Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024. First, I wish to quickly address Senator Pocock, who just spoke on this issue. There will be another chance to send this to inquiry, Senator Pocock. I foreshadow that I will be moving a second reading amendment to once again try to have a proper inquiry into this bill. The communities of Western Australia—including the farmers, the shearers and the truckies—deserve no less. I would encourage not just you, Senator Pocock, but all the crossbenchers to vote to refer this bill to inquiry to give those communities a chance to have their concerns heard.

I was sworn into this place in August 2017, in the same month the Awassi Express incident, as it has come to be called, occurred. But my association with the sheep industry in my home state of Western Australia predates that by a long time. Tonight in this chamber I'm wearing my father's watch. It was my father who transitioned our farming business from cattle to sheep in the late 1970s. From that time—from my early teenage years—we were producers of Merino ewes—a self-replacing flock of Merino ewes of the kind that is such a keystone of the Western Australian agricultural system. The self-replacing Merino flock is in-built diversification in a farming system. It provides wool from the ewe. From the ewe you also get prime lamb, which is more often than not slaughtered for the domestic market. But then, for some producers and in some seasonal conditions, it also provides the chance to hold older, less heavy sheep through for the export market.

The Western Australian seasonal conditions relied on that safety valve of the export market. We were a small producer of prime lambs and, whenever we could, we sold prime lambs, because the dollar value was higher. But occasionally, every three or four years, we would have carryover stock. I can remember one thing very clearly from my teenage years and in my 20s when we went to the markets, then at Boyup Brook: if the trade was there, Dad was happy, because if the trade was there, you knew you were going to get a fair price for your sheep. If the export trade was not there, you knew prices were going to be low. If it was only the abattoirs competing for lighter stock and perhaps some of the farmers, you knew prices were going to be low.

The domestic abattoir system in Western Australia will not replace live exports. Anyone who says it will is lying to you. It cannot replace live exports because of seasonal conditions. It cannot replace them because when Western Australia turns off its stock as a result of this policy the flock will shrink in WA. All those effects that we've heard about from earlier speakers—the shrinking of country towns and the elimination of whole industry segments—will take place.

The wool industry, reliant as it is on shearers, is based on this idea of the self-replacing merino flock. That is why we have a wool industry in Western Australia. That's why in the 1960s we were able to ride on the sheep's back. What you are ripping out of communities is that in-built economic diversification, that in-built economic support of communities through the presence of shearing teams, of truck drivers and of support services to the sheep industry that so many towns across the wheat belt of Western Australia rely on. It's like a complex web of interactions: if you cut one strand, everything else will move and shift, and many, many people will suffer. These towns are built on the presence of their truckie buying fuel from the local station, on the shearing team buying food from the IGA, buying fuel from the local petrol station and employing people in the town, and on those people then spending their wages in the town.

Let's go back to 2017 to the month I became a senator—the month that the Awassi Express incident happened. The industry was shocked. The farming community was shocked. There is no doubt about that. The Australian people were shocked. But they should have been even more appalled and shocked by the information that has come to light subsequently that very clearly shows a pattern from the animal activists who set out to destroy this industry. In a statutory declaration from Lyn White, the head of Animals Australia, which has been cited in numerous media articles, there is a clear long pattern of communication with the deckhand involved with the Awassi Express incident. Even though Animals Australia denied that they paid for that footage, there is very clear evidence contained in this statutory declaration that not only did they pay for that footage but they set an expectation of the sort of footage they wanted to see.

I will quote from this statutory declaration. These are Lyn White's own words: 'I asked Mr Ullah whether he had filmed or photographed any of the issues that were of concern to him. He advised me that he had copied some of the photographs and videos from the ship's computer but hadn't thought to take photos himself of the issues that concerned him.' Lyn White went on to say: 'My assessment was that Mr Ullah had not secured the visual evidence needed to support his stated concerns. I had no reason to doubt his firsthand, detailed descriptions of events and issues that concerned him.'

The statutory declaration goes on to set out a long chain of communication by which payments were agreed in return for footage. It is couched in terms of 'payment for the risks he was taking'. But it is very clear that this was cash for cruelty. Mr Ullah, the shiphand concerned, was earning something like US$350 per week. And what are the sums that Lyn White, the head of Animals Australia, describes as being transferred to him, a poor deckhand earning a few hundred US dollars a week? I quote: 'Over the nine months between June 2017 and February 2018, documenting evidence across six Australian shipments, Mr Ullah received US$26,000.' Cash for cruelty! A few pages down and there's another payment totalling $38,000—cash for cruelty! The most shocking thing is that these documents are in the possession of the department of agriculture and nothing has been done about it.

I have another statutory declaration from Mahmood Raza Mazher, another shiphand onboard the Awassi Express. He was a shiphand of the whistleblower. I will quote from his statutory declaration as well. It reads: 'I met Fazal Ullah at the Maritime Academy in 2012. The normal wage for a deck cadet is US$350 per month'—so I misspoke; it was $US350 not a week but per month—'with an additional $50 payable at the end of each voyage.' Mr Mazher goes on to talk about the fact that he was very close friends with this whistleblower, Mr Ullah. He also goes on to talk about how Fazal Ullah was considered to be a poor seaman and how he was in trouble. In fact, he was caught hitting cattle with a stick, so the management company refused him a new contract aboard that ship. He then tried to get his shipmate to procure footage in the same way. I think the key paragraph from this statutory declaration from a fellow deckhand of the whistleblower is this: 'I cannot prove that Fazal Ullah shut off the ventilation system on the ship, but it is my suspicion that is what he did. This is because in similarly hot conditions I did not observe the type of panting and distress that Fazal was able to capture.' It was on Mr Ullah's deck that those sheep died after receiving tens of thousands of dollars from Animals Australia—cash for cruelty.

On the back of this, Labor and the Greens, in an alliance, are shutting down this vital trade for Western Australia, shutting down this important part of the Western Australian agricultural system. It's a system that delivers protein in a highly efficient, highly humane manner, with the highest animal welfare standards in the world. Exiting the market will actually make animal welfare standards fall internationally. It will make animals worse off. It will make communities in my home state of Western Australia worse off. It ignores every skerrick of science, every skerrick of evidence and everything the industry has done to improve over the last 30 years, all on the back of cash for cruelty.