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Though the Regulations give no guarantee that Submissions will be called for, this Petition of well over 100,000 signatures is one of the biggest in New Zealand history and an issue of megalithic proportions and implications in which the public has demonstrated substantial interest. That the domestic intricacies of government housekeeping should be used as a weapon against Petitioners for whom the machinery for negotiation is defined, and whose views must be accepted and assessed regardless of similarity or dissimilarity, is deplorable. Disqualification of Submissions by prejudging their content is an erroneous assumption based on ignorance and is merely a ploy to enable the Committee to shelve its responsibilities. The benefits to society inherent in our successful petition is not to be achieved without careful study of the facts and a subject of such proportion can not be addressed without diligent and exhaustive investigation of the evidence.

Further, it would take a Submission of exceptional length and unreasonable proportions to document all the evidence that exposes vivisection as an international conspiracy, therefore the government should be mindful of the depth of intensity an increasing number of people are bringing to this issue, and encourage, rather than refuse their papers to aid the Committee's deliberations.

This Society never anticipated that the government would evade its responsibility to accept, scrutinise and assess the many diverse and professional documents which present views, experience and information not necessarily dwelt on by the principal petitioner. The Committee which rejects Submissions on the basis of repetition is on shaky ground and not earning its keep. The Committee which rejects Submissions on any grounds is sinister and should be investigated.

At the time of our Society's previous Petition to Parliament (under the same government in 1984), in which 55,000 signatories sought abolition of the unscientific Lethal Dose 50 Test, Submissions were formally sought through this Society's journal Mobilise! and their writers were allowed, provided they specified in their Submissions, to attend the subsequent Hearing to answer questions put by the Committee. Though this token Hearing was farcical and the outcome a blot on New Zealand's history (a similar Petition the following year in Sweden was successful in banning the Lethal Dose 50 Test in that country), on surface, and ostensibly, we were afforded the right of recognition and negotiation through the bureaucratic machinery.

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