Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak about this travesty of a democratic process. It is in the Senate that we have the appropriate place to review the decisions of government. It is in the Senate that we have a properly organised process to hear from both sides of the debate. We had a promise. This is another broken promise from Labor, because the agriculture minister, Murray Watt, promised a Senate committee inquiry. Instead, the House made some very tokenistic inquiry. It was very dissatisfying for all of those concerned. The sense of despair and betrayal on the part of the people of Western Australia who are involved in the sheep industry is shocking. But it's not just those people; sheep growers right across Australia are now affected. They're affected with poor prices, they're affected with an understanding that the business of those people who grow sheep in Western Australia has been fundamentally damaged.

There is some proposal that you would be able to convert those sheep, through manufacturing, into processed boxed meat. It demonstrates such a deep lack of understanding on the part of both the minister and the departmental advisers if they think that there's some equivalence between the live export trade and boxed meat. It just isn't equivalent, and that's why we now have Australian beef producers also terrified. Before the last federal election, the then Labor shadow ag minister, Julie Collins, and today's Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, made a commitment to those sheep growers that there would be no shutdown of the live sheep industry. Instead, they have completely reversed that in a deal with the Animal Justice Party for a by-election in Victoria.

I appreciate that politics happens, but you can appreciate that all of the beef producers who have been promised that there will absolutely not be a shutdown of the live beef trade now don't believe that. They absolutely don't believe that, and they are now wondering. They haven't got compensation for the last time this Labor cabinet shut down the live beef trade. They're begging for an appropriate settlement, and now they're facing the very real prospect that beef is going to be shut down as well and that the cattle industry will be shut down.

Last time that happened, it wasn't just northern Australian producers, northern Australian truck drivers, northern Australian vets, stock and station agents and the small businesses in the communities that were adversely affected so terribly; it was also the beef producers right across Australia when the market collapsed. I don't know if people understand what it is like for somebody who's in the farming industry and who battles climate conditions, market conditions, workforce shortages and all the things that you have very real challenges from when their own government attacks them by ripping away such an important market. You never ever make that money back. If it takes several years for you to grow that animal to provide great, high-nutrition, sustainably grown food and, at the penultimate point when you hope to sell, that market has been collapsed, there is no recovery from that. It takes years to get back on the same financial footing.

The Senate is the place to do a proper inquiry into this review. What we are begging for is that Senate ensure that Western Australian farmers, all of the affected businesses—the trucks and the vets and the businesses in small communities—and the children of those people who hope to stay in that industry and who will now struggle to have the balance that their business enterprises need to make them work have a fair hearing, that sheep producers in other parts of Australia have a fair hearing and that farmers and farming right across the country have a sense that the Australian parliament actually is prepared to give them a fair go. This is incredibly important, because it is only when there is faith and trust in our democratic processes that this whole place works.

This was a broken promise to the farmers of Western Australia and the farmers of northern Australia, and the rest of the country is now terrified. If we don't step in and hold a Senate inquiry, then this is a sellout of all of them.