Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

The minister is saying it's not true. I will say that I have read reports of Wellards' letter to the minister. I'm wonder if the minister is saying it was a different minister, because I've actually had a conversation with Wellards about that matter and I understand it to be true. But I will acknowledge that the minister has challenged me, out of courtesy to him. Wellards told me that they did send a letter to the government of the day, saying, 'You've got to do something about these exemptions with no sunset clauses. We have vessels at sea that were given exemptions many years ago and the exemptions just remained in place ad infinitum. If you don't do something about this'—and this is one of the live exporters—'then there is going to be a catastrophic event in the sector.' What did the government do about the Wellard letter? Nothing. The first we learned of the Wellard letter was sometime after the Awassi Express incident, and we would still not know about it if parts of the industry hadn't started defending themselves against other parts of the industry.

I will just go back briefly to the summer trade while I'm talking about the industry. Graham Daws, the CEO of Emanuel Exports, the exporter involved in the Awassi Express, said on our national television screens, 'No matter what you do, you can't do anything about the northern summer trade.' His words were effectively, 'No-one can do anything about these climatic events. They just happen.' Well, I think that was the Labor Party's point. That it doesn't matter how heavily you regulate or what the standards are, they just happen. They're unpredictable, and when they come, you'll have significant mortality rates.

And with more on mortality rates, can I say again—and I do welcome the McCarthy review acknowledging this—that mortality rates aren't a measure of animal welfare standards. What we've been saying is that it's all right for 1,800 sheep to die, because that's within the mortality rates. If 2,500 sheep die, that's okay—don't worry about the other 58,000, who probably wish they had died because they suffered the whole trip. The ones which died were probably the lucky ones. But this is not a measure of standards, and McCarthy has recognised this. The government has embraced it and, of course, there will be a new way of measuring the animal welfare issues within these matters.

I'm talking about culture. Culture is all-important. When you have a minister who does all of these things with the full authorisation of his Prime Minister—and let's not single out the former, the almost former, member for New England—he was just the minister of the day. Those of us who have been in cabinet know that these are decisions of government, and these were all authorised by the Prime Minister of the day. Again, I suspect that members of this government regret allowing those two things to occur on their watch, because it did them no good whatsoever and it has been damaging to the trade.

I said that this is cultural; the minister's attitude affects the culture both within the regulator and in the industry. But it goes beyond that. It can also affect the culture in the research sector. LiveCorp is the RDC for the live export trade. We asked them a few questions at Senate estimates last week. We asked them, for example, why the language has changed about mortality rates in the live trade sector. In one initial report, the language changed from 'substantial increase' to something like 'minimal increases'. But, more particularly, they told us:

One high-mortality voyage each for 2013 and 2014 will not be included in some analyses, as the high mortalities occurred under exceptional circumstances, and would distort the study of long term trends.

What LiveCorp are saying is that when they have an 'exceptional' event, as they call it—and, no doubt, the Awassi Express incident was an 'exceptional' event—they don't include it in the data because it's an exceptional—

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