Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They did. With my limited understanding of the meat industry—my family has a history in the meat industry—I do know this: the more sweat you put into doing something with meat, the more you can charge when you sell it. Rather than sell a quarter of a beast, if you turn it into sausages and roasts, all those sorts of things, you make more. Basically, you value add with labour input—a simple fact. There are lots of pressures on our meat processing sector. The high Australian dollar obviously is one. We have had droughts, we have had floods in the north in the member for Leichardt's electorate and we have had supply issues but the live export of meat has been growing. For sheep it has been pretty stable, but there are the same pressures.

In 2005, 573,000 head were exported; in 2009, 949,000 were exported; it is expected to go to a million head this year. Despite those pressures, the industry has been growing and the sad thing is we miss out on the value adding. As a Queenslander I know we have had abattoirs closed down in Killarney and in Pittsworth, mainly in rural and regional areas. I think the member Kennedy was talking about the Innisfail abattoir. We have had Northern Territory abattoirs closed and an abattoir in Cairns closed.

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