David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

In fact, as the member opposite interjects, that bill from the last time the Labor was in government and shut down the live cattle industry is going to cost the Australian taxpayer well in excess of $200 million because the Federal Court found that the Labor minister at the time, Bill Ludwig, made it without proper consideration.

When there was an incident with this industry, we worked with the industry. We didn't have a knee-jerk reaction. We didn't shut it down. We made sure that we reformed it, and we reformed it to a way that has led the world, that has set the standard internationally, that we should be proud of. We didn't put our head in the sand and we didn't turn away from this. We made sure that we could face up to the world in saying to them that this is the standard that now everyone must meet. By cutting and running, which isn't the Australian way—not while we're in government, anyway—you will have perverse animal welfare outcomes because that standard will be lost.

Let me tell you what I did to reform this industry when I was agriculture minister. It was about the stocking density rates on those boats. It was abut making sure that we had science and that we reformed the methodology of how we assessed the success of a shipment, whether it be cattle or sheep, to anywhere in the world. It was to make sure that was predicated on world-leading science that was created right here in Australia to make sure that the community had confidence and we set the standard internationally. That science was so intricate that we went from a mortality methodology, where the assessment of deaths on a boat of over 60,000 to 70,000 sheep had to be reported if there was one per cent mortality on that shipment, to now being down to half a per cent. Instead of going by the mortality, we overlaid that with the cause of that mortality: heat stress. That heat stress is what we made the reforms around. That was very scientific. It was done by eminent scientists and veterinarians that could give us confidence. It went to the very heart of the principle of the reforms that we put in place to make sure that these animal welfare standards would lead to us leading the world.

In fact, that sheep that trave on these boats now actually put on weight. As someone from western Queensland, let me tell you: animal husbandry is pretty simple. If animals are fed, watered, can walk around and can have a lie-down, they're pretty happy. When they're happy, they put on weight. It's a pretty simple philosophy and pretty simple in terms of what is happening to these sheep that we now have on our boats. We have made sure that each individual boat that comes to this country has its own individual score in terms of the air that flows through those boats. That's important in setting the stocking density rates to ensure that those sheep are happy and content and that there are good animal welfare outcomes. We score each individual boat by the way that it's built and by how much airflow it has. Then we look at each individual animal before it goes on that boat, and we measure to the millimetre the length of wool on each sheep—they're shorn before they go on—and they're allowed on. We also weigh them, and the weight of the sheep is very important as well because that goes into the stocking density rates you can put on these boats, in the pens. That's important because, if you have airflow and you have the weight and you have the length of the wool, that reduces heat stress.

But we went a step further. What I wanted to do when I was the minister and what our government wanted to do was have truth and proof. We wanted to prove to the Australian community we were leading the world in animal welfare standards in the shipment of sheep to the Middle East. I put in place independent observers that gave truth and proof about how the exporters were treating those animals on the export voyage. That was about making sure we had certainty and currency in what we were doing and what we were saying. They made sure that they built on that science of not just the airflow that was going through the boat, the stocking density predicated on the length of wool and the weight of those sheep; it was also about the pants per minute. We could work out whether sheep were heading into a heat stress situation by the number of pants they were taking per minute. This is a shipment of 50,000 or 60,000 sheep, and we were able to demonstrate that because of the reforms we put in place we would then have precautionary principles taken over by those exporters to ensure there was artificial airflow to reduce the humidity, to allow the airflow to go through and to reduce those pants per minute to ensure there was a good animal welfare outcome. That is something no other country in the world had ever done before, and that is what we did here in Australia.

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