Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wholeheartedly endorse the motion moved by the member for Page and I thank her for her longstanding and passionate commitment to this issue. Like other members speaking in support of this motion, I am very happy to make the case for positive change when it comes to Australia’s live export industry.

I am not against farmers, I am not against exporters, and I am certainly not against the cattle and sheep export trade. Indeed, I am 100 per cent in favour of a thriving cattle and sheep export trade based on higher value-added production, higher job creation and greater rural and regional economic development activity. All those things will be delivered over time by a transition from a live export to a chilled meat export trade. Most importantly of all, those things will be delivered hand-in-hand with an end to the animal welfare travesty that is the current live export trade.

I want to put on record my gratitude for the tireless advocacy and dedication of a number of animal welfare groups in this cause, including Animals Angels, Animals Australia, Stop Live Exports, World Society for the Protection of Animals and RSPCA Australia.

As a parliamentarian, there are few issues that I have followed and pursued more consistently. That is appropriate because my electorate includes the port of Fremantle—through which flows 80 per cent of the live sheep trade—and because there is an overwhelming consensus in Fremantle that this trade should end.

Let my say quite clearly that it is not a nimby consensus. Last year the City of Fremantle adopted a resolution in support of a phased transition away from live exports, including the clear statement that the City would not support a shift of the live export trade from the Fremantle port to a new port proposed for Kwinana, some 20 kilometres south. The Fremantle community does not want the trade out of sight, out of mind; it wants the trade to end in favour of a more humane, more economically sustainable industry.

The Fremantle community does not want to be spared the sight of animals with broken limbs hanging from truck sides even before they are crowded into overheated ships and taken to an inhumane slaughter in the Middle East. The people of Fremantle want the entire industry to change, and to change for the better in every sense.

Strong evidence was provided in the 2009 ACIL Tasman report that a phased transition to a chilled meat export industry offers significant economic improvements for Western Australia, including the potential to double the jobs in the WA industry from 2000 to 4000 workers; the potential to increase the number of sheep processed in WA from 2.7 million to six million without the need to construct additional processing capacity; and the potential to replace a $700 million per annum industry with an industry worth $2 billion per annum. These are the economic benefits—more jobs, more sheep, more export dollars—that are likely to flow from an expanded meat processing and chilled meat export industry.

Last year I helped to host an event in Fremantle, in partnership with WSPA, Stop Live Exports and representatives from state parliament and local government in Western Australia. At that event, we heard from meat processors V&V Walsh and from the Australian Meatworkers Union, who testified to the damage that has been wreaked by the live export trade on the domestic industry in the last 35 years. More than 150 meat processing facilities have closed down with a loss of 40,000 jobs. Last year alone, 1,000 jobs were lost, mainly due to livestock shortages, not to a lack of demand.

We also heard from live export industry representatives who took issue with both the economic and the animal welfare criticisms of the current trade.

It was only a month or so later that horrible footage emerged of the gross mistreatment of sheep on arrival at a distribution point in Egypt. This footage, which was featured on the ABC’s 7:30 Report, showed live sheep being thrown and stuffed into car boots, injured sheep being mishandled, and throats being cut as animals struggled upside down at a dusty roadside. Some of these inhumane treatments were filmed occurring in plain view of signage that indicates that such cruelty is forbidden.

One of the same live export representatives who had attended the Fremantle community event was interviewed for the 7:30 Report story. You could see his certainty evaporate as he was shown footage which plainly contradicts the claims that the live export industry is consistently operating to exclude cruel, inhumane and unacceptable treatment of animals.

On that point, I believe there are urgent short-term measures that need to be considered to deliver some essential animal welfare improvements in the current trade. These include a requirement that live animals be sold into closed systems—that is, for slaughter at DAFF approved and monitored abattoirs rather than for private sale with the kind of car-boot cruelty that we know follows—and a cessation of export to countries that do not demonstrate compliance with the World Organisation for Animal Health guidelines for the slaughter of animals, and the guidelines for the transport of animals by land, sea and air.

Finally, I would simply observe that many improvements have been made over time to Australia’s agricultural sector industries in the name of better economic, social and animal welfare outcomes. To my mind there is no reason Australia should not properly investigate a phased transition from live export to onshore processing that will deliver these outcomes.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

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