Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the Export Legislation Amendment (Live-stock) Bill 2018. I thank the member for Hunter for foreshadowing his motion and putting it on the table. I was going to accuse him of being a wolf in sheep's clothing, pardon the pun, but to the people in my electorate he's just a wolf!

The intent of the legislation is to increase criminal penalties and introduce new criminal offences and civil penalties for conduct that is unacceptable for livestock exporters. Those who obstruct or hinder an accredited veterinarian or authorised officer, or dishonestly influence any person performing their functions or duties or exercising power in relation to an export program, will be penalised. Exporters who commit an offence, intending to obtain a commercial advantage over their competitors or, by committing an offence, cause economic consequences for Australia will face severe penalties. Under this offence a company would face a fine of whichever is the greater of $4.2 million, three times the benefit gained by the company or 10 per cent of the company's annual turnover. A director of a guilty company could face 10 years in prison or a fine of $2.1 million, while an individual convicted under the same offence would face 10 years or a $420,000 fine. Other penalties will increase from the current five-year prison sentence and/or a $63,000 fine for an individual to eight years prison and/or a $100,000 fine. For a company the fine will be increased from $315,000 to $504,000. These are very serious impositions. A criminal offence with a jail sentence of up to 10 years shows that this government and this minister are very serious about tackling poor practices in the livestock industry.

Why is that important? It's important to me in particular as the member for O'Connor. The live export industry exports around 1.9 million sheep out of the country, and around 1.6 million of those sheep come out of Western Australia. Of those numbers about 65 per cent, or about 1.4 million sheep, come out of my electorate of O'Connor. This trade is worth around $220 million to WA, so around $150 million to the people, businesses and farmers across O'Connor. I've had it put to me that 1,800 jobs are reliant on the export trade, but I would contend that many more people partly rely upon the trade, whether they be farmers who derive part of their income from the trade, livestock agents who derive part of their commission income from the sale of sheep in the live export trade, or truck operators who derive part of their income from trucking sheep from the Great Southern through to the feedlots in Perth and then loading them onto the boats.

We've heard a lot about the trade, and the previous speaker, the member for Hunter, made mention that community standards have moved on. He's absolutely right. I think all of us who have received the emails would accept that community standards have moved to the stage where they will no longer accept the sort of incident we saw on the Awassi Express. I absolutely agree with the member for Hunter on that, and that is exactly why the government is instituting these very tough measures.

But we do need to talk about some of the issues where the industry has been kicking some goals. Firstly, the ESCAS has been a great success. We are one of a hundred nations that export live animals. We're the only nation that has an export supply chain assurance scheme. That export supply chain assurance scheme has lifted the standards in all of our destination countries not only for our animals but for animals from other nations as well. I think Australia as a nation can be very proud of that. If we pull out of the live sheep trade, there will be no-one left in the Middle East setting that standard.

The other thing that needs to be mentioned is that mortalities on these voyages have fallen from 1.9 per cent per voyage in the mid-1990s to 0.7 per cent in the last five years. So that's a significant increase in the success of these voyages—a significant decrease in the number of mortalities. That shows that we can improve standards, and we need to continue to work to improve standards.

Regarding the Saudi market, the Saudi market in 2008-09 imported around thee million sheep, including around 20 per cent Australian animals. When ESCAS was imposed, the Saudis declined to be part of it, and so Australia withdrew from that market. I've just had a look at some recent figures. Between 2015 and 2017, on average, the Saudi market imported five million animals per annum, so that's about a 40 per cent increase in the number of animals that the Saudi market imported. Not one Australian sheep now goes into Saudi Arabia. So, those people who suggest that by Australia withdrawing from the live sheep trade somehow there will be no more incidents for sheep from other destinations in the world are kidding themselves, to be quite frank. I think that what will happen is Australia will pull out of these markets—if the member for Hunter gets his amendment up, and I'll discuss that in a moment—but if anyone thinks that if we pull out of these Middle Eastern markets that they will stop buying live sheep, that is a complete furphy. The trade will go on; the animals will be imported from other countries. Just to go back to the Saudi example, most of those sheep come out of the Sudan, Ethiopia and Djibouti. They're not countries known for their high animal welfare standards. They may well be, for all I know. I don't want to prejudice those countries. Maybe some members on the other side know of some animal welfare initiatives in those countries concerning live trade. But certainly there's many, many animals coming out of the Horn of Africa and going to the Gulf States at all times of the year, including high summer.

