Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I have a great deal of respect for the member who spoke previously, but I will make this point: he's a city expert on a regional issue. That's what I'd say. With all due respect to the previous speaker, this bill—I say this on a lot of bills that we're debating at the moment. with what the government are bringing forward—is showing a city-elite attitude versus a regional or rural attitude. What this bill is all about is city elites saying to country people either (1) we don't like what you do or (2) we don't like how you do it. This is another example. It's getting quite depressing. I'm sure the elite teals would feel the same and the inner-city Greens would feel the same, and, obviously, we're seeing the same thing from the inner-city Labor people. They know best! They know what country people should do. They know what farmers should or shouldn't do. How do they know that? They know that from a TV program.

About 10 or 15 years ago we saw when this first started. This ideological obsession they have started from a Four Corners program that ran a negative thing on live exports. We saw within a few days that the then Labor agriculture minister shut that industry down. It caused great distress to the farming community here and, let's not forget, it caused great international relations problems too, with us and our trading neighbours.

There's a term that's become a little bit infamous, if you like, in Australian politics. It was tweeted—or now x-ed, if you like—by a left-wing journalist, who accused a previous prime minister, a Liberal prime minister, of 'ideological bastardry'. That was the term that she used in relation to what he was doing. I can tell you right now that this Labor Party bill is ideological bastardry. I don't think you'll see that journalist tweet that about anything that the Labor government does or that the Greens talk about, because that suits her ideology. But, obviously, things that the other side of politics did didn't suit her ideology. You'll never hear that term—ideological bastardry—come from her about what this Labor government does, but that is exactly what this policy is.

All industries reform and all industries, hopefully, get better over time. There have been—and I've heard a couple of speakers on the other side talk about this—instances where what happened on some of these ships and boats was not okay. The industry admits that. They've reformed and they've got better. We are a world leader in animal welfare with live exports. We have become a world leader. We should be proud. We are proud, on this side of the chamber, about what our farmers do, how they've reformed and how they've got better at what they do. They do that across everything.

But from the elite teal people and the elite greenies to this side—no. They have an ideological obsession—'ideological bastardry', as Laura Tingle used it—about what we do, about what our farmers do and about what we do in the country. I could go on about a whole lot of other industries that they have this on, but I won't. This is another example.

We have said very clearly on this side of the chamber that, if we win the next election, we will reverse this decision. I went to a meeting near where the member for Forrest lives—not in your electorate, Member for Forrest, but in Katanning, a big sheep-producing area in WA. They were sitting there, about 300 or 400 of them, going, 'Look, maybe if somehow we could move the wharf or the export terminal from where the live sheep get exported from out of Perth, maybe if we moved it to a different area'—that would be an issue—'maybe that would change their minds and they'd be more accepting of it.' I said to them, 'Look, unfortunately, it doesn't matter where you do this. It doesn't matter where the terminal is; they hate you. They hate what you do and they do not want you to do what you do. You could have this in a terminal 100 kilometres down the road and they will close you down because they don't respect what you do and don't respect who you are because of what you do.'

As we said, we will reverse this. I know the member for Parkes spoke earlier—a great farmer himself. One of the things he raised was animals give you really good feedback if they are being well looked after. Because of the reforms in the industry, what happens when sheep go on to these live export ships is they put on weight. I'm a far more modest farmer than the member for Parkes. I know my cows, calves, when they are happy, they put on weight. If they have enough feed, they are content and they will put on weight. That is the experience of these live export ships. But do these people want to hear that? No. Because it doesn't matter what the industry does. They want to shut it down because they know best. They know best from social media or media stories. It is unacceptable. I would like to challenge if any of them have been to a live export ship. I have. I have had a look. I would like to challenge them: Who has? Who has gone out? Who's gone and spoken the Western Australian sheep farmers and asked them, eye to eye, 'Why do you think what you do is okay? Why do you think you should continue what you're doing rather than take your news from a left-wing media source?' That, again, is one of the problems we are having here.

I want to go through some of the amazing reforms that have happened within the industry. They don't do live export all year round. It was decided that, in the really hot Northern Hemisphere summer, we wouldn't export at that time because it is less comfortable. There was improved ventilation, there was automated environmental monitoring, there were independent government observers on decks, there was a system called Live Ex to ensure consistent data was being collected, there were selection criteria at farm level to make sure sheep were more suitable, lower penning numbers and a whole lot of other stuff. But they don't care. They're not interested in the reviews. The review was half-hearted.

The other thing I want to end on is what this does to our international relations. In the Middle East, we are looking to do a comprehensive agreement with the UAE. We live export now to the Middle East and to Indonesia too, a country close to us that we export beef to. What are we saying to those countries when we say, 'We are not going to do this anymore.'? We are saying to them, 'What you do is not okay.' This is causing international issues. Again, what the inner city elites are saying is they know best, not only about what we think on this side of the chamber but what should happen around the world. That is unacceptable.

What is the perverse outcome of this legislation? This is the perverse outcome: if you want good animal welfare standards, you have just made them worse because this industry isn't going to disappear. There are countries, for cultural reasons and for other reasons, who demand and want to process their own beef or their own red meat. They demand that and that industry will stay. So what's going to happen? There will be countries who step in to fill this void who have worse animal welfare standards. If you are going to be completely altruistic about this, what would you say? You would say, 'We should stay in the industry because we are improving the animal welfare standards worldwide because we're the best at it.' When we remove ourselves from this, when these bastardry ideologues opposite remove us from this, what will this do? It will mean the animal welfare standards around the world fall. So what will that mean for the animals involved? It will mean they have worse welfare than they currently do.

That's the hypocrisy of those opposite; they are not interested in what is actually a good outcome, or in what is a good outcome for the farmers, or in what is a good outcome for our exports, or in what is a good outcome for our trading partners, or even in looking to continually improve the industry. They are interested in their ideology of satisfying the left-wing, inner-city, entitled groups of who they are. I felt a lot of empathy for the farmers I spoke to in WA a month or two ago. It was clear that the writing was on the wall that the Labor Party was never going to listen to them, no matter what they did, said, changed or improved. The government were never going to listen to any of that because they'd made up their minds with their own ideology.

It is a very sad day for the farmers, their families and a lot of the communities. This is a big industry in some of these communities, and the sole industry in some of these communities. The supply chains they have, the carters, the truck drivers, a lot of the industries around that support them—again, this is Labor, for ideology, killing off an industry. It's going to have a detrimental effect which will be felt and already has been felt; other people have raised this issue. When you can't export something, when you have all these animals that were going to be live exports staying onshore, it floods our market. We don't have the processing capacity. They go, 'We should be value-adding and selling them ourselves offshore.' We do that, and we satisfy that demand. This is a market that exists because they want live exports. I know the member for Parkes said this when he spoke: the stock stays onshore, and the stock floods markets over in the eastern states and everywhere else around the country. What does that do? That makes really low prices for people's sheep. What will that do? That'll hurt every sheep farmer in the country because we're going to have oversupply and we're not going to have the processing capacity—and we don't have the processing capacity—to process these sheep.

The government don't care. They talk about this compensation package which does nothing for the people involved and won't help them in any meaningful way. It is very disappointing to be up here again talking about how this country is now divided between inner-city elites—the teal elites, the Green elites and the inner-city Labor Party elites. It is to the detriment of the good people of Australia, especially regional and rural Australia—good, hardworking people who want to earn a living and generate jobs and wealth for this country. This industry is doing that. The government are doing this simply to keep Four Corners and the people who watch it happy.

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