Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

May I say thank you to the Senate and in particular members of the government for allowing me to fill these few minutes before question time in the matter of public interest debate. No-one that I know could fail to be horrified by the scenes shown on Four Corners of the treatment of some Australian live exported cattle in Indonesia. People will object to those scenes because they do not like to see cruelty. In Australia there are any number of different views about the live cattle export trade. I do not want to specifically talk about that but I would like to talk about the method of slaughter of livestock in this country and something that I think we need to do about it.

There are religious slaughters of livestock that take place, for both the Jewish tradition and the Islamic tradition, to accommodate kosher and halal food requirements. There are people that will object to this on ethical grounds. They do not like the idea of a beast being stuck and bleeding out in order to kill it. There are other people that would also object to it on the basis of religious grounds. They would say, 'I do not want to eat or consume meat that has been killed in such a process or been effectively anointed with the blessing of either a rabbi or an imam.' I make no comment on the relative aspects of that—I have a personal choice about the consumption of meat—but I understand that people should be informed about it. I think this is quite a significant issue because a lot of the time people who do not want to participate in consuming ritually slaughtered or unstunned slaughtered livestock are not made aware of the method of killing.

A very simple way in which this could be accommodated would be for very plain and simple packaging and a clear statement, such as: 'The food you are about to consume has been slaughtered in a ritual or in an unstunned manner.' The exact wording, of course, would take some refinement. Such a process would allow the accommodation of religious beliefs and religious requirements in the preparation of meat. But it would also allow those with either an ethical or a religious objection to consuming ritually slaughtered meat to make an appropriate choice. I have discussed this with members of various religious communities. They are not opposed to the very clear labelling of food in such a manner. But the difficulty may arise when the unwitting consumer is perhaps consuming halal meat or kosher meat and does not want to; they may be surprised about how much of our livestock is actually slaughtered in such a way.

I would propose that the federal parliament consider drafting a bill similar to the bill which was drafted by the New South Wales government, the Food Amendment (Beef Labelling) Act 2009, which came into effect in August 2010. This act addressed the issue of halal and kosher meat labelling. Given the ethical or religious objections or concerns that so many Australians have had highlighted in how their meat is prepared for consumption, I think this would be a very prudent and sensible approach. I am not sure exactly how this could be done, but I have had some discussions with the drafting office. It is all about making the consumer aware of the potential to offend their own sensibilities.

We have made decisions in this regard before. Most recently a palm oil labelling bill went through this House in order to save the orangutans or highlight the issues of orangutans. I think it is absolutely critical that Australians in this day and age can make an appropriate decision about how their meat has been slaughtered, whether it has been stunned before slaughter, whether it has been ritually slaughtered and in the name of which religion it has been slaughtered, and they can free themselves from any of those burdens by making an appropriate choice. Ultimately the market will decide whether these sorts of things should be sustained and continued. I would put that on the table because I think it is a matter of public interest. It is something that this parliament needs to address. I look forward to the opportunity to raise this further in other substantive debates and to perhaps even introduce a bill to this effect at some stage.