Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

On the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024, I'd like to note the member for Mackellar—this is the issue: people who have no idea about the live sheep trade are making comments on it. I'd like to note that the member for Mackellar has to deal with those well-known sheep producing areas, such as Palm Beach, Scotland Island, Dee Why and Akuna Bay! It's so easy to be moralistic about something when you don't actually live in the industry and you know nothing about it, to be quite frank. The incidents that the member talked about are incidents from many years ago. Might I just note that some of them were inspired by payments by animal activists to put the animals under stress. They turned off the air conditioners and didn't de-foul the pens. Because they had graphic images, they got paid a lot of money. In fact, that person got themselves a very nice house. I think it's in Thailand. That was one of the people whose responsibility on the ship was actually to look after the sheep.

The mortality rates of sheep on ships now are about equivalent to what they are in the paddock. It's a completely different industry. There were issues in the past, and they've been dealt with. You will not get rid of the live sheep trade, I hate to say to the member for McKellar. It's still going to continue on. It's going to continue on from Somalia, from Kenya, from Turkiye, from South Africa—and the way they work is this: whatever comes off, they get paid for it. They don't care about the animal welfare issues. So, by doing this, ipso facto, you are actually promoting a worse form of the trade. You are taking out of the market the best player, the model player, in the live sheep trade and replacing them with all the others.

We also note that they talk about how you make more money out of processing sheep. But do you think the processors are going to be happy, mad or sad that one of their biggest competitors is now out of the market? They're going to be loving this because there's less competition, less people on the rails buying the sheep, which, of course, forces the prices down. Have I heard the Labor Party or anybody else say, 'That's alright; what we'll do is invest in abattoirs to deal with this issue.' No, they won't. What we will see is—and I'm very aware of this—that people will make a judgement to just keep shearing the sheep and hope that what they make out of the wool this year is more than what the sheep would cost. What that actually means is that they end up just dying on the paddock. They just keep shearing them until they die. That will be the prospect. Some people will go broke because their place is just not viable unless you have this.

There are so many issues happening in the Middle East. I have been to the Middle East quite a number of times, and that is pertinent to the live sheep trade. For us to have relevance, there has to be something that we do that they want. And the live sheep trade was it. It gave us a mechanism to have a conversation with people in the Middle East, which now will be lost. We have to understand how they work culturally and not try and impose our culture on them.

One of the reasons the live sheep trade happens is because of a lack of refrigeration in those areas; that's how you keep the meat from going off. But now, by reason of Australia being in it, they have brought in new abattoirs—new abattoirs for humane treatment when slaughtering sheep. That's because Australia was involved in the trade! That's why it happened. But now we're removing that. Now we're going to vacate that market. So it's a very scripted and constricted view of the holistic outcome of what happens to sheep. What those opposite are saying is that what happens to sheep in Australia justifies the more barbaric treatment of sheep somewhere else. And that's exactly what will happen.

I also note that the member for Mackellar said exactly what we know—that this is just the start. This is the thin end of the wedge. She actually nominated the live cattle trade—they want to close it. Banning the trade was probably one of the worst decisions Australia has made in regard to its closest neighbour, as a supplier of protein to its people, especially the people of Jakarta for their bakso balls, a staple that they eat. She said it: it's on. So we're heading towards banning live cattle. We also heard the member for Bendigo giving a speech, I believe, on issues of land transport. This is where you can only transport them for so long and then they have to have a 24-hour spell. In a country the size of Western Europe, this will be devastating. The way we work is completely different to the way they do in Europe. It just won't work! And I declare that I produce and sell sheep, and also cattle.

We've also had the activists in the same genre coming and saying they don't want rodeos anymore. Those are part of our culture; they're what we do. People from Palm Beach might not understand that, but you understand it if you're from Tamworth because that's part of who we are. And there are campdrafts and, for those who are lucky enough, polo. But, really, it's about campdrafts, rodeos and stock transport. In our area, people get so frustrated. The people I talk to don't get this place, and this is a great example of why they don't. Look at a contract musterer who is working hard; they say: 'Our job is to feed and clothe people. That is what we do. Because we do our job, we add to the global food stack. And because we add to the global food stack, people at the bottom of the stack, who would otherwise go without, get fed.' The people who feed off the top are having steaks, but it all falls down: there are too many people on the globe and not enough food. That's exactly what's happening now: the number of people who are malnourished and who are 'starving' is going up exponentially because this globe cannot produce enough food.

Now, this is what you do if you want to make it worse. This thing abides by an anthropomorphic principle, where animals are people and people are animals. What happens if you follow that is that you just start treating people like animals. If you believe that and you want to go to a non-animal diet then a couple of things will happen. You will have to completely denude all the country at certain elevations with certain rainfall and certain soil types of all vegetation and then plant soybeans. And you will still have about three billion people too many in the world. I don't know what you do with them; they will die. People have to be sustained by protein, and there are some tricks to growing protein. What we've got—what nature made, what God made—is this very interesting thing. He made capacity in marginal areas where you can't grow soybeans and you can't grow chickpeas so that you can convert minor pasture and lesser pasture into units of protein. It's a really clever thing. And that goes onto the food stack and feeds people. That converter unit that converts minor pasture and lesser pasture into protein is called a' sheep'! It eats mulga and lesser vegetation, and converts them into protein. So you can actually get an outcome, an output—a moral good—in food, from lesser country. But what they're doing here is to say, 'No, that won't happen,' because this is the sort of country they come from—basically, older sheep; full-mouth whethers and full-mouth ewes. They're the ones who end up in the live sheep trade.

