Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will make a brief contribution to this. It gives me the opportunity to commend the work with this legislation of not just my colleague Senator Rhiannon but also many other people from the Greens; indeed, many people from a range of parties going back to the 1980s. I point, particularly, to the groundbreaking work of the Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare which was set up on the motion of Don Chipp, if I recall correctly, and which did a range of inquiries, some of which were very influential in getting significant changes happening in animal welfare area in a cross-party way. Alongside that it did have a report into live export. Even back then the major welfare implications of the live export trade were clearly acknowledged across all parties by that committee. I think that was a 1985 report. Unfortunately, all these years later, despite all of the evidence of cruelty being even worse than people had assumed at the time, we've had government after government not just continuing the trade but actually looking for ways to expand it. It really is a great tribute to the many people in the wider community who have continued to campaign to end this cruelty, which is intrinsic and embedded in the nature of the trade.

When I was in this chamber previously, one of the largest petitions of the entire decade, with hundreds of thousands of signatures, was tabled in this place from people seeking to end the live export trade. That was in the days when everyone had to actually write their names on bits of paper for petitions, rather than just click on the screen on the internet. So the size of public concern and opposition to this trade has been longstanding and very, very large. We've had motion after motion put forward in this chamber over the years. We've had other legislation and amendments to legislation moved, including some I did myself previously, over 12 or 13 years ago. Each time we've had the corporate interests winning out over the community concern and the clear and extreme suffering of animals that was displayed time and time again. It is a really sad indictment of the unwillingness of vested interests to acknowledge extreme cruelty and their willingness to use what are basically flimsy and sometimes just straight-out false arguments to try to dismiss that. Most of the time it's just been straight-out denial. Despite the absolutely mountainous evidence of massive and extreme cruelty, involving whistleblowers and activists sometimes taking extreme personal risks themselves to expose that cruelty, we've actually had an industry, aided and abetted by some in government over the years, prepared to cover up and deny the extent, both the breadth and depth, of the cruelty involved.