Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

If you allow me to finish my sentence, you might actually learn something. I think there is a piece of information that the opposition clearly do not have which is absolutely vital to understanding this problem and resolving it. I suggest to the opposition that they might follow this piece of information. As the Leader of the National Party has been talking about, there is a National Livestock Identification System. The Leader of the National Party knows a bit about that. As a former agriculture minister, he is obviously familiar with it. The system was imp­lemented between 2003 and 2004. When the Leader of the National Party was the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry he agreed to exempt from that system northern cattle for live export—that is, the cattle that we are talking about and that need to be traced into Indonesia were exempted from the livestock tracking system that the Leader of the National Party is extolling the virtues of. So to get the trade back up and running, given that the cattle we are talking about have not been in that livestock tracking system, we need the two parts. We need the tracking and we need the inspection as to standards, and we are working on both.

I understand that there are many people who are anxiously waiting for this live animal trade to get back up and running and I am very sympathetic to the circumstances of those who are anxiously waiting, which is why we will be working with them to get this reform done. Australians do not want to see animals treated in the way we saw them treated on the Four Corners show. We will get the system up and running so that we know there are standards and we know where Australian animals are.

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