Dinesh: I am curious about your background. Prior to your work with Australian Alliance for Animals, you were at the RSPCA. You also have PhD in Law and have a history of teaching animal law as an academic. What led you to doing work related to animals?

Jed: I have always had a strong intuitive sense of justice so when I started becoming aware of the way animals were exploited in various fields, it had a big effect on me. It led me to borrowing Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation from the Coffs Harbour public library when I was about 16 years old, and I haven’t looked back since.

Dinesh: Australian Alliance for Animals has quickly become an important organisation within Australia’s animal advocacy terrain. Can you say a little about its history and role today?

Well, being a little over two years old, it doesn’t have a lot of history! Together, with my co-founders Dr Meg Good and Dr Bidda Jones AM, we launched the Alliance in March 2022 with the aim of uniting the animal protection sector to increase its political influence and to change the way animal welfare policy is governed in Australia.

The current policy and governance system is completely captured by meat and livestock industry interests. This is one of the biggest barriers to progress our movement faces. We intend to systematically dismantle this barrier piece by piece and build up a new system in its place.

We ultimately want to remove animal welfare from agriculture ministries and departments and set up more independent governance frameworks where science and community views are given greater weight, and by implication, the interests of animals.

It’s an ambitious agenda. The task is fundamentally political in nature because it’s all about who has power and control over our nation’s animal welfare laws and policies.

This is why we have united the sector behind the campaign to leverage the collective strength of the movement. We have six core members, including Animals Australia, World Animal Protection, Humane Society International Australia, FOUR PAWS Australia, Compassion in World Farming, and Voiceless, the animal protection institute, and we work with a range of other groups on specific campaigns. Together, we have a collective supporter base of over 2 million people, which gives us the political clout we need to open doors with government.

We help the movement channel this representative strength towards political pressure points. We engage directly with politicians, parties and bureaucrats at a state and federal level, we run election campaigns to secure policy commitments, and we coordinate lobbying activities within the sector on key issues.

In essence, we see ourselves as political lobbyists for our members. This seemed to be a gap in our movement’s skill set. While the animal protection sector excelled at exposing issues and stimulating public demand for change, it lacked the capacity to see those demands through the policy process and translated into law. Instead, once the issue entered the agriculture policy framework, livestock industries would take control of the narrative and tokenistic policy changes barely resembling the public’s demands would come out the other end, often several years later.

We’re now filling that gap, and so far, our strategy appears to be working. If you listen to leaders of the meat and livestock lobby, we have already captured the government and are writing their policies for them!

Dinesh: What projects are you currently involved in?

Jed: We invest a lot in campaigning during elections as they provide a great opportunity to secure policy commitments from parties and candidates and to lift the political profile of animal welfare generally. So right now, we’re preparing campaigns for the Queensland election in October, and gearing up for the federal and WA campaigns in the first half of 2025. We’re also working on the establishment of an independent office of animal welfare with the NSW Government. This will be the first of its kind in Australia and a key element of our #FairGoForAnimals campaign.

In additional to these projects, we’re working on lifting standards in the chicken meat industry through our Better Chicken Australia campaign, ensuring the phase out of battery cages is regulated in each state and territory, securing a phase out of live lamb cutting (traditionally known as mulesing), and ensuring the phase out of live sheep exports proceeds as planned. It is a big agenda! But we’re not doing it alone. We’re working with a coalition of groups on each one.

Dinesh: Do you draw on academic research to inform the work you do?

Jed: Yes, a lot! My PhD was on regulatory capture in the agriculture sector, particularly how it affects animal welfare policy. The recommendations from my PhD basically form the basis of our intuitional reform goals at the Alliance. My PhD research taught me a lot about political influence and the way different groups exercise it. One of the key take away lessons for me was that concentrated interests are always more influential than diffuse ones, hence the interest in forming an alliance!

Dinesh: How can people find out more about Australian Alliance for Animals and support your work?

Jed: Visit our website at www.allianceforanimals.org.au and sign up to our mailing list to receive updates on our work and how you can be involved, and of course, donations are always gratefully received! Lobbying is very resource intensive. There is no substitute for having a physical presence in the halls of parliaments around the country. We desperately need more lobbyists for animals and with further support we can make really good ones!

Dr Jed Goodfellow BA/LLB (Hons), GDLP, PhD is co-founder and Director of Policy and Government Relations at the Australian Alliance for Animals. He has over 20 years experience in animal welfare law, policy, and advocacy, having previously worked in senior policy, prosecutorial, and enforcement roles with the RSPCA across Australia. Jed developed Macquarie University’s Animal Law unit in 2012 and has taught the course annually for the past 12 years. In 2015, Jed was awarded a PhD in animal welfare regulation. His research examined the role of agriculture departments in regulating animal welfare and provided an empirical and analytical basis for law reform proposals to establish new animal welfare governance models in Australia.

Advocacy Update is aimed at providing information to members on the work of animal advocacy organisations. Advocacy Update helps to connect the worlds of animal advocacy with the work of AASA members. Note that while the below is presented for the information of members, AASA does not necessarily endorse the views represented. AASA is not affiliated with the Australian Alliance for Animals.