LIVE EXPORT —
INVESTIGATION
234. Hon SIMON O'BRIEN to the Minister for
Agriculture and Food:
I refer to the ministerial statement
that the minister provided earlier today in which she asserts that the WA
Animal Welfare Act 2002 applies on board live export vessels.
(1) Is the minister
saying that a WA statute applies to a vessel on the high seas or in foreign
ports; and, if not, how does it apply?
(2) What breaches
of the state act might conceivably be uncovered by an investigation into the
August 2017 voyage of the Awassi Express?
Hon
ALANNAH MacTIERNAN replied:
I thank the member for the question.
(1)–(2) Certainly,
the advice that we have had from the State Solicitor and the Solicitor-General
is that the Animal Welfare Act can apply at the point of loading the ship and
up to 200 kilometres out to sea. The scenario that obviously is being looked at
is the conduct of loading the vessel, in the state that the vessel was and at
the density it was loaded, knowing where that vessel was going to end up and
what the weather conditions were going to be when that vessel reached that
destination, and then whether the acts that occurred within the jurisdiction of
Western Australia were highly probable to result in an act of cruelty to these
animals.
That is the logic of the
interpretation. The conduct of an exporter in loading that ship and in managing
the ship in a particular way is assessed in terms of the probability of that
resulting subsequently in harm occurring to the animals.