Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Forrest leaves, I'd like to assure her that she's not on her own in this place. I'm the daughter of a mixed farmer. We grew grain, dairy, sheep and pigs, and I too lived through a crash in a market. It was a crash in dairy in Victoria that resulted, ultimately, in my father's death. But that's not what the Export Legislation Amendment (Live-Stock) Bill 2018 is about. This bill is not about crashing a market. This bill is about ensuring that Australia has a reputation as a clean, green, safe, high-quality and ethical producer of food. That's what the amendment to this bill is about. We come into this chamber to debate a bill that this government has put forward as a fix-all on what has residents in my community incredibly concerned.

Like those Australians, farmer's child or not, I was deeply disturbed and disgusted to watch the now infamous footage of sheep on board the Awassi Express. What is more disturbing than the footage itself, though, is the fact that this was not a one-off incident. The 60 Minutes program on 8 April showed on-board treatment of live sheep over a series of voyages. This segment shed light on an ongoing issue that is being left to spiral downward, without a regulator and without the teeth and the grunt for enforcement. And I don't believe that the legislation that's before us tonight will seriously change those practices.

The segment also shed light on the failures of this government, and, in particular, the series of ministers for agriculture who have done nothing. They have sat back and have allowed these incidents to occur without any kind of intervention. This government have continually failed in the live sheep export space, first with the former minister, the member for New England, Barnaby Joyce, and now with Minister David Littleproud. In fact, let us go through a brief timeline that demonstrates the government's repeated failures over the past couple of years.

It is too late now to cry, 'We need to fix this,' in terms of taking a long view and suddenly increasing fines to make things change. The behaviours haven't changed. What Labor is proposing is a transition period and a government that would work with the farmers to ensure that we can stop the summer trade and come to a situation where live exports and the farmers can continue but without the scenes that we have seen.

In October-November 2016, footage obtained by Animals Australia showed cruelty to Australian sheep in Malaysia and in the Middle East. Fast forward to 2018, April, and nothing had changed—same harm, no regulator. In August 2017, reports revealed that 3,000 sheep died due to heat stress on a single voyage to the Middle East in July 2016. So it took a year for that to be exposed. In November 2017, concerns that unfit ships were being used for live exports to the Middle East prompted the Western Australian government to seek to send a government official to inspect a live export vessel in the Fremantle Harbour. This attempt was unsuccessful. The result: the status quo remained and sheep continued to be loaded onto ships with inadequate ventilation on long-haul voyages in those summers.

In February, the Western Australian government commenced an investigation into a voyage by Emanuel Exports in which four per cent of the shipment of 63,000 sheep died. In March 2018 it reported that the live sheep export trade to Saudi Arabia was set to resume by mid-2018. In April 2018, the notorious footage of conditions on board an export ship bound for the Middle East in August 2017, released by Animals Australia, emerged. Approximately 2,400 sheep died of heat stress in this footage, and this footage was disturbing. I don't believe there's a member in this place that could see that footage and not be disturbed by it—as disturbed as members in my community.

I would remember the words of the member for Hunter—after the decades that he's served in this place—and his comments about the amount of contact he'd had from Australian citizens. I would echo that, that in the five years I have been in this place, I have not seen the amount of emails, the amount of letters or the amount of phone calls to my office on any other issue. And I want to share some of those here tonight.

One is from a local vet: 'I want to see Australia protect our farmers and protect our animals from this cruelty by stopping the live sheep animal exports and expanding a sustainable trade in chilled and frozen meat instead. We need to stop May-to-October exports now. We need to halve stocking densities now. We need highly trained, independent observers on all voyages now. And we need to plan how to end long-haul live animal exports for good.' These people aren't writing lightly. These people aren't similar to those in the past—just sending awful photos in the post. These people are thinking through the issues and contacting their local members to urge us to do what commonsense says we should do. Here is another from my hundreds of emails: 'I'm dismayed by the suffering of animals that I saw on the 60 Minutes program. It has absolutely stunned caring people everywhere. Temperatures well over 40 degrees, packed so closely they can't move, cooking alive. You wouldn't wish this on your worst enemy.'

