Perth Voice Interactive

STIRLING councillors weren’t shown the results of a survey showing overwhelming support for cat containment when voting to proceed with a local law that looks set to kick the issue down the road again.

At its last meeting the council agreed to move forward with amendments to its Keeping and Control of Cats Local Law, but as former council aspirant Simon Wheeler noted in public question time, only a dozen responses to its advertising of the law were included in the agenda, and not the 144 submissions gathered during the consultation period.

They showed overwhelming support for cats to be fully contained on their property or other forms of restrictions, such as night curfews. Of the submissions, 66 per cent called for outright cat containment, 17 per cent called for other types of restrictions and another 10 per cent listed problems with cats without specifically detailing any measures they’d like to see.

Just 5 per cent thought containment was an over-reaction.

“I was told at the committee, and later in writing, that the July 2023 local law consultations that were withheld from tonight’s agenda, with an overwhelming majority of the responses in favour of laws for the effective control and protection of cats, would be shown to council,” Mr Wheeler said.

“That local law process can not, according to tonight’s reports, even consider the wishes of the vast majority of respondents; it won’t be on the table.

“Those with a magnifying glass will read in the officer responses to consultation results that adjacent local governments do not currently have any cat containment provisions, and to ensure a consistent approach to governance, neither will the City of Stirling as part of this review.

“So that decision has already been made, just not by councillors.”

Mayor Mark Irwin said the issue had been raised and discussed previously.

“This has been brought up before and this council has considered the cat containment laws through significant amount of time through workshops, so that would guide the policy decision-making of the officers,” Mr Irwin said.

The City’s government manager Jamie Blanchard said councillors would get to decide what went into the laws when staff presented their recommendations later in the year.

But the sticking point remains a parliamentary committee which has repeatedly knocked back councils that wanted to clamp down on cats. In June last year Bayswater council risked being held in contempt of Parliament because it delayed removing the provision from its proposed cat laws so it could argue the point.

A staff report to Stirling’s meeting said the Joint Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation was not supportive of laws restricting cats in public, but there was a softer option.

“The Committee confirms that the local law-making head of power under Section 79 of the Cat Act 2011 does not permit local governments to require that cats be contained within their owner’s property,” the staff report said.

“…the Cat Act 2011 provides powers for the City to specify places where cats are prohibited absolutely, although this is limited to specific places, so the City would need to specifically include every park, reserve, bushland and foreshore area as a prohibited area…”

by STEVE GRANT