James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It is very important, when any government or chamber comes to make public policy decisions, that we understand what has happened in the past and understand that failure of policy. There were many great failures in the previous Labor-Greens government—we don't have enough time. There were two in particular. They effectively opened up our borders to the people smugglers; that was the greatest failure. The second-greatest failure was what they did with the live cattle trade. For those who do not understand that, I would encourage them to go to regional Queensland. I would encourage them to go to Normanton. I would encourage them to sit down with the cattle producers and those involved in the cattle industry in rural and regional Queensland, whether in Normanton, Cloncurry, Winton or wherever it may be. I want them to sit down and understand what the ban on the live cattle trade did to them and their communities and what it actually did do in terms of producers who, sadly, took their own lives.

What we're seeing with the bill that is before the chamber is a desire to extend this perverseness to the sheep industry and to the export of sheep from Western Australia to the Middle East. We know what will happen if this passes and if this chamber and this parliament approve the banning of sheep to the Middle East. As Senator Richard Di Natale says, they want to—and I wrote it down—'end all live animal exports'. That is a terrible, terrible thing to do. It is shameful that anyone in this chamber or this parliament would want to do that, because of the damage that would inflict upon rural and regional Australia. But it's not just rural and regional Australia. The damage will impact upon our economy. Ten thousand jobs depend on this sector. That's 10,000 families. How many rural communities? The flow-on effect when these jobs go—this is an industry that is worth $1.6 billion. We must continue to tackle the issues that impact upon all public policy decisions in Australia. We must improve the trade. We've got to weed out the problems. But we must support our farmers, not just throw up our hands and say, 'Look, we want to shut it all down. These farmers can go and start weaving baskets or open up a coffee shop or something like that.' That is just a failure to understand how the rural economy works.

Minister Littleproud engaged Dr McCarthy to do the McCarthy review of the Middle Eastern summer trade of sheep. That was released on 17 May along with the department's response. This review gave us a map to progress immediate improvements to the current trade and into the future. All of Dr McCarthy's 23 recommendations were accepted subject to further testing and consultation on the heat-stress risk assessment recommendations. Given the proposed heat-stress model recommended by Dr McCarthy produces fluctuations in stocking densities of between 18 and 85 per cent, it requires further work, which has already commenced. In response to other recommendations of Dr McCarthy, the regulator has reduced allowable stocking densities. This means sheep are getting up to 39 per cent more space, with stocking densities reduced by up to 28 per cent.

Before I go on to further points that come out of Dr McCarthy's review, I want to remind everybody who is listening that in 2017 there were 1.7 million sheep exported in the live export trade by sea, and 99.29 per cent were delivered in good health. That is a very good figure, a fantastic figure. The live animal trade to the Middle East is a very important industry. The Left want to extend this ban to the live cattle trade but it should not be implemented because we have a very, very good live animal trade. Dr McCarthy's review wants to establish the mandatory investigation of any voyage on which more than one per cent of the sheep perish; ensure all vessels carrying sheep to the Middle East during the northern hemisphere summer are equipped with automated watering systems; and place independent observers on all voyages to report back to the regulator.

The review of the capability, culture and investigative powers of the independent regulator, which in this case is the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, is also near completion. Mr Philip Moss AM will report later on his investigation into the capabilities, investigative capacity and culture of the department as the independent regulator of live exports. The regulator needs the best available tools to do its job without interference. These tools include tougher new penalties to punish exporters who put profit before animal welfare and break the rules.

The government would like Labor to stop playing politics and vote with us for the Export Legislation Amendment (Live-stock) Bill 2018. The proposed amendments increase criminal penalties, introduce offences for directors of companies and introduce new regulatory options. Under the current act, penalties for wrongdoing in live export are a maximum of five years in prison and a $63,000 fine for individuals. For a company, the maximum fine is $315,000. These will increase to eight years in prison and a $100,000 fine for individuals and a $504,000 fine for companies. If people have done the wrong thing in relation to animal welfare—and Minister Littleproud has been very, very strong in relation to this—they should be 'nailed, not slapped on the wrist'.

This is what is fascinating about the failure of the Left to understand rural and regional Australia: the best protectors of animal welfare are not those who come from the inner-city suburbs; they are the farmers themselves. If you speak to any grazier, any sheep farmer or cattle farmer, they are the ones who are in love with their animals, who want to protect their animals and make sure their animals are in the best possible health, because they know that a happy animal, an animal that is well cared for, is an animal that they can get more money for. And that's what we're here for. We want to make sure that our animals are in the best possible condition, because we want to get more money for our animals. The more money we get for our animals that we export live to the Middle East and to Indonesia means the more money that goes into our rural and regional communities—that is so important.

It is rural and regional communities that are still doing it tough. Look at what's happening with the drought. Parts of Queensland, for seven years, have been in drought. In my view, it's one of the greatest natural disasters to hit Queensland in the last few decades, if not in the last century, in terms of the lack of rain that has fallen. We're not just talking about the fact that there has not been enough rain; there are parts of Queensland where it has not rained for a number of years. We have children in parts of western Queensland who have never seen rain fall from the sky. That is sad in terms of not only the impact it has upon the rural producers but also the impact it has on the small towns that are in western Queensland.

What we will see with this bill, if it is passed, is another disaster hit the rural and regional industries of Queensland and Australia. Western Australia will be smashed, their sheep trade will be smashed and the sheep industry over there will be completely turned on its head, because it is false. It is false to say that those in the Middle East will suddenly accept a chilled meat trade. Minister Littleproud has met with the governments of the relevant countries in the Middle East and they have said: 'If you turn off and stop exporting your sheep to us, it means we will not take our chilled meat from you. We'll get our chilled meat from elsewhere, and we'll also get our live sheep from elsewhere.' There are a bunch of Lefties who have had a bit of a get-together and who have decided that this is a good thing to do because it's bumper sticker politics. Some emails have come in, and they're using their outrage to raise money to campaign against rural and regional Queensland when what we need is for this chamber to not smack down the sheep trade and not smack down the cattle trade but to understand what rural and regional Queensland needs. Actually, what we need is more of what the government is doing. The government has done some fantastic work in terms of supporting those who are impacted by the drought.

We must understand that we're in real, real danger here of history repeating itself. Labor and the Greens destroyed the live cattle industry. They took a sledgehammer to communities across not just Queensland but also the Northern Territory and huge damage was done to those communities. In 2010, the Indonesian market imported over half-a-million head of Australian cattle, representing nearly two-thirds of all live cattle exports that year, and that was switched off via press release. Via press release we effectively declared a protein war. We turned off the protein that an independent sovereign country needed. The Left do not understand the cultural sensitivities of our trading nations and do not understand that, actually, most people in Indonesia do not have the ability to have fridges, so they want to have fresh meat from those markets. This government will strongly stand on the side of the live animal trade, both sheep and cattle. I encourage senators to oppose this bill.