Inquiry into the Animal Care and Protection Amendment Bill 2022 (Qld)
Submission overview
The Animal Care and Protection Bill 2022 contains some positive improvements to the Animal Care and Protection Act 2001 but it misses a number of other important opportunities to bring Queensland into line with standards of modern and contemporary animal welfare law.
The Bill maintains the basic deficiencies of the traditional animal welfare legislative approach in carving out entire categories of animals from the protective reach of the duty of care requirements and cruelty prohibitions through the use of wide-ranging exemptions. This creates a two-tiered system of animal welfare under which standards are determined not by consistent science-based criteria but by the use to which animals are put.
The stated objective of the Bill is to ‘modernise Queensland’s animal welfare laws to reflect modern scientific knowledge, community attitudes and expectations.’ It is our considered view that the Bill falls short of this objective. We offer nine recommendations for how the Bill can be improved to create a more robust animal welfare framework that includes consistent decision-making principles, stronger governance and institutional arrangements, and a formal role for independent expert advice.
Recognising animals as sentient beings in the purposes of the legislation, establishing a Queensland Animal Welfare Authority to administer the Act, formalising the role of the Animal Welfare Advisory Board, and strengthening the process for making codes of practice to ensure they are based on contemporary science and consistent with the duties enshrined within the Act, will greatly enhance the Act.
Wholesale legislative reviews of this kind do not occur often. The Queensland Government should be setting the bar higher to meet the standards of animal welfare that will be expected by Queenslanders over the course of the next decade and beyond. We hope our comments will be helpful in achieving this objective.
Read our submission
In this submission, the Alliance for Animals puts forward nine recommendations to improve the Animal Care and Protection Bill 2022.
Cover photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media (2017).