Senate debates
Thursday, 27 June 2024
Motions
Live Animal Exports: Sheep
12:38 pm
Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I seek leave to move a motion relating to the referral of the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024 to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee, as circulated in the chamber.
Leave not granted.
Pursuant to the contingent notice standing in my name as the Leader of the National Party in the Senate, I move:
That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me from moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to the referral of the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024 to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee.
Here we are again in this chamber that is supposed to provide an opportunity for the people of Australia—across the length and breadth of our wide, brown land—to come before our committees. Whether they agree with the substantive issue or not, they can put their case. The standing committee can hear from community groups and stakeholders and generate a report that will be put before the Senate. The Senate then makes a decision on whether or not to support any given legislation.
Here we have the decision of the government to shut the live sheep trade in WA, to put out of work transport and truck drivers, and to put at risk the economic underpinning of regional communities, from one end of Western Australia to the other. That's not to mention the blood, sweat and many, many tears over many, many generations of our primary producers in Western Australia, who are proudly supporting particularly Middle Eastern markets with live sheep so that those predominantly Muslim communities can select their beast and make sure that their families have high-level, clean, green Australian protein on their table each and every night.
The Labor Party has made this decision in order to win seats in mainland capitals on the east coast—in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. They've done preference deals and they've also done it to shore themselves up from quite a resurgent Greens party in those seats with an alternative view. So make no mistake, this is a highly political decision, but it has very real-life human consequences for the mums, the dads, the kids, the farmers, the truckies, the processors, the exporters, the doctors, the teachers and the men and women who reside in these communities up and down regional WA. This Prime Minister promised he'd have WA's back. But do you know what? No sooner had he got the keys to the Lodge than he turned his back on Western Australia.
If I know anything about Western Australia, as an east coast Nat, I know that there is no capital city in this country that is more connected to where the wealth is generated than Perth. Suburbs of Perth understand that it is the mining industry, the agriculture industry and the fishing and forestry industries that underpin their wealth and the wealth of our nation. That connection has been lost in other capital cities. But the Perth suburbs know that this is bad for WA. They know that this is bad for their friends, their family and their future. That's why the call-in board lights up at 6PR and on ABC Perth when this topic is mentioned. People are not going to take it lying down. They have absolutely had enough and they're going to fight to the death to overturn this. It's why tens of thousands of Australians have signed keep the Keep the Sheep petition and it's why so many thousands of people have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to get rid of Anthony Albanese's east coast Labor and actually overturn this ban, like the National Party and the coalition have promised to do should we have the great privilege to be returned to government.
I want to give a shout-out to the men and women who are the front line of this fight: Paul Brown; John Hassell; the pastoralists and graziers; Tony Seabrook; Mia Davies, the local MP there in the Central Wheatbelt; Shane Love, the Leader of the Opposition in WA; and his many colleagues in the Liberal and the National parties in WA, who are not going to take this lying down and who are going to stand up and fight every inch of the way, just like we are here in the Australian Senate this week. You haven't seen anything yet. It is our desire and strong belief that, irrespective of where you stand on this substantive issue, the Senate is the place for the people to bring their concerns to be heard. We need something better than the sham of a process held in the House of Representatives, where the submissions that people had taken the time to write in haven't even been uploaded onto the committee website. This is people's livelihoods, and you have that level of respect. Give us a real Senate inquiry, make sure people can be heard and then make your callous decision to shut them down.
12:43 pm
Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to 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.
12:49 pm
Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I move:
That the question be put.
Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The question is that the closure motion moved by Senator Gallagher be agreed to.
12:57 pm
Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The question now is that the suspension motion moved by Senator McKenzie be agreed to.