Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

On 14 May, federal budget night, the Treasurer, the member for Rankin, went to that spot and adjusted his red tie, and in his budget he announced the biggest spend for agriculture would be that he would pay farmers to stop farming. He would pay farmers to stop farming. Wouldn't you think that a government which wanted to be there and wanted to govern for everybody would at least have something in the budget which would help those people who the member for O'Connor quite correctly thanked—and we should thank our farmers every day, three times a day. They grow the food and they grow the fibre that puts food on our table and clothes on our back, and not just for us but for many other countries besides. Yet the biggest item of expenditure in the federal budget this year was to pay farmers to stop farming—$107 million to Western Australian sheep farmers to stop doing what they're doing. That is a disgrace.

I've got a little bit of advice, too, for the member for Eden-Monaro. In the next election, under the new New South Wales federal boundaries, she is going to take over Goulburn. That's if she wins her seat. Goulburn, since 1985, have had one of those 'big' things—many of our cities and towns across Australia have them—and for Goulburn it's a big merino. They are very proud of their sheep production. For her to say that the Labor government is bringing the farmers certainty—well, I'll agree with her; she's very right on that. They are bringing to the Western Australian sheep farmers a certain end, and this is just beyond belief, because our farmers are the very best in the world. We are also telling the world that their business is not good enough for Australia. What we're telling the Gulf States is, quite frankly, the insult that we no longer want to trade with them, just like in June 2011 we told our Indonesian friends—one of the largest, if not the largest, importers of our cattle—that we didn't want their business any longer.

Tony Mahar, Chief Executive Officer of the National Farmers Federation, had this to say in a recent media release:

The Government's political decision to end live exports showed scant regard for its own departmental advice, and caused widespread financial damage, family breakups, and even suicide among those impacted.

We do not want to do that to our WA sheep farmers. Paul Brown, speaking today in this building, said that this will have an effect on the sheep industry. He said it will have an effect on families and on people's mental health. He knows full well the impacts of this sort of thing. He ran a feedlot which didn't do that well, and he said that he was very affected by it. He was very emotional when he spoke. We also heard also from Mark Harvey-Sutton, from the Australian Livestock Exporters Council. He was talking about the 31 May rally in Perth, and he said he's never seen anything like it in his life. The cars and the sheep-transporting trucks extended 20 kilometres long. This rally, he said, created solidarity.

Every agriculture body supports the Keep the Sheep campaign, and the Keep the Sheep campaign is coming to the electorates of those WA the members. The WA members need to heed the warning that the member for Curtin very much listened to when she got up and spoke in support of the legislation to ban live sheep exports and then voted against it. Why did she vote against it? It was because people power came to an electorate office near her, and people power will come to an electorate office near those WA members. They want to keep the sheep, and so they should. Despite what the member for Fremantle tells us, the animal husbandry—the animal welfare standards—on those ships was world's best practice. We are the only country in the world to have that exporter supply chain assurance system in place. Every one of those sheep was well looked after. The animal husbandry was first class, with veterinarians on board. We looked after the sheep. It's a pity Labor didn't do the same for our farmers.

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