Wildlife Ethics Committee

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:22): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before addressing a question to the Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation on the topic of transparency about reports made to the Wildlife Ethics Committee.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS: As the minister and other members of this council would be aware, researchers are required to report adverse events that impact on animal wellbeing, including unplanned deaths, to the Wildlife Ethics Committee, promptly. That unplanned death is documented and the researcher must be able to demonstrate that an attempt was made to determine the cause of death and give an explanation of the remedial action taken to prevent reoccurrence.

I note that these surveys are returned to the Wildlife Ethics Committee promptly but I note that my request under FOI for a copy of the reports made to the Wildlife Ethics Committee between the dates of 1 January 2013 and 2 June 2015 took over a year to be complied with. By contrast, I note that PIRSA makes their information about animal deaths public and available on request, with regard to authorised experiments, without even the need for an FOI exemption. My question to the minister is: does he have faith in the transparency of the current system if it takes over a year under FOI to get this information released from the reports made to the Wildlife Ethics Committee?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (15:23): I thank the honourable member for her very important question about reporting standards to animal ethics committees of various institutions and research institutions around the state. I am not aware of the particulars of the situation that she is referring to so I will give that some due consideration, but my experience has been, in dealing with these committees, that they take animal welfare as their highest bar, if you like, and they, of course, have to weigh up the benefits to society through increased and improved medical research with the experimentation of animals.

My understanding is that every step of the way they try to reduce the number of animals that are used in experimentation and often send back to researchers probing questions about why they can't do modelling rather than use animals in their research programs. Nonetheless, there will always be situations, particularly in terms of health sciences and medical research requirements, to test procedures on animals before they are tested on humans in hospitals, and that is what we would expect, I would imagine.

As I say, my experience of these animal ethics committees and how they work is that they always put safety and the benefits to society at the highest, but also animal welfare issues. They don't slack off on this; in fact, they would probably be criticised as being quite hard on researchers who apply for permits to study with animal models who haven't given alternative thought to other models they could use without using animals, particularly those animals that would be sacrificed at the end of the research.

So, I will consider that, but my experience has been that these animal ethics committees of our research institutions really do take their job very seriously. They do put it as a priority to reduce the number of animals that are used in experimentation, but there always will be some animals that are used in experimentation, particularly, as I said, for medical research, and some of those animals will be sacrificed at the end of it. There is no getting away from that. At the end of the day, that information is generally available through their processes. As I understand it, they report at the end of the year through their university research committee.