This is not the only move that the minister and the government are imposing. The minister, on Thursday a week ago, accepted in full all 23 recommendations of the McCarthy report. The key recommendation from McCarthy was a reduction in stocking rates, and there's quite a complex formula that will be applied to boats that arrive at a destination in the Middle East, or in the Northern Hemisphere generally, during the months of June and September. These stocking densities will, generally, reduce the amount of animals on board by roughly one-third. So that will make a significant difference to the animal welfare of those animals on those boats.

The member for Hunter mentioned that the sheep in those hot conditions looked to be suffering—those that didn't perish—and no doubt it was very hot. But I will say that across the Great Southern and Central Wheatbelt part of my electorate on a hot summer's day you'll see a lot of sheep standing in the shade of a tree, and they'll be panting, because that's how they deal with extreme heat. I'm interested to see whether the member for Hunter and some of the harder-left members of his side will want to see farmers running sheep in a broadacre situation in the Great Southern penalised when the temperature reaches over 40 degrees, and those animals, just like the human beings who handle them, are suffering from heat distress. It is what happens in the farming industry across my electorate.

Another measure from the McCarthy report will be independent observers on board. With the Awassi Express incident, which happened in August last year, for some reason the footage was unfortunately not released immediately. It was held back and released at an opportune time by Animals Australia, so instead of it being possible for action to be taken immediately, we had another eight months, effectively, of the situation continuing without the government being made aware of it. So an independent observer on the boat will make sure that any of these incidents are immediately reported to the government and action can be taken immediately.

The member for Hunter has foreshadowed that he will be moving an amendment in the immediate future to suspend the trade in summer months and to phase out the trade over five years. We all know that capital these days is very fluid. International capital will find its best home, and most of the live export operators out of Australia are internationally based. There's no more liquid or fluid capital than a live export boat, which can be directed to any port where the owner sees that it's going to make its best profit. So to say that we will phase out the industry over five years and somehow we'll adjust and there'll be this gradual phasing out is a complete furphy. It's complete nonsense. What will happen is that the exporters will see that they have no future here in Australia, and they will withdraw their ships and their capital almost immediately. That is my feeling of how things will go.

While I'm on the topic of furphies, there are some facts that have been put about in this place which I just want to challenge—firstly, that the price of mutton in WA is 20 times higher than it was 20 years ago, in 1998. Why choose 1998? You can go back to 1990 or 1991, when farmers were destroying sheep because they couldn't find a market for them. That was when the single desk for wool, known as the reserve price scheme, was abandoned and the Australian sheep flock fell from around one billion sheep; it has stabilised at about 335 million. That's about a two-thirds contraction in the industry, and obviously over that period there was a great deal of pain for growers as they transitioned out of sheep into cropping and other enterprises. So, yes, there was a period where we suffered extremely low prices.

However, throughout that period there has always been a premium paid by the live exporters. Just the other day I had a case of an exporter who told me that he may have to divert some sheep that he purchased to slaughter. Because of the new rules, he may not be able to get them on the boat. He indicated to me that, while the live export price was around $110 per head, the maximum that he could make out of them as slaughter sleep was around $75 a head. So that's an indication of the premium that is in the market for the live export of sheep.

If you close the industry down effectively overnight, which is what the member for Hunter is foreshadowing with his amendment, you will not see the price fall by $30 to $35. With 1.6 million additional sheep to be processed on the market, out of a turn-off of about 3.5 million or 3.6 million in Western Australia, you will see the market collapse. As I said at the start, it would be wrong to say that every farmer relies on the live export trade for their livelihood, but every farmer who runs sheep would rely on the live export trade, and also the processing market which spins off the live export trade, for a significant part of their income. It might be their profit for the year. It might mean the difference between making a profit and a loss. It's the same for the truckie. For the truckie who carts sheep, that extra work that he gets carting sheep off farm up to the feedlots at Baldivis and then loading the sheep on the boat might be the difference between him having a viable business and not having a viable business. For the stock agent who earns his living out of commission sales, losing that $110-a-head sale and seeing the market overall come back by $30, $40 or $50 means a significant amount of income that comes off his livelihood.

So I commend the bill to the House, because we on this side of the House accept that changes need to be made. This bill does implement serious changes. It will make live exporters— (Time expired)

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