We now see this great split, where regional Australia is run by Palm Beach, Scotland Island and Bellevue Hill. It's not run by the people who actually live there. This will filter through into other sections of the rural economy. It's no good saying, 'I believe in rural Australia,' and getting yourself a brand-new set of RMs—maybe not RMs, because that is Mr Forrest, and he's putting up the swindle farms—or a new Akubra, or maybe not because that's also Mr Forrest, and parading yourself around saying, 'I love youse all. Here we are at Rockhampton, rah, rah, rah. Come on, come and have a beer. I love to have a beer with Duncan,' and then go and shut down one of the cornerstone industries because you want to look after the people of Palm Beach, the people in the seat of Manly or people who really have nothing to do with the industry at all.

I'll tell you about another group that has been thrown under the bus. There was a former premier of Western Australia who was very popular. I think his name was McGowan. Even though he was from Labor, he actually stood by the industry because he's a Western Australian, and it's very much a Western Australian issue. It's part of the iconography of Western Australia. One thing that Western Australians hate is eastern staters telling them what to do, and this is precisely that. It's eastern staters telling Western Australia what to do. The parochialism of Western Australia works in such a form that they sort of bind together very quickly when they see you picking on Western Australia.

So we've got a bit of an issue here. The Prime Minister is not going so well. He's not going so well in the polling; let's be honest. He's kind of cooked. They're going to have to do something rather tricky at the next election to try and stay there. Part of that trick is that they've got to hold seats in Western Australia. This says to Western Australians, 'Don't vote for the Labor Party,' and that's precisely what they'll do. Maybe, in a perverse political sense, I should say, 'Thank you very much,' because you're going to help hand across seats to us from Western Australia. All you ministers can go back to that other part called 'the corridors of irrelevance', which is opposition. You'd be great! You've successfully made yourself the second one-term government in the history of Australia, because you've decided that it's better for you to look after teal seats and inner urban seats than to actually stay in government.

I know you don't really care what we do in regional areas. You just don't like us. That's quite evident. You don't understand us. You have no respect for us. You push an unreasoned and unresearched moral view of an industry that you don't understand. You haven't been a part of it recently to understand exactly what we've done in the improvement of animal standards, where we lead the world.

I remember when the live cattle trade started. I have to be honest, I was the first one to give a press conference as the shadow minister for water, and Tony Abbott lost his mind with me. He rang me up, said I was outrageous and asked whether I had watched Four Corners. I assured him and said, 'Tony, this is one of the worst decisions that has been made by a government, and time will prove me correct.' Without self-aggrandising—but I suppose I am—I was correct. People now clearly acknowledge that it was a disaster of a decision. The Indonesians looked at us and said: 'Our relationship with you relied on you feeding us and being a reliable source of protein. Jakarta's a big place. We get rather scared when we've got nothing to eat. We thought you were reliable, but you're unreliable. You've got this vacuous, mystical philosophy that says, "I can supply you with protein," and then all of a sudden you don't.' They'll also be watching what we're doing here with the Middle East and saying: 'They're at it again. Here go the Australians again.' They're on the path, and they'll be saying: 'We've got to start looking around. We've got to start finding somewhere else.'

Much of the whole economy that underpins northern Australia is the live cattle trade, which is just another addendum to the live sheep trade—the live animal trade. This is remarkable, because these are the things that actually take Indigenous Australia, ahead. They are actually part of the industry. They can become very wealthy. They'll also be looking at it and saying, 'Well, there you go. The people of urban Australia, they love us and they want to buy our paintings. But when it comes to something we start making a buck out of, they start closing us down. They moralise about us. They only like us in a kind-of way, in a way that suits their rules, their morays and their terms.' There's another word for it; it's called 'patronising'. They're very patronising.

The coalition have stated, as they should, that we'll reinstate the trade. Here's a clear statement to the people of Western Australia: if you vote for the Labor Party, they will take away one of your major trades because they don't respect you. They're eastern staters coming over to tell you how to live your life, because they think you're repugnant and immoral. If you vote for the coalition, if you vote for the Liberal Party or the National Party, we will reinstate your trade because we believe Western Australia has a right to have one of its major industries maintained. You'll get this choice as to whether you vote for people who don't respect Western Australia or do respect Western Australia, I would suggest, in the next six months, maybe earlier. And when you go to the ballot box, you can say, 'Am I going to have someone in Mackellar, in Palm Beach, in Scottish Island, in Bellevue Hill, at Manly, at Dee Why, telling me what to do in Western Australia? Or am I going to boot them out?' And I would boot them out.

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