Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The industry has had four decades of notice to phase out the live sheep export trade. I will point out the incidents that have occurred over that time, and this is only a short list of what I was able to quickly gather. There was the Farid Fares in 1980, 40,000 sheep; the Uniceb in 1996, 67,000 sheep; the Cormo Express in 2003, 50,000 sheep; the Ocean Drover in 2012, 21,000 sheep; the Al Messilah in 2016, 3,000 sheep; the Awassi Express in 2017, 2,000 sheep; the Queen Hind in 2019, 14,000 sheep; the Al Kuwait in 2020—that's when we had the COVID debacle; and the MV Bahijah in 2024, 12,000 sheep. Most of the incidents I just quoted came after the implementation of the ESCAS conditions, which members opposite say are the best in the world. I agree that they are, but, even with those conditions, there is a litany of failures with respect to this trade.

It has also been pointed out, separately to anything that any government has done, the reality is that this is a diminishing trade. Right now, we have an industry that's worth $4.5 billion. The value of live sheep exports, which are still carrying on right now, as we saw on the MV Bahija only two months ago, is 58 times less than the meat export trade. That's how much it has declined, particularly over the last two decades—with the first seven years of that under a coalition government. It was also a coalition government which supported the McCarthy review after the Philip Moss review. Both of those also highlighted serious concerns with the industry. Members ought to get a reality check about what has really been happening in this industry.

There are alternatives. The argument that other countries don't have freezers and the like is simply nonsense today. That might have been true 40 years ago, but that is simply nonsense today. Even the now opposition's own deputy leader argued that this trade needs to come to an end and said that the live sheep trade is in terminal decline:

Unfortunately this is an industry with an operating model built on animal suffering.

Those aren't my words, they're the words of their own deputy leader.

New Zealand ended its trade in 2007. In 2023, New Zealand said, 'No more animal exports of any kind,' not just of sheep, of any kind, and that's what they agreed to only last year. It didn't kill their industry.

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