Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Animal health is integral to what happens in our nation. Coming from a family where my father was a vet, I grew up with the tuberculosis eradication scheme—and that was imperative to keep our trade going to the United States. We all know about the cattle crisis back in the 1970s. I remember our family taking a truckload of cattle to the saleyards and coming back with two, and me saying, 'Well, what was the purpose of that?' Dad said, 'At $5 a head, there was no purpose in selling,' which was the reason we were there, so they purchased. It shows you how integral animal health and biosecurity are to the economy of regional areas, and it continues on.

I suppose the most pressing things right now are the threat of lumpy skin disease in cattle, screw-worm fly and, most importantly, foot and mouth. If foot and mouth comes in, we have devastation across our nation, and it will cost tens of billions of dollars. Immediately, there'll be the cessation of the movement of stock, right across our nation. This comes into an act that I was a part of, the Biosecurity Act 2016. It's one of the largest pieces of legislation that has ever gone through this nation, and it may be the largest. The shutdown would mean no more transport operators, no sales for farms, no moving of earth—the construction industry, earthmoving industry, roads. Everything stops. This would be devastating not just to the cattle industry but to the economy in general. Our role is to make sure that that doesn't happen.

As foot-and-mouth disease is now prevalent in Indonesia, especially in Bali—and so many people go to Bali—one of the things we have to do is inform the Australian people: if you've got a pair of thongs in Bali, with the Hindu culture and cattle being prevalent, please do not bring them back to Australia. Throw them out; you don't need them. The threat that comes with it just doesn't warrant the expense it would cause. When they talk about threats, they talk now about it being close to 10 per cent, so it's not as if it's out of the ballpark.

What we also have to do is try to vaccinate. Of course, if we do that, we have to bring in a live virus, which straightaway means that you have to test the live virus and whether it's working by seeing how a beast deals with it. That calls into question whether you can call yourself foot-and-mouth-free anymore. So we actually have to go out and—as they say in the infantry—get close with the enemy. If foot-and-mouth was the enemy, we must be doing our part to control it overseas, and it would be incredibly difficult to try to control it within Papua New Guinea.

There are also other things that are very important. In the past we've dealt with such things as rabbits, and successfully with the myxoma virus and later on with the calicivirus and variants of that calicivirus to try to keep at bay what was an absolute scourge of regional Australia and Australia in general. People may not understand rabbits, but luckily in Canberra you've got your own classic example. Down around the flag down there, if you want to look, there's an infestation of rabbits. It is beyond belief what you see around there. That a small part of Australia, and they were everywhere like that. When you go around—I do a lot of fencing; it's probably why my knees are shot at the moment—you see that they actually dug in the netting. How hard would that be, going up and down hills digging in the netting so rabbits couldn't get through it. This was because they tried in vain to control rabbits. Even if you have a good season like right now, you couldn't control it. This is all part of dealing with the issues in the protection of animals and animal health, issues such as strain 19 of brucellosis, dealing with live virus and also protection of the land to make sure you get better production.

One of the issues of animal health that is pertinent to my area at the moment is St John's wort. St John's wort has a chemical as part of its chemistry in the time up to flowering, so that chemical builds up through the springtime. After flowering this chemical falls away again. What it does is it causes destruction of the liver, cirrhosis of the liver, and the beasts, if they've got white skin, become photosensitised, which means the white skin starts to slough off. For Herefords and cattle such as that it can cause real problems. St John's wort is now out of control, and we have to look at things such as biocontrols. That's the only way to do it; you can't get enough chemical to try to spray it—that would be impossible. You need biocontrols to try to deal with that, and one of the great biocontrols of St John's wort is the chrysolina beetle. We should be working towards how we develop this biotechnology so that we can deal with these things in a chemical-free way. That's in line with the sorts of smarts that Australia has had in the past, and there has to be an aptitude and a focus to deal with it in the future.

In a similar vein are issues such as blackberries. There are a whole range of variants of blackberries. You'd think there's one, but there are probably about 13 or 14 different variants of blackberries, and trying to get a rust, which is a disease that impedes their growth—it doesn't completely kill them but certainly sets them back—would also take us away from the use of chemicals. This is what we're doing at our family's place which I manage. We're using tens of thousands of dollars of chemicals, which we spray. It doesn't matter how much you use, they always come back. It's a continual task to deal with it. If we can develop that rust, we can reduce the amount of chemicals we use. The chemistry of the pores of the blackberry plant open predominantly in wet, cool weather. In dry areas you don't get those conditions, so you need to get a variant of rust that has a more virulent pathology to deal with issues such as blackberries. Briars is another one.

