Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sadly, I'm not quite sure that the new government is actually getting the urgency of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Indonesia, including in Bali. Last week I attended a briefing from the minister. I learned something from that briefing: if we get an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Australia—just one outbreak—our exports will cease, which is 70 per cent of our production, and it's likely to take two to three years to get that export status back. If it were to get into our feral populations of goats, pigs, camels, deer and buffalo, I don't think we'd ever get our export status back. This is a chronic danger.

I note the government has now brought in the mats with citric acid. I hope they are as effective as the footbaths. I made the point last week in a speech that, if you are coming back from anywhere that has a foot-and-mouth infection, you should expect to have your luggage opened completely, as if you were making a declaration. If there's footwear in your luggage, it should go in the bath and be given back to you in a plastic bag. Most especially, we need to stop meat imports from any one of those areas. We saw the McDonald's hamburgers coming into Adelaide, or trying to come into Adelaide. But let me say the New Zealand government has banned meat imports from any country in the world that has foot-and-mouth disease. And we should do the same.