There is no doubt about the impact that this footage has had, and there's also no doubt, in my mind, that this situation has worsened under this government. They have turned a blind eye to what has been occurring, not just on the AwassiExpress voyage but on other long-haul voyages. The cruelty to the animals involved in this trade needs to be pulled back and pulled into line. The farmers in this business need to be supported through a transition. I have people who work with animals in my electorate; farmers have said to me that they were disturbed by it. This should not become an argument about: it must go on or it must stop. This has to become something that this place can work and find a solution for.

This government now has the responsibility to legislate meaningful reform. The crux of this bill is to ensure that penalties and sanctions are high enough so as to provide a level of deterrence and punishment necessary to protect the sheep exported. The sentiment of that is welcome. But you have to ask: where has the regulator been? Why are we seeing this footage on our television screens, backdated, and nothing's happened in the interim? These are the questions the Australian public wants answers to. They want to know why so little, so late. And they want a different answer to this question. They're not going to accept an increase in penalties when it appears there hasn't been a regulator in place to oversee and ensure the penalties are actually placed when the breaches are occurring. This bill does nothing to address the ventilation issues, it does nothing to prevent the same kind of cruelty that we saw on our television screens from happening right now. We can't go far enough into the cruelty. The people who are writing to me are not people who normally pick up a pen to write about animal welfare. They're people who have been shocked and disturbed and don't understand how we can put profits above the way we are going to be perceived internationally for the way we treat our stock.

This bill needs to do a lot more than it already is doing. It was deeply disturbing to read two weeks ago that the ship at the centre of the latest live export scandal passed 39 inspections over five years. Deputy Speaker Andrews, if you thought the letters had stopped, once that became public knowledge they began again. Because, rightly, people are concerned that a ship can fail to comply with the ventilation requirements but can have 39 inspections over five years and be passed. Clearly, as the people writing to me have said, something's wrong with the system.

The system needs to be changed. We need to be legislating to ensure that the sheep at the centre of this scandal are treated humanely on their journey to the Middle East. That means stopping the summer trade. That means finding new solutions. Minister Littleproud saw the footage and said on the record:

I've seen the footage and I was absolutely shocked and gutted. … This cannot go on.

Well, hear, hear. That's what the residents in my community have said: 'This cannot go on.' Yet, for all the emotive language from the minister, we haven't seen any real and meaningful reform to ensure that we don't continue to see the horrifying footage of sheep suffering on those long-haul voyages.

The outcry from residents in my community about the issue has been overwhelming. We have received hundreds of emails and letters. On social media, it is hard to scroll for a few seconds without seeing a post about this issue. It is very real and very alive in my community. And I stand with those members of my community on this issue.

Those opposite want to talk about the past. They want to talk about the Australian government, the Labor government, having to stop live export in the meat industry in the past because of cruelty happening in abattoirs at destination points. I echo the member for Hunter's sentiments: things changed as a result of that pause. Things changed on the ground. And the level of animal cruelty was reduced dramatically. The industry won't change unless government acts.

I'll finish with a few more points that my local residents have made. 'Banning awful sheep live export means so much to me. People are disgusted by this cruelty, yet the government continues to ignore what the public wants.' I don't believe that the person who wrote that to me will be satisfied with this legislation—with an increase in fines but without the surety that there will be regulation of some kind. And I don't think that, at this point, the Australian public is going to be satisfied with anything but the cessation of the summer trade.

To quote another local vet in my community: 'I want to see Australia protect our farmers and protect our animals from this cruelty.' I don't think I can say it any better than that. We need to know, in our communities, that this trade has stopped—that what we saw on our television screens will not happen again.

We need to look at the mechanisms in this trade. Is the trade flourishing, or is the trade, in itself, reducing? Is this government just waiting for this trade to peter out? In the meantime, we'll continue to see these shocking images on our television screens—post-dated, of course, by some months. It is too late now to say that we can change the density on those long-haul summer voyages. It's too late for that. We need to stop the long-haul summer voyages. Then we need to look at a real regulator in the industry. We need to transition. We need to create, working with the farmers, a reasonable transition, to ensure that their livelihoods are protected but also that our country's reputation as a grower of ethical, high-quality food is maintained.

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