Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have listed this private member’s motion so we can have a discussion about an issue that concerns many people in Australia, and one that is based on facts. I also raise issues of concern to locals in my area of Page which they have raised with me over the last three years. My overarching concern is for the industry—for farmers and all associated with it; for meat processing and all associated with it. My primary concern is jobs. Another concern forms part of the debate and also informs the debate, and that is the welfare of the animals, which is important. As a Labor person, jobs concern me—creating them so that we have economic and social inclusion and supporting and sustaining wealth-creating industries such as farming and the livestock industry.

I have seen some figures from the MLA claiming that if we did not export livestock or have a live export trade then it would cost a certain amount of money and impact on our overall budget. But I know that the figures are based on a cessation of it overnight, at midnight tonight, not on what this motion is about. Point (3) of the motion makes it very clear: it calls for ‘consideration of a planned and supported transition in the medium term away from live exports and towards an expanded frozen and chilled meat export industry’. There are seven parts to this motion, and that is at the hub of it.

The live export industry is a risky business. If you laid an audit template over it, it would come up with all red signals. We know that with an audit template there are red, amber and green. I do not see any amber or green with this industry; what I see are the red signals. It is not a healthy situation for an industry to be high risk in that many countries taking live exports are increasingly moving to chilled meat and processed meat. There is volatility in their markets and in some of the countries. They are also being paid hefty subsidies. That puts us at a disadvantage here, not the locals in those countries. We have also seen the impact of Indonesia’s move to a policy of beef self-sufficiency, the 350-kilogram limit, and we know what that will mean to the live export industry here.

This motion is about sustainability and the general reason I outlined above and some specifics about jobs. I will turn to jobs because it is jobs that have disappeared in large part due to live exports. We are exporting jobs from our shores and not processing, particularly in regional areas where the meat processing takes place. In my area we have the Northern Cooperative Meat Company, which is a very large employer based in Casino. They have a fine reputation and export chilled processed meat to many places around the globe. It is one of those industries we all want to protect in our area. The way the live export industry has developed in Australia, and being as risky as it is, it is risky for them but also risky for our locals.

I have a few facts here. In the past 30 years, 40,000 meat processing jobs have been lost and 150 processing plants have been shut down, primarily due to the live export trade. If those jobs had been able to be taken up because of the live export trade and had been replaced in other areas, even then I would have had some concerns, but that has not been the case. From February to August 2010, 960 full-time Australian meatworker jobs have been lost nationwide. That is an average of over 150 jobs each month. The AMIEU, the union which represents workers in the meat processing area, is calling upon the government to take action to prevent further job losses and it spells out some of those. One of the plants that closed was Killarney, which is not far from my seat of Page, just over the border in Queensland, and another was in Dinmore in Queensland, where I used to work, in the seat of Blair. (Time expired)

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