James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I want to commend the words and the thoughts of my colleague from WA Senator Brockman, a passionate defender of our agriculture industry and, more importantly, a passionate defender of the sheep industry in WA and the many thousands of people who are going to be detrimentally affected or, in plain English, very badly hurt by Labor's policy to phase out the live export of sheep. As a Queensland senator I can speak with a little experience about what happened in Queensland when a previous agriculture minister, Senator Ludwig, a Labor senator from Queensland, on the basis of a TV program, banned the live export of cattle. Senators from WA—Senator Brockman, Senator Dean Smith and Senator O'Sullivan—would know what that did.

Senator Smith is correct; it is still in the courts because what that did to family businesses across Queensland means that people in those businesses are still hurting today. I know people don't want to hear about this. They want to talk about the suicides—plural—of countless men and women who were involved because they worked in the live cattle trade out of Queensland. We are not talking just about those who might have worked on the ships; we are also talking about the graziers. If you know anything about farming, which those on the left don't, you'd know that the biggest defenders of the welfare of animals are those who raise them. So many farmers and graziers have grown up around poddy calves. They have grown up around orphan lambs being fed on the hour in the kitchen or in the laundry. They understand the sanctity of life, and they are the biggest defenders and protectors of animals. And yet we have a Labor minister, on the basis of a television program by our friends at the ABC, cancel the live cattle trade out of Queensland and out of Australia. The ramifications of that one decision by that minister, as Senator Smith pointed out, are still before the courts at the moment.

If you understand anything about the agriculture sector in Queensland, it is that these families can cope with droughts to an extent. They understand because often these families have been on the land not for two years but for 20 years, 50 years or 100 years. They understand the land. They understand that there are droughts. They understand that there are floods. But they will never understand the madness of decision-making that comes out of Canberra. I am with them because I don't understand the madness of decision-making that would lead a Labor minister, on the basis of a television program, to destroy such an important part of Queensland's economy.

So what happened to these men, women and their families is that they suddenly lost their business. People went broke. The banks moved in. For those that survived, we had a drought. For those that survived what Minister Ludwig did and survived the drought, we then had the floods in north-west Queensland a few years ago. These graziers, these sentinels, these guardians of remote, regional and rural Australia keep getting punched down by so many factors. We're seeing now, with Labor's proposals, Labor's policy to phase out and ban the live export of sheep, is a stunning and rather depressing example of Labor's failure to understand how the market operates. What's going to happen is that, without the sheep farmers of WA having a market for their sheep, these businesses—and they are businesses; they're small businesses, family-run businesses—will go broke.

Not only will these businesses go broke; for every farm that stops operating as a sheep farm in WA, there is a flow-on effect across regional WA. When the farmer and their family are not making money, it means they're not employing casual labour during peak seasons. It means that they're not going into town and spending money, so it means the small towns, villages and communities across WA are going to be hit, because suddenly money isn't being spent in town. This is what happens. This is a drought that is being forced upon the sheep farmers of WA. When a drought hits part of Australia, those who live in the small towns are hurt just as much as those who live on the land. This is something that those on the left side of politics don't understand about how natural disasters impact our rural communities. The effect is twofold: those on the land and those in town. What is going to happen in WA because the left side of politics is captured by the extreme left of politics, by these groups that use tactics that are beyond the pale to fundraise, who use lies to raise money—because the Labor Party and their coalition partners, the Greens, are captured by these people and by their ideology—the sheep industry in WA, because of Labor, will be cooked.

This is where Labor come in with their failure to understand the market. If you look at the prices for lambs in my home state at the moment, they're going down, because the market is being flooded, because people realise that one outlet for sheep is being phased out, because of Labor. This means that you're having all these lambs and sheep flood the market. On the eastern seaboard, the price of lambs and sheep has plummeted. If you go into a supermarket, the price of lamb hasn't plummeted, because our good friends at Coles and Woolies haven't passed on the reduction in prices to the consumers, even though there are so many sheep farmers on the eastern seaboard who—Acting Deputy President Hughes, you will appreciate this, as someone who is across regional New South Wales—can't actually afford to shoot them at the moment. This is the tragedy.

The same thing is going to happen in WA. Those Rhodes Scholar runners-up over on the left side of politics think this is a genius idea—they're going to save all these sheep. Well, guess what? Because you're stopping them being exported overseas, and because the eastern seaboard is already seeing a massive reduction in the prices for sheep and lambs, what's going to happen to these sheep in WA? Well, they're going to be shot, aren't they, if the farmer can afford to shoot them. They can't take them to market, because there is no market. There is no demand. The dream factory that is Canberra has once again, thanks to this Labor government, come up with a policy that will destroy the sheep industry in Western Australia, with unintended consequences—because they don't understand basic market economics—that will damage and destroy the sheep industry across the rest of the country.

This is where, as a senator, as a politician speaking here in the Senate chamber, you get so frustrated, because we on this side of the chamber can see how this movie ends. We know what's going to happen. You've heard Senator Brockman. You'll hear other WA senators. Senator O'Sullivan is following me. We're telling you how this movie is going to end. It is going to end up with the deaths of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of sheep—put down by sheep farmers. If you don't think that has an impact on the men and women who farm in WA, and their children, then you are having a kid of yourself.

Mental damage was done to the grazing community across Queensland—those on the land and those in the towns—because of what Labor did to the live cattle trade out of Queensland. Those mental scars are still there today. Those families live as much as they can, knowing that their mum or their dad took their life because their mum or their dad hit a cul-de-sac because they could not go on any further because those animals they loved so much had to be put down because of a policy decision made here in Canberra. It was one of the worst policy decisions made by an elected government since the formation of this country in 1901.

You would have thought the Labor Party would have learnt from the ramifications and the scars of that decision, but they didn't. They didn't learn at all, because they're making the same decision again over in WA, destroying the sheep industry, destroying families and destroying communities over there. But they don't care.

This is actually about raw, ugly politics. It is about ensuring that the Greens preference Labor at the next federal election. This is what this is about. It's not about the good people of WA. It is about the preferences of those Australians who vote Green, because the Labor Party can only ever win elections in this country with the preferences of the Greens, and that is sad for Australia.