Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to update the House on an issue which impacts thousands of my constituents and has been come to be known colloquially in the media as the 'cash for cruelty scandal'. Just to remind the House—and I have spoken on this issue many times before—this relates to an issue that took place on the Awassi Express in Qatar in August 2017 when tragically 2,800 sheep perished in diabolical conditions. There's no question that that happened.

The Department of Agriculture, the regulator, inspected that incident and reported in March 2018—mortality report No. 69. While acknowledging that the incident was unfortunate and that the animals certainly died, they concluded that the exporter had taken all measures possible in the circumstances.

In April 2018, 60 Minutes aired some footage that had been gathered by a whistleblower, Mr Fazal Ullah, who had been a deckhand on the ship. Subsequent to that footage, the industry was thrown into turmoil. I saw a recent estimate of $100 million worth of economic damage to the live export industry—80 per cent of which are my constituents.

To go to the update that we saw in the media on the weekend, we saw revelations that Animals Australia are out there openly offering to pay deckhands to neglect sheep on these boats. One particular email from Lyn White, from Animals Australia, urged the deckhands to leave ill, sick and injured sheep in the pens rather than moving them to the hospital pen at the end of the deck. For those of you who haven't been on these boats, there is a hospital pen at the end of this deck and the veterinary surgeon on every boat attends to the sheep in that pen. Ms White was actively encouraging deckhands to ignore those animals so that they could get the sort of footage that they were chasing. The sort of money that they were offering for these deckhands was up to a year's salary to inflict this sort of cruelty on these animals.

I want to conclude today by informing the House and my constituents that I have raised this issue about the lack of rigour on behalf of the Department of Agriculture as the regulator in pursuing this inquiry and these issues directly with Minister Bridget McKenzie. It would appear to me that the media are doing a much better job of uncovering this cash-for-cruelty scandal than the regulator tasked with looking after the industry.