Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm always happy to take your interjections, Senator O'Sullivan, because you expose where you're coming from. Let's just remind ourselves of the depth of the failure of the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, the ESCAS. I imagine most, if not all, of us have seen the harrowing images of cattle cowering, slowly dying under the blows of sledgehammers, throats sawn agape, eyes gouged and tendons slashed; and of sheep kicked, trussed together, thrown on the top of car roofs or thrown in the back of boots when it's baking hot—suffering an appalling death. That's how it's been for too long.

These are the things that we should be dealing with and working out how we can end them, not coming up with an ESCAS scheme that is really nothing more than a PR exercise so when the exporters are caught out again, the government can get up there and say, 'We've got rules. We'll have to investigate why they were broken. They've broken Australian rules.' We know now that that's absolutely ridiculous. How can you control animal welfare from behind a desk in Canberra? It's not possible. Different countries have different rules. Just on the issue of live exports, I can never understand why Labor go along with live exports. We know why Liberals and Nationals do, because they're locked on to the rich pastoralists.