Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with great pleasure to speak on the National Cattle Disease Eradication Account Amendment Bill 2006. Having been involved in the very early stages of the development of the program and involved at a personal level in the sense of having cattle involved in this scheme in those very early days, it is a great pleasure to see that the scheme has been so successful that we are winding up the residual levies and putting them into a fund that will be used for research and for the benefit of the cattle industry in the future. The bovine brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication campaign is possibly one of the most successful campaigns of its type anywhere in the world. We have to give great credit to the industry itself. It led this campaign with the cooperation of state, territory and federal governments, departments of agriculture, field workers, veterinarians and staff on cattle properties right across Australia.

Obviously public health is of paramount importance to the food industry in Australia and of course the cattle industry wanted to make sure that they were able to meet the increasing need to give the countries importing our beef guarantees that our beef going into their markets is free of diseases that could have a public health risk attached to them. There was a huge challenge in implementing this program. I think the experience that it built on was the eradication of pleuropneumonia from the beef industry. That was eradicated from the beef industry by about 1967. It was running post the Second World War. We built on that experience to implement the program for the eradication of brucellosis and tuberculosis from the beef industry in Australia.

I mentioned a moment ago that this was a huge challenge to the beef industry. This was because we were dealing not only with small holdings in Southern Australia that were probably going to find it very easy to manage this scheme but also with large pastoral areas in Northern Australia. You have to make sure you are able to test all the cattle in these large pastoral areas. That means you have to muster them in, contain them, inoculate them and read the reaction to that inoculation in very large herds. You also have to deal with the wild buffalo population, which also could be a carrier of the disease. These animals are roaming wild in northern parts of Australia. The other problem was feral pigs.

So it was probably the most ambitious eradication program that has ever been conducted in Australia. The great success, as I said a moment ago, should be seen as a great benefit to the industry and we should commend the leadership of the industry in wanting to make sure that they persevered with what was going to be an incredibly difficult campaign. The funding for this program came with a levy attached to it which was funded by 50 per cent of the cost being borne by the producers, 20 per cent at least by the federal government and 30 per cent by the state and territory governments. The residual funds that are in this fund now will be transferred to a more permanent fund that will enable the cattle industry to use them perhaps for further exotic disease research and also, importantly, for the benefit of the beef industry more generally.

Brucellosis was eradicated in Australia in 1989 but to eradicate tuberculosis from the beef industry was going to be far more difficult. The complexity of where cattle run in Australia and the difficulties in Northern Australia meant that this area was going to be dealt with last. As difficult as it was to implement the program it was nonetheless successful and in 1997 Australia was declared free of tuberculosis.

The importance of the beef industry to our regional communities cannot be understated. The beef industry and its exports—whether in processed or live cattle form—contribute enormously to our export wealth. But it is also the jobs that the beef industry creates at a local level which are important to regional economies and rural communities. That is underpinned by the ability of Australian cattle producers and meat exporters to be able to export our beef or live cattle into other markets with confidence. To now be able to give that guarantee—that our cattle and beef are going to be free of brucellosis and tuberculosis—gives us an advantage in many ways over other countries that cannot give that guarantee to importing countries.

The beef industry have moved ahead again with the desire to ensure that they are able to identify at a consumer level the cattle and meat produced by them. That led to the introduction of the National Livestock Identification Scheme, commonly known as NLIS. There was a very difficult debate within the industry as to who would fund it and whether it would be successful, and there have been teething problems with the roll-out of that scheme across Australia. The National Livestock Identification Scheme ensures that cattle can be traced from their property of origin from the moment they leave a property to go through to feedlots or into the meat processing chain. That is important because, if we have exported beef to the United States, we are able now to identify the source of the meat, the history, and trace its progress from paddock to plate.

That gives Australian producers another marketing edge: an ability to guarantee that, if there is a problem, we are able to trace at very short notice the source of contamination or possible disease. God pray it will not happen but, if it does, we are able to trace it quickly and efficiently. If quarantine is required—if an exotic disease has emerged and has arrived on a property by accident—then a particular area or property can be quarantined and dealt with very quickly.

We have only to look at the experience of the United States with mad cow disease to understand just how important traceability is today. A number of years ago the beef industry in the United States identified two or three cows that had entered the food chain or had been identified with mad cow disease. The problem for the beef producers of the United States was that they were not able to guarantee that cattle which could have mad cow disease had not entered the food chain. Importing countries such as Japan then immediately put a ban on the importation of beef from America. That has been a huge advantage to Australia because we have been able to guarantee that our beef on the market in Japan is able to be traced to its source and that this traceability extends to being able to trace its history from property to property and from feedlot to processor to a retail outlet.

You have only to look at what has happened in the United States and how they have been kept out of a very valuable market—the Japanese market—to understand that the traceability of animals today is an important issue for us. We have a competitive advantage because of the introduction of the National Livestock Identification Scheme. I am pleased that this federal government injected some $20 million into that scheme to help with the set-up of the infrastructure required for the reading of cattle at saleyards. Some state governments assisted with the subsidy on ear tags, which have an electronic chip in them, and production costs. Unfortunately, our Queensland government failed to a large extent to support our cattle producers in Queensland in relation to the cost of those ear tags. But that is a debate we have had and the beef industry in Queensland will always hold the state Labor government accountable for their failure to support a scheme that was going to guarantee the export status of beef from Australia.

In Queensland the beef industry is our second largest export by value, which gives you some idea of the importance of it to Queensland. It is the second largest export by value—second only to coal—out of Queensland. It underpins jobs in regional areas, meatworks and export shipping terminals, and it is an example of why the livestock identification scheme was so important as part of the brucellosis and tuberculosis identification scheme in being able to identify cattle and individual properties. The principle used, dating back to the eradication of pleuro in Australia and then followed with brucellosis and tuberculosis, was about identification of cattle and properties so that if cattle were identified as part of that scheme they were able to be traced and dealt with accordingly with regard to the eradication of those diseases.

I want to conclude by saying that, having been involved personally as a beef producer in the early days of the scheme, happily our own cattle did not read positive in any way to brucellosis or tuberculosis. But having been involved at an industry level and having watched with great interest the challenges that the beef industry right across Australia had to eradicate this disease, I commend the industry. I commend all those who have been involved in it from government, at a departmental level, from producer organisations and the producers themselves, because not only are we winding up this scheme in terms of the levies but that levy will go on to great use for the benefit of the beef industry in a contingency fund. I commend the bill to the chamber.

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