David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in opposition to the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024. This bill is a slap in the face and a major career- and business-ending piece of legislation. The response in Western Australia of those people concerned is overwhelmingly sad and angry at seeing their livelihoods destroyed.

People have to realise that live sheep export to people in the Middle East has been a longstanding business which has attracted controversy and has had improvements done to address the issues of heat stress. There are plenty of places in the world, particularly in the Middle East, to which Australian animals head by live export because those nations can't produce that amount of animal protein. As we know, the grazing capacity for Australian agriculture is much greater. These sheep have grazed in open pastures and are clean, healthy sheep. Their life on this planet is not taken for granted. Any farmer who is producing sheep for meat or for wool is very proud of their flocks and has cared for and tended to them.

Since man has walked the earth, sheep and other animals have been a source of sustenance. A lot of people don't like that, and I fully respect the choices they make in their lives. A lot of strict vegans and vegetarian people don't like the idea of eating animal meat, but there are millions and millions of people for whom this is the most effective way of keeping their nutrition up to the standards they require.

Australia has been a world leader in improving the standard of transport of live animals out of our country. We've done a great deal by introducing ESCAS, which not only looks at all the steps up to hopping onto the ship; it also follows the animals into the market where they are sold, and it has changed the standards in places in the Middle East where the abattoirs have been upgraded so that the cultural and social norms of having sheepmeat can be observed with their religion and their beliefs. We can't dictate to them what they do in their civilisation, with their cultural norms, or anything they should be doing.

What will happen if this ban goes through? You will find that other countries in Africa and in the Northern Hemisphere that have no concern for animal welfare will be there in a flash. We have to realise that the other consequences of this are that the whole blowback on the sheep industry in Australia will affect much more than just what occurs in Western Australia. There were 654,000 sheep exported in 2023. This is the exact opposite of what opponents of it said was happening. A lot of the opponents said: 'It's a fading industry. People don't like it. You have to ban it.' The figures the year before, following on from COVID, were only 380,000 but a year after that were up to 654,000.

The sheep staying in Australia means the price the farmers and graziers will get for their sheep will go down dramatically. We saw this happen back in 2011 when there was a summary banning of the live cattle export to Indonesia. A lot of the cattle that go to Indonesia are going there as live exports because they have similar cultural and religious practices about the consumption of their meat, and they also didn't then and still don't have the widespread refrigeration in every house and every shopping centre that we have in Australia. We can't judge them by those standards. But I can tell you the same thing will happen. Even with the announcement, the price of sheepmeat has, in the marketplace at least, been deleteriously affected, and it will ricochet across the country into South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and even Tasmania.

When you have 650,000 sheep who generally go, because that's tend of their life span—they won't be shorn any more, they are in their prime and they have good nourishment and good animal protein—it means all that value will have to fit into the eastern market, so the price will go down. What does this mean? For people who invested in years of genetic improvements for these sheep, all that value is going to evaporate overnight. A lot of their loans might have covenants on them, depending on the price of their sheep and value of their flock. It will do all of these things to all the people in the industry who know this industry inside out. It will affect the haulage contractors, the feed suppliers and the towns in which the markets operate. All of the ramifications of banning export mean the whole value case of those sheep will be diluted and will reduce.

To do it because they made a commitment to get preferences at the Dunkley by-election and were happy to put their principles aside to get a few votes in a by-election in another state just shows you why people are so annoyed. We're not making this up; the Animal Justice Party proudly announced it on 11 May 2024:

We are proud that the AJP could deliver the knockout blow by demanding the end of live sheep export as a requirement for our preferences at the Dunkley By-election in March. Ongoing conversations behind-the-scenes between AJP and Labor leadership has helped to finetune government policy.

For 20 pieces of silver the government, by this decision, is sending many businesses possibly to the wall, because their whole business case evaporates at the stroke of a pen when this goes into action. Admittedly, it's delayed till 2028, but it won't stop magically on that day; it'll be winding back from now, because people want to have certainty of supply. They want to know they have a viable industry going forward.

Our trading partners think of this very poorly. The member for Maranoa, the Leader of the National Party, actually travelled over to Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East and spoke to their industry people, and they were quite blunt and open. They're not going to buy our boxed lamb, because they don't want boxed lamb. There's a certain part of their market that wants to have freshly slaughtered animals, and that's why they built special abattoirs where the cultural practice of choosing your animal can be observed. They follow religious rules, which are up to the highest standards, for the slaughter. The standards on the vessels are a far cry from those that we saw in public several years ago on the Awassi Express.

The package the government is offering as a readjustment package will not replace an existing driving value chain around live exports. People in the cattle industry have connected the dots: the same Animal Justice Party who congratulated themselves on trading livelihoods for a few votes at a by-election have live cattle in their sights. We will revisit this, I am sure. People are speaking about this already in those circles, because it is their firm commitment and they can hold it. But you can't destroy what is a social or cultural norm in our trading partners' countries and destroy the industry that supports them as well as their food security.

I travelled to the Middle East many years ago when this was an ongoing industry. Members were speaking about it then. We travelled to the United Arab Emirates where they displayed how they developed a country that was underdeveloped at the end of World War II through developing their natural assets and have turned the place into amazing cities. Other countries in the same area, as their populations grow, have to feed people but they don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of acres of grazing country to run animals. They can only have a limited number of cattle and sheep and goats. All those animal protein industries are at risk as a result of this. The message, loud and clear, that this government needs to hear is that people in the Middle East also supply oil that runs our liquid fuel transport industry. We depend on Middle Eastern providers of our oil and we provide them with lots of other technology but particularly food security—grains and fruit as well as animal protein.

The other side of the House needs to realise this will be to their detriment. The industry will not support them at the next election if that is what moves their dial. They need to know that Animal Justice have established petitions. I have heard of numbers of 10,000 or 12,000 people signing petitions to end this trade.

Since this was announced, in Perth, in the space of three or four weeks, 60,400 people have already signed up to support the Keep the Sheep campaign, which is aimed at getting the government to change its mind. So we have only 10,000 or 12,000 across a whole country people signing a petition yet in three or four weeks, in one city in one state, we had 60,000 people put pen to paper and sign up to the Keep the Sheep. The whole idea, whether they like it or not, is not going well in WA.

Mr Speaker, I'm sure you are really enjoying being in government, because people voted you there, but a lot of those voters didn't realise that you were going to ruin agriculture, and this bill is the latest measure that will make agriculture more difficult.

In the Murray-Darling Basin area, which has a lot of sheep graziers and large, large flocks in Victoria and New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, they are all watching this closely. The ramifications of this ban won't just be felt in Western Australia. This is a really bad piece of policy. We do defend the rights of people to export their sheepmeat and their cattle. We insist on very high standards. We've improved the standard internationally, but this will mean that other people who get judged by Australian standards won't have to compete with us anymore; they will be given open slather. I don't support this bill— (Time expired)

See this speech in context