John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. Let us look back at the decisions of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Perhaps we will go to the live-cattle-export issue. We saw the Four Corners story and we supported the abolition of Australian exports of live cattle to those abattoirs which were clearly doing the wrong thing. Then the minister put a total ban on the export of live cattle. What a financial mess this has been for the graziers in the Top End of our nation. This is a clear example of one minister with too much power doing something very wrong. Once the cattle got over 350 kilograms live weight, they were not suitable to send to Indonesia. So, as the delays went on, what could the people do with their cattle?

I live at Inverell, a lovely town in northern New South Wales, where we are fortunate to have an abattoir. Those Top End graziers were forced to send cattle from the top of Western Australia thousands of kilometres by road to Inverell. That is a classic example of a minister making a very bad decision. What Minister Ludwig should have done was to get a copy of that film, hop straight on a plane to Jakarta, meet with the Indonesian agriculture minister and say: 'Look at this. We have a problem. We do not accept animals being treated like this.' I agree with that proposal totally, as someone who has done my own butchering on the farm for many years. Whether it be beef cattle, sheep or pigs, I am no stranger to a butcher's knife. I would never, ever condone animals being treated like that.

To come back to our argument about ministerial power: it is seven million square kilometres. Like it or not, the Greens carry a lot of weight in this Gillard-led Labor government. We know we have to preserve our fish stocks. We know we cannot just go out and net the fish stocks. It is all about sustainability for the future. We know that in 1998 the Howard government led in the right direction on this very important issue, the conservation and retention of fish stocks in our marine areas. But there were consulta­tions. The government worked with the industries and the people, whether they were local fishermen who just wanted to go and wet a line on the weekend or professional fishermen. To leave this in the hands of a minister and take it away from the parlia­ment is wrong, by all democratic beliefs. How could you trust a minister? I could give you other examples. I have talked about the cattle industry and what a shambles it was.