Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024.

Deputy Speaker Freelander, I ask you and all those in this place to cast your minds back to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a grim time, and something that shook the nation. It was something that took us by complete surprise; something that hit us from the side. Suddenly, families went to the supermarkets or to town in a panic. They didn't go to buy a new car, or a new iPhone, or a new coat or a new pair of jeans. They didn't buy gold or other precious metals. Instead, they went to the supermarkets and bought food. When push came to shove, when the pressure really came on—and it was a life-or-death situation at the time—people resorted to buying food as a first priority. And that priority should be maintained as a paradigm and a pillar for our thinking as we move forward. The food production of this country is a sovereign risk, and it's something that we must look at, first and foremost, if we are to preserve the security and the food security of our nation.

Dwight D Eisenhower once said that farming looks very easy when your plough is a pen and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield, and I think that summarises and underpins the decision when we start looking at the export control amendments around live sheep exports. People in Canberra, people who have no idea about the agricultural sector and bureaucrats that do not understand what it's like to run an agricultural operation are posing implications onto the agricultural sector which they cannot possibly deal with.

As a farmer from Tasmania, I'm somewhat removed from the process of exporting live sheep, but the process of exporting and moving cattle and sheep by sea isn't removed from the great state of Tasmania. In fact, last year we moved 834,000 fat lambs out of my port in Burnie in the electorate of Braddon for the Coles and Woolworths slaughter job in Victoria. You might ask yourself: With that amount of lambs, why shouldn't Tasmania have their own abattoir? Why wouldn't they have their own meat processing in the state of Tasmania? The answer to that, when we start looking from an agricultural perspective—from those that know the business—is that if we were to build an abattoir that was capable of dealing with that amount of animals then they would probably kill that amount of animals in two months. What are the slaughtermen and all the process workers going to do for the remaining 10 months of the year? It isn't economically viable. It isn't viable to sustain that level over the full 12 months, and that's why the movement of those live animals out of Burnie into Victoria is absolutely necessary and is crucial to the maintenance of that industry in Tasmania.

When it comes to the standards that are required to move those animals from A to B via a ship, it's the most regulated industry that I've ever come across. The rules, the regulations and the compliance that are involved with moving a live animal are enormous. I visited Wagin in Western Australia last year and I listened to farmers. I listened to the honesty in their voices when they said they had complied with every direction that had ever been given to them—every rule, every regulation in relation to the export of live sheep, they had complied with. They have done their due diligence and they have been responsible stewards of that industry. They've done themselves a proud justice of maintaining all of those protocols. What do we do in return? We shut their industry down.

Farming is about mitigating risk. Farming is a multilayered pursuit whereby it's not simply one thing one day and the same thing the next day. There are a number of moving parts, and it's all dependent on a number of issues. Farmers have to deal with climatic conditions and with climate variability. When you start talking animals, there are a thousand things that can kill them; a farmer's job is to make sure they don't. A farmer's job is to make sure that they look after their animals. I know that I care for my animals deeply, as I do of my own children, and I cannot bear to see them in any suffering whatsoever. But, when it comes to external forces like bureaucratic decisions that come out of Hobart, that come out of Canberra and that come out of the cities, that is an external force, an external influence that farmers simply cannot deal with. It comes from the side and it has no relationship whatsoever to the nature of farming and the fact that a farmer deals with nature every single day of his or her life. And that's the difficult thing. It gets back to that quote that I used earlier: 'Farming looks very easy when your plough is a pencil, and you are a thousand miles away from a cornfield.' And I think there's something in that.

The deepening divide between urban and rural is another issue that I want to discuss briefly. The people in the cities and the towns, those people I talked about earlier, who, during the COVID outbreak, rushed to the supermarket and stocked up on food—I doubt very much whether any of them, when they were ransacking those shelves, gave any consideration or thought for the farmer that put the food there. That is where we need to get back to.

I see that the shadow minister for energy and emissions reduction has just come into the chamber. When he starts talking about the 280,000 kilometres of poles and wires that are going to go around, linking our intermittent power sources up to the grid, they're not going to be going through the bush; they are going to be going across the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance in most cases is a prime agricultural land. And I'm here to tell you today that we have very little of it, and it is precious. It is precious to that vital food security and sovereignty issue I talked about—that security of producing food to feed our people first. If we cannot feed ourselves then we will not survive. And it's not until push comes to shove that we start to even consider this.

Our WA farmers have borne enough. As I said, they've complied with every direction given to them over many years. This has been going on since the sixties. I've been on those ships. I've visited them. I've had tours on them, and the conditions onboard those ships are impeccable. I was surprised and shocked at the thought that has gone into, and the protocols that surround, the transportation of live animals by sea. They are more likely to die in the paddock than they are on that vessel, on that voyage. They are more likely to die of natural causes than they are to die on board a ship. And if they do then the regime, as far as compliance is concerned, is immeasurable; it's out of control.

My point is that this is a very regulated industry. It is world's best practice. Farmers care very deeply about their animals. At the end of the day, if we don't produce the very best animal, and if we don't get that animal to the place of sale in the very best of conditions, then that isn't going to do our bottom line any good. So it's in our best interest to look after our animals. As a farmer myself, I understand that if I don't look after my land then I'll have no land to make a living on and my next generation won't have a farm to make a living on. We understand that intimately.

The next point I want to make is that of the thin end of the wedge, as I call it. We might talk today about the removal from WA of live sheep export to the Middle East. Where does that stop and when does that start? When does the Labor government intend to knock off? Where is their limit of exploitation? We started talking about the movement of cattle—and I know that's slightly removed, but we are on a similar train of thought here. If they're going to stop live sheep export out of WA, what's going to be next? The stopping of live cattle, Bos indicus cattle, out of Darwin into the Indonesian market? Some 600,000 animals go to that market. Is it going to stop there?

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