As a young fellow at home I remember my father going through and saying, 'There's a dead sheep'—recently dead. There's a code for it if they've been dead for too long; it's called TFG, too far gone. But you can do an autopsy on a recently dead animal, and that's what curious people, especially vets, do. My father was saying to me, 'Why did the sheep die?' and I said, 'I don't know, old age? It died of death. It's dead.' He said, 'Nothing just dies. There is not a thing on this planet that just dies; it dies for a reason, and now we have to try and work out what that reason is.' So he did an autopsy, starting at the mouth, inspection of the tongue, removal of the tongue, inspection of the brain, going down through its oesophagus into its gut, and in the end he found it. He went, 'Aha, I've got it. It's called liver fluke. This has died by reason of liver fluke. It was an infestation of liver fluke—which, of course, when you lose your liver, you lose your life.' That is one of the greatest uses of chemicals, to try and deal with barber's pole worm or liver fluke, trying to make sure that you keep these parasites at bay. The life cycle of liver fluke comes also through the process of the freshwater snail, so you have the process of a life cycle going through to the beast.

We're always trying to work out a better form of chemistry. Another issue we have on farm produce is a thing called drug fastness. When you have an excessive use of chemicals, especially excessive use of antibiotics, you by its very nature start to breed medicine resistance within a herd. Especially we see it in the poultry industry. Once you get resistance then you immediately have to find another form of variant or a development of the chemistry so that it can go through its next iteration of being efficacious in dealing with the condition that is before you. These all require research. In the past we had great advances through the CSIRO. One of the things they were noted for was their capacity to develop the drugs that allowed the Australian people to have the incredible agricultural industry it has got.

In closing I'd like to talk about why the agricultural industry is important. Last night I had the pleasure of talking to one of our Asian neighbours at dinner. Australia doesn't comprehend at times the geopolitical consequence of its capacity to produce food. One of the great things that people are interested in about this nation is our capacity to assist them to feed themselves. This is so incredibly important, our capacity to assist them to feed themselves. One of the issues with the protein requirements of one of our near neighbours, Indonesia, particularly in Jakarta, is if Australia didn't have the live cattle trade. One of the staples of their diet is called bakso balls. They're made of beef, and they're a part of their diet that they have every day. Of course, in the Islamic faith there are certain meats they can eat and certain meats they can't.

When we ceased the live cattle trade for that short period of time, it was not just a disaster for people on the land; it sent a lot of people broke, and people who'd been doing it hardest in the remote areas who were in the live cattle trade—I'm not, but people up north are—are the ones who were smashed. I remember a lady covered in skin cancer up in the north, and she went, 'I haven't lived a really flash life; I've lived a pretty tough life, and I've done it because I believe in it. Then great opportunity came because of the live cattle trade, and for my perseverance and the privations I went through I had a chance to make a dollar'—and she did. Then she said, 'And you came out and sent me broke, shut me down. So why? Why did I live this life?'

Even in Aboriginal communities—I remember speaking to Fred Pascoe. I know he got himself into a bit of strife later on. He said, 'You wanted Indigenous people to stand on their own two feet and get ahead.' I said, 'I agree with you.' He said, 'We had 60,000 head of cattle. We were making money, good money. Then you came in and closed down the live cattle trade, and now we have a major problem. So what would you prefer—that we go back to the national parks?' He was very direct with me, 'Where do you want to send us, national parks? Or do you want us to go stand in a creek or something? We actually like this industry. It actually is our industry. It actually gives us purpose, it gives us respect, it gives us position in our local community. This is it: we're in the live cattle trade.'

In Western Australia they have the live sheep trade, and this is incredibly important for that. I rarely give a yell out to people of opposing political views, but I will here. Premier McGowan was strong enough just after the Labor Party won the election, when there was a discussion about banning the live sheep trade, to stand up and say, 'No, you won't.' It is emblematic of what Western Australia is. It is absolutely fundamental to how Western Australians see their industry. People who ban it are usually so far away from it that they don't understand it. A few facts: you have less chance now of a sheep dying on a ship than dying in a paddock because the technology that's going into it is always advancing, always getting better.

The live sheep trade is also part of our diplomatic capacity to affect other people around us. If you go around Asia, they want to talk to you about the food that you can sell them. It means more to them than many other things we can sell them, because they can't do it themselves to capacity. They can do it some of the way, but then there are the corners that we Australians produce for, and those gives us engagement diplomatically on trade with our near neighbours. This is a very important thing that people should be made aware of: the holistic managing of that industry requires investment in the chemicals and in the biosecurity mechanisms. We have to be always reaching forward and never complacent. We have to clearly understand the realities of what we are. We are South-East Asians. We don't realise it, but we are South-East Asians. That's where we live. We have to understand the nuances and the terms of trade, and what people in South-East Asia want from us.

We are also a little bit Middle Eastern because of our trade to the Middle East. We are at times very Chinese, a tiny little bit from the United States and a tiny little bit from Europe. But we have to make sure, in doing this task—which is a noble task. There can be nothing more noble than feeding and clothing people—not ripping off people by gambling on their weaknesses. Every day when I go to the paddock I think that the fruits of my labour mean that people eat and people are clothed. We raise their standard of living and give them the basic sustenance of their lives.

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