The true meaning of free range

Moreover, by forcing all other eggs to be labelled as cage eggs, it would have led the public to believe there were just two options. That would have cleared the decks for a campaign to demonise egg production as factory farming and insist that all producers adopt the bill's free range specifications.

The Greens argued the bill was based on an understanding of birds as "social, sentient beings that need to develop complex relationships and whose wellbeing is fulfilled only when they can forage for food." In fact, hens in cages lay more eggs than free range hens and there are major doubts about whether all that is true, but even if it was, it does not translate into a particular density. Even humans are comfortable living and socialising in close quarters.

The bill is supported by Labor, which amended it, and by the Shooters and Fishers Party, which supported Labor's amendments.

Several speakers expressed concern that there was no legally enforceable standard for free range eggs, some sounding like they were saving hens from torture rather than talking about a legal definition. One described "how hens are crowded into long, poorly ventilated, completely dark sheds with fully automated egg collection systems and filth, death and suffering." As if.

The bill was opposed by the government, one of whose speakers noted that free range egg production means disease management is more difficult, waste disposal less certain and aberrant behaviour such as cannibalism more likely.

Others noted that existing regulation ensures labelling is not deceptive, food safety is protected and animal welfare is not compromised. As one put it, the government's job is to protect rights, not regulate people's affairs, and a private certification system would be quite adequate to maintain valid free range labelling.

The bill has not been presented to the lower house and will not pass if it is, so it will not become law. The Egg Corporation nonetheless supports the next version of the Model Code being made mandatory on a national basis, although how that would benefit consumers is unclear.

But perhaps the final word belongs to Dr Peter Phelps, the Liberal MP who responded to the Greens' comments describing hens as "social, sentient beings".

"I went into the chicken run and I put to Pickles the proposition raised by The Greens, and she found it was "sound, but simplistic". Whisky, a Marxist chicken, said that The Greens had completely failed to understand the inherent class structure in chicken society. Pebbles merely queried if a rooster crowed in a henhouse and nobody heard it, could it be said to have been crowing? Snowy replied, "Of course it happened because an objective reality is not reliant upon subjective observation."

Pecky and Becky, the anarcho-feminist chickens, said that the whole egg-laying system was a tool of patriarchal oppression and that I would be in trouble if I even thought of bringing a rooster into the henhouse. They also asked, for the purpose of Hansard, could chicken please be spelt "chyckyn"? Becky and Ginger got into a fight over whether the true conservative chicken view is one of tradition or liberty. While Frilly, a Nietzschean, rambled on about "chicken and super-chicken" before handing me a list of those she thought could be disposed of to "improve the situation".

Now that is genuinely free range.

David Leyonhjelm is the Registered Officer of the Liberal Democratic Party (www.ldp.org.au). He works in the agribusiness and veterinary markets as principal of Baron Strategic Services and Baron Senior Placements.