ANZCCART (Australian & New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching)

ANZCCART — the Australian and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching — is the advisory and training body behind institutional animal research ethics oversight in Australia and New Zealand. It is easy to conflate with the codes it helps institutions apply, or with the Animal Ethics Committees (AECs) it supports, but its actual role is narrower and worth stating precisely: ANZCCART advises, trains, and publishes guidance. It does not regulate, and it does not approve or reject a single protocol.

Governance: two sponsor-funded councils, not a statutory agency

ANZCCART operates as two linked but separately governed bodies. The Australian arm is hosted at the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus, with principal sponsors including Universities Australia, CSIRO, and Royal Society Te Apārangi. The New Zealand arm operates as a committee of Royal Society Te Apārangi, sponsored primarily by Universities New Zealand and AgResearch Ltd, with contributions from the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Royal New Zealand SPCA. Neither arm is a Commonwealth or Crown regulatory agency — both describe their own role as operating on a ‘purely advisory basis,’ providing guidance and information to Animal Ethics Committees, scientists, teachers, regulatory authorities, granting agencies, government, animal welfare organisations, the media, and the public.

What ANZCCART actually does

Three concrete activities make up most of ANZCCART’s work:

• ComPass training — a free online course covering the Australian Code and the equivalent New Zealand guide, used widely as the baseline training for new AEC members and researchers working with animals.
• The ANZCCART Openness Agreement on Animal Research and Teaching in Australia — a voluntary commitment, signed by universities, research institutes and funders, to publish clear public information about how and why animals are used in their research.
• Promoting the 3Rs — Replacement, Reduction and Refinement, the same ethical framework that underpins US animal-research oversight, applied here to how AECs assess proposed animal use.

ANZCCART also runs an annual conference and publishes guidance documents on specific welfare and methodology questions that AECs are routinely asked to weigh — pain and distress assessment, humane endpoints, species-specific housing — without itself issuing binding rules.

What ANZCCART is not

Three distinctions matter for anyone drafting institutional policy or explaining the system to a new committee member:

It is not the Code. The Australian code for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes is published by the NHMRC — first released in 1969, currently in its 8th edition (2013), with a further review under consultation as of late 2025 — and is adopted into legislation in every Australian state and territory. ANZCCART did not write it and cannot amend it; ANZCCART helps institutions understand and apply it.

It is not the NHMRC. The NHMRC is the Commonwealth statutory authority that publishes the Code jointly with the Australian Research Council and Universities Australia. ANZCCART is a separately governed, sponsor-funded advisory council — institutionally independent of the NHMRC, even though both operate in the same space.

It is not an Animal Ethics Committee. Every institution conducting animal research or teaching in Australia or New Zealand must convene its own AEC, the body that actually reviews and approves (or rejects) individual protocols, inspects facilities, and monitors ongoing compliance — the functional counterpart to a US IACUC. ANZCCART trains AEC members and publishes guidance those committees draw on; it does not sit on, chair, or overrule an AEC’s decisions.

It is also worth not confusing ANZCCART, or the animal-care Code it supports, with the separate Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research — a different NHMRC/ARC/Universities Australia code entirely, covering general research integrity and misconduct rather than animal welfare.

The US parallel: ANZCCART versus IACUC/OLAW

Research administrators moving between US and Australian/NZ institutions often look for a like-for-like mapping. The closer comparison isn’t ANZCCART-to-IACUC — the AEC is the actual IACUC counterpart, since both are the institution-level committees with real approval authority. ANZCCART’s closer functional parallel is a hybrid of the training and standards-support roles that, in the US system, are split across the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) and the professional-development track that groups like PRIM&R provide for IACUC coordinators — except ANZCCART is a single, jointly-funded, cross-border advisory body rather than a federal office. See the site’s broader IACUC and animal research oversight guide and Animal Research Ethics: The 3Rs, IACUC Oversight, and the Law for the equivalent US-side detail, and the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) term for the US statutory layer that the Australian Code plays a comparable role to.

Frequently asked questions

Is ANZCCART a regulator?

No. Both the Australian and New Zealand arms describe themselves as operating on a purely advisory basis. Regulatory authority over animal research sits with state/territory legislation (in Australia, via the adopted Code) and with each institution’s own AEC.

What is ComPass?

ANZCCART’s free online training course covering the Australian Code and the equivalent New Zealand guide — widely used as baseline training for AEC members, animal handlers, and researchers before they work with, or review protocols involving, animals.

How is ANZCCART different from an institution’s Animal Ethics Committee?

The AEC is the body with real authority: it reviews, approves, or rejects specific protocols at a given institution, and monitors ongoing compliance. ANZCCART trains AEC members and publishes guidance those committees use, but does not itself sit on a protocol review or have power to approve or overturn one.

Does ANZCCART cover both Australia and New Zealand?

Yes, as two linked but separately governed and separately funded councils — the Australian arm hosted at the University of Adelaide, the New Zealand arm operating as a committee of Royal Society Te Apārangi — each supporting AECs under its own country’s code/guide.