Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to oppose the government's bill, the Inspector-General of Live Animal Exports Amendment (Animal Welfare) Bill 2023, not because the coalition don't absolutely support animal welfare but because this is a case of overreach which may have a perverse outcome of seeing state governments withdraw from the animal welfare space. We have seen that in housing and many other areas; where the Commonwealth government gets involved, the state governments tend to use that as an excuse to withdraw their resources. So the coalition will be opposing this bill, and I certainly support that stand. I want to use the opportunity today to talk more broadly about live exports and certainly the importance of those live exports to my electorate of O'Connor, where probably 70-plus per cent of the sheep originate from, and also to touch on the phase-out panel which the government has put in place, which the member for Newcastle, speaking previously, touched on.

Firstly, about live exports in O'Connor, around 70 per cent of the animals that are exported from Western Australia come out of O'Connor; it's essentially a Western Australian industry. The importance of that industry to my constituents and up to 120 towns—many of them small towns, small communities, where the school might only have 20 or 30 kids and two or three teachers, and the education department are constantly looking for an excuse to close those schools down. Many of the local pubs, which are the heart and soul of the community, are struggling to remain viable, particularly with labour shortages and other issues. They are relying on the people that work in this trade. They are the people who drive the trucks, the shearers who shear the sheep, the livestock agents who are the brokers between the farmers and the exporters. They are critical to my communities, and their livelihoods are under threat, as are those many, many small communities across the electorate of O'Connor.

As the member for Newcastle said, the government has instigated a panel to phase out the live export industry out of Western Australia. They are effectively inviting members of those communities and the people who work in the industry to come along to a session to debate how they should phase themselves out of a job, phase themselves out of existence. When I say 'invited', I say that reservedly, because initially the phase-out panel headed by Mr Phillip Glyde tried to sneak into WA and meet with some hand-picked groups that they thought might give them the sort of answer that they wanted—that yes, the industry is ready to roll over for 40 pieces of silver, a bit of compensation money, and everybody will get on with life and things will be rosy.

That plan came off the rails; it didn't last 24 hours. When word got out in the Moora district, in the northern part of the Wheatbelt, in the member for Durack's electorate, that the panel was coming to Moora but would only be speaking to hand-picked guests, the outrage was palpable and the panel backflipped very quickly. With less than 24 hours notice, 80 people turned up in the Moora town hall, and the panel got a taste of what was about to unfold. I wasn't at that particular meeting, but I believe that 80 very angry farmers and local business people and community members told the panel in no uncertain terms, firstly, that they resented the fact that they had tried to sideline them in this process; and, secondly, just how important the industry was and is to those communities.

The panel then travelled to York; Narrogin in my electorate; and Katanning, which is my home town, the home of the largest sheep-selling centre in the Southern Hemisphere and a large abattoir owned by the Western Australian Meat Marketing Co-operative, a cooperative of growers. That was the first meeting that I attended. There were over 200 people there. Once again, I couldn't have been prouder of my constituents, my people, my friends and my neighbours who turned up to that meeting. They were respectful while being very passionate, and they left the committee in no doubt that this industry is critical to their future prosperity and the future of the community and their businesses.

There are some very sound reasons for that. As a lifelong farmer in that particular district, I can certainly relate to the arguments that they put forward. The first and most important one that most people don't understand is that the live sheep export industry is the outlet for the merino wethers. I'm glad the member for Fremantle has arrived in the chamber, because he's been to Katanning and the saleyards. I'm about to give him some insight into just how important this particular industry is. The merino wether is a by-product of the self-replacing merino flock, which produces wool and is the backbone of the rural economy across the Wheatbelt of Western Australia. As I say, it's a by-product. It is not a fat sheep. It's not bred to grow a round carcass, which is the lamb chop or the lamb roast that people would buy—if they can afford to nowadays—at the supermarket. The merino wether is a lean animal. It is bred to grow wool.

But it just so happens that our customers in the Middle East have a strong demand for that type of animal. The local processors don't want that animal. Yes, they will process that animal if it's put into a feedlot and, at great expense, is fattened to within an inch of its life—then it becomes an attractive animal for the processor. But there's no profit in that for the farmer. By the time he feeds that animal up to the extent where it's ready for the processing market, there is no profit. But the live export trade, which has been going for nearly 70 years now, has a strong demand for the merino shipping wether. If you take that fundamental economic pillar out of the self-replacing merino flock, the merino flock itself, which underpins the rural economy across my electorate, is effectively unviable. The impact is not just on people that might sell their surplus wethers to the live export trade; the impact goes much further than that. This is what the panel heard loud and clear, that the impact on those communities when you lose your shearing teams, when the school closes down, when the truckie goes out of business—those communities have a very dark future under this current government's policy.

