The regulation affects multiple classes of actors and allocates costs, duties and decision rights among them.
Primary animal‑keeping stakeholders: commercial egg producers are the most intensively regulated group. Part 2 imposes design and management standards on confinement of laying fowl in furnished cages and pre‑2025 cages, and in non‑cage housing (ss 4-25). Those producers must alter or certify cage dimensions (height, door sizes, floor area calculations s 4, 11-13), provide perches, nests, scratch substrate and pecking materials (ss 7-10), comply with stocking densities (ss 15-16, 21), and carry out daily welfare inspections (s 24). Producers using pre‑2025 infrastructure have a different stock‑density and height regime (ss 12(2)(b), 16), which creates compliance‑timelines and potential capital upgrade decisions.
Veterinary practitioners: vets both gain and bear regulatory duties. They have an expanded register record keeping obligation when performing regulated procedures, including maintaining consecutively numbered written registers and entering owner details, procedure justification and statutory declarations (s 30). Vets also feature as gatekeepers for some procedures: tail docking and debarking may only be undertaken by a veterinary practitioner subject to specified preconditions including behavioural treatment plans, statutory declarations and court orders in the case of debarking (ss 27-28). Vets are also a class of persons who can be prescribed members of Stock Welfare Panels where needed (s 38(3)).
Animal trades and their personnel: proprietors and managers of businesses listed in Schedule 1 (pet shops, boarding establishments, breeding establishments, transport, grooming, security dog businesses, riding centres, commercial pig establishments and land transport of livestock) are required to maintain premises, records and ensure employee compliance with identified Codes and Standards (s 31; s 32(1)-(3); Schedule 1). Individual employees are subject to a specific duty to comply (s 32(2)). Codes listed in Schedule 1 determine additional documentary compliance obligations.
Equipment manufacturers and suppliers: suppliers of virtual fencing devices and other electrical devices listed in Schedule 3 face an indirect regulatory effect. Section 51A requires that before a person uses a virtual fencing device they complete training with instruction from the manufacturer or supplier (s 51A(1)). Manufacturers thus have an implementation and training role. Schedule 3 also delineates permitted uses of specific electrical devices and the circumstances in which they cease to count as electrical devices for the purposes of the Act (Sch 3; s 43).
Inspectors, police and authorised officers: enforcement personnel are addressed across Part 5. The regulation prescribes procedures and timeframes inspectors use in emergencies (ss 33, 36), classes of persons who may be called to assist (veterinary practitioners and persons with special handling expertise s 37), the composition of Stock Welfare Panels (s 38), and identification requirements for police exercising powers (s 35).
Approved charitable organisations: organisations approved under the Act are required to include particular matters in their reports (s 41), including numbers of complaints, seizures, cautions, notices, court proceedings and details about officers and memoranda of understanding with the State. That imposes reporting costs and public‑accountability duties.
Rodeo and racing organisers: rodeo organisers receive explicit exemptions from certain prohibitions provided they comply with the Code of Practice for Welfare of Animals Used in Rodeo Events and the exemption is subject to the condition of ongoing compliance (s 44). Steeplechase or hurdle race organisers receive a narrowly framed exemption when races are organised so no horse attempts to jump an obstacle at the same time as another horse (s 45). These carve‑outs create compliance conditions and record‑keeping implications where applicable.
Owners and keepers of other animals: provisions on prohibited traps (glue traps s 42), prohibited electrical devices and their permitted uses (s 43; Sch 3), transport carriage height requirements for large stock animals (s 47) and the ban on using animals in film/theatre outside of a Code of Practice (s 48) affect a broad range of owners, transporters, event producers and pest‑control businesses.
Consumers and indirect downstream actors: while not directly regulated, consumers who buy eggs from producers covered by Part 2 will be affected through supply chain costs and labelling decisions that producers may make in response to capital or operating costs. The regulation creates differential cost structures between producers with furnished cages and those still using pre‑2025 cages.
Overall, the regulation distributes duties across technical equipment providers, animal handlers, veterinarians, proprietors, enforcement officers and approved charities. For each class the instrument prescribes specific, measurable obligations, and in many cases ties them to external Codes or Standards (s 32(3)(i); Sch 1), thereby extending compliance obligations beyond the text itself.