. Those members have now done a complete turn-round and have tried to forget history in its entirety. I thought it was important to point out that during the third reading debate. 
It is great that we have all come together once again on this bill. It is very important legislation. I hope it will make a significant difference and I thank the member Simon Bridges for bringing it to the House.