Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

That's right—that's their fridge. That's where they'll remain until such time as they are processed for personal consumption by the people in the village or a community.

No longer can we say to people, 'We have a commodity,' and jam it into their marketplace on our terms. Those days have been gone for decades. Now they're looking for the providence of the product. They're looking for these issues—for the ticks around animal health care, transportation, impacts on the environment and labour arrangements for people who are working to produce these articles. They are setting very high standards to be met in the market sphere that we are in. We're not in a volume market. We are producing the best we possibly can, comparable to other points in the world, who are our competitors. We have to produce it at a competitive price because in most agricultural industries we are price takers, not price makers, particularly around beef. If you're starting to sell beef at a premium, above what commodity beef is processed as, then you need to meet all of these very high standards.

Through this Export Control Bill, the government is demonstrating that it will create the environment so the producers of these articles—products, commodities, livestock—can get on with the very, very important job of competing in tough international marketplaces, producing that article for which we are so well known, that high-quality, pristine piece. I think the fact that this bill is not receiving resistance in this chamber is evidence that the people who drafted the bill and the people who conducted the review and pulled this together into one piece of legislation need to be congratulated—clearly, given we haven't got a resistance movement on the floor of this Senate. There are those who might wish it to be something else. They might wish it to be, 'We'll stop all of this sort of trade.' But the fact is they know that these measures provide a significant improvement to an already high-quality environment for the production of commodities and the export of livestock.

It's a great pleasure for me to first of all thank the drafters and those staff in the minister's office, in the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources and in other departments who've been involved in the production of this. They've done a terrific job. In closing, I commend the adoption of this bill to the Senate.

Debate interrupted.