David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

The Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024 is intending to end an industry which is based on cash for cruelty—the live sheep export industry. It seeks to amend the Export Control Act to prohibit the export of live sheep by sea on or after 1 May 2028, and that will not be before time. I want to commend the government and those who have worked to bring about this bill, including the countless people from the agricultural industries and the sheep industry, animal activists and millions of ordinary Australians who joined together to not only end the live sheep trade but come up with a comprehensive transition plan for the tiny portion of the industry that is still involved in live sheep exports. It is an example of how you end an industry whose time has come because the values we reflect upon now are not reflected in the industry. It is an example of how you end an industry seen as exploitative and inappropriate. You do so in a way that provides a transition package, a transition scheme, so that the workers in the industry—and that is a very, very small part of the sheep industry—have a future and can transition out of that industry. I think the bill gets that right.

Why are we doing this? We're doing this now because, since the start of the live sheep trade, it's involved extraordinary cruelty to the animals that have been conveyed on these ships which are intrinsically dangerous and cruel to the animals that are conveyed on them. We could look back to pretty much the start of the industry in 1966, when I think more than 60,000 sheep died aboard the Unceb in conditions that are too horrifying to imagine. It continued in the 1980s. We can look at just the last decade. In 2014, 4,000 sheep died on the BADER III in appalling conditions—prolonged heat stress and dehydration. They died after days and days of suffering. Three thousand sheep died in 2017 aboard the Al Messilah and 2,400 died on the Awassi Express. We have seen some images of that and the incredible cruelty and conditions in which those sheep perished. Again, that was over days and days of appalling cruelty, dehydration and extreme heat. No sentient animal should be consciously exposed to that kind of suffering, particularly not on an industrial scale.

More recently, just in January of this year, there were some 16,500 sheep that were left sweltering through an appalling heatwave off the Western Australian coast on the MV Bahijah. That's the same ship that, just in 2018, subjected some 9,000 sheep and more than 3,500 cattle to torturous heat over eight days. In January of this year, again we saw sheep being put on that ship for weeks and weeks and being sent to a conflict zone. It was known that their welfare would likely be seriously prejudiced, and it happened as you could have predicted it: torturous conditions on the ship again in January this year. We know that that kind of torture is intrinsic in the industry, and that's why I'm glad to see the live sheep trade ended.

I want to acknowledge the work of my colleague Senator Faruqi, who in her time in this chamber has been absolutely consistent in her work standing up for animals. It's in part a testament to her work and that of her office that we're here. I want to acknowledge the work of a former Greens senator, Lee Rhiannon, a friend and colleague of mine, who also worked throughout her political career, including in this place, to end live sheep exports. I want to commend the work of organisations like Animals Australia and the millions and millions of Australians who support animal welfare to end this kind of grossly unnecessary industrial cruelty towards animals. Of course, I commend the work of academics such as Jed Goodfellow and his team, who have been making the case—the clear legal and ethical case—for well over a decade to end this cruel industry.

I would note some of the work of former senator Lee Rhiannon, who worked with the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union around the country. Their members not only lose work when sheep are exported live; they understand as well that, with live sheep export, they see the same sheep that they seek to deal with in as prompt and humane a process as possible in their industry being exposed to weeks and weeks of cruelty and torture, and they don't want that to happen. They acknowledge as well there are far more jobs locally if you end the live sheep trade and then we deal with the animals here, with the work and the industry that would be involved for members of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union. They acknowledge that this is really exporting jobs as well as cruelty.

So we come to this point in history. Surely we could look at the arc of history and see industries like the whaling industry, which, thank goodness, we've ended in Australia because of the inherent cruelty of it. We can see other industries that have been inherently cruel, and time has moved on and we've finally ended them. It's now clear that we will end the live sheep export trade.

It's hard to quite comprehend why the coalition is so committed to this one small, cruel aspect of an industry, which, with its continuation, reduces the reputation of the entire sheep industry. While ever it's associated with this kind of industrial-level cruelty and torture, that's bad for the broader sheep industry in Australia. It's hard to understand how the coalition haven't joined one and one together and made two and realised this tiny fraction of the industry, through exposing sentient animals to this industrial-scale, unnecessary cruelty, is also damaging to the reputation of the broader sheep industry in Australia. But it seems that the coalition can't lift their eyes above a narrow, short political moment. They seem to want to continue this kind of reputational damage to the sheep industry. Well, more shame on them for doing that.

It's time the industry ended. Yes, we should export protein to rest of the world, but there are plenty of options for exporting protein and our amazing agricultural produce other than relying upon an industry that, at its core, practises industrial cruelty. I commend the bill to the chamber.