To move on from that, I want to update the House on the current situation in Western Australia in relation to animal welfare. This might be of interest to the member for Fremantle. I want to put some context around this. When I first finished university and went back to the farm, in late 1989, the wool industry was at its peak. There were 190 million sheep in Australia at that time, producing five million bales of wool. It was still one of the nation's largest export earners. With the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, sheep became valueless overnight. One of the first jobs that I did when I left university, under the then Labor government's national flock reduction scheme, was to destroy hundreds if not thousands of sheep because they were valueless.

What's happening in Western Australia at the moment is shaping up, unfortunately, into a similar situation. We've had a very poor start to the season in terms of rainfall, although there are good rains forecast today. Just about every farmer across my electorate will be doing what I'm doing, checking the radar every five minutes. We'd had 5.8 mils of rain at Katanning a few minutes before I stood up to speak. The forecast is for a bit more, hopefully. But the season has begun very poorly.

The processing sector—in Western Australia, there are two main abattoirs that process sheep—can't find enough people to work in the plants. They are so far behind in their processing schedule that farmers can't get a booking until October. It was weeks ago when I heard that, so I don't know what it is today.

Without the outlet of getting sheep away to the processor—if they are that type of sheep—and without being able to get the sheep away to the live export trade, farmers are confronted with a very, very dark situation. They either have to try and buy feed in to keep those sheep alive for at least six months, going then into a very tough summer, in the hope that at some point they will be able to get rid of those sheep to a market somewhere; or they go to the local gun shop and stock up on a lot of bullets. That's the situation that we're currently facing in Western Australia. Hopefully, that will be alleviated with some good rains in the next few days—as I say, it is forecast, and I'm watching that radar with great interest. I am praying and hoping that that will relieve the pressure on the farming businesses across my electorate, but, if not, it's the most heartbreaking thing you'll ever do, to have to destroy sheep.

Fortunately, at this point in time, come the middle of September, the live exporters will be back in the market. At least a farmer in my electorate today knows that, if he can keep those sheep alive for three months, if he can keep them in condition score 2 or 3—which is a good, healthy condition but nowhere near fat enough for the processors to contemplate, even if they were looking for sheep; even if they weren't booked out for months ahead, those sheep would still be unattractive to the local processors—at this point in time, come September, the live exporters will be back. I've spoken to them, and there is great prospect for reopening the Saudi market. They're talking about having two ships on the run—we're down to one ship at the moment—getting rid of 100,000 sheep every two weeks.

That's the outlet. That's the safety valve that we have today. But who knows how long that safety valve is going to be there? There's talk about, 'Oh, but we'll process them locally.' Find me the people that are going to work in the processing plants to do that. Deputy Speaker Stevens, I know you come from the wool industry yourself. You would understand better than most other people in this chamber the sort of situation that my farmers are confronting at the moment.

Yes, we'll get through this period, because there are good rains forecast over the next week, and that will get the season going. We will get through to September, possibly at great cost in terms of hand feeding, but we'll get rid of those sheep in September to the live export trade, and we'll have the opportunity for the spring feed to get away so that we've got some feed in the paddocks to carry those sheep through the summer—the ewes, the lambs and the hoggets that we're retaining for next year's breeding program. But we'll do it because we have the live export trade there.

A lot of farmers in Western Australia, as we speak, are going: 'This is all too hard. I can sell my sheep. I've got a tractor, I've got a big air seeder bar, I can put some extra crop in. I don't need the shearing team. I'll get rid of the workmen and the stock manager that looks after the sheep. I don't need to get the truckie in to cart the sheep.' What we'll probably have is a town where the school will close, the pub will close and the local footy team will shut down. That's what confronts my community simply because this government made a promise to win some votes in some inner-city eastern state seats. Yes, we have the member for Fremantle here. He would have worked out that it would have played well in his seat as well. It is going to destroy livelihoods and communities and, perversely, it could have some absolutely devastating animal welfare outcomes.

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