Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the very important Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024 tonight. It is another example of how the Labor Party's attempting to destroy primary production in this country and our agricultural sector. It goes without saying that Australia basically made its wealth on the back of the sheep industry—first with wool, then meat. As someone who grew up on a western Queensland sheep station of 150,000 acres with 10,000 sheep, in the glory days of wool, this is something that's very close to my heart. I spent many school holidays and many weekends either out in a 20,000-acre paddock on the back of a motorbike with four kelpies behind a big mob of sheep or in the sheep yards, rounding up and getting the sheep ready to be shorn. On many occasions, as the sheep got older, we would sell the sheep off to market.

There is no doubt that working with livestock is a tough industry. if you're not used to it, it may appear, from the outside looking in, that it's a brutal industry. But that is not true at all. The sheep are beasts of burden, effectively, and this is a fact of life. Unfortunately, it's a fact of life that I think too many of our children aren't exposed to today, in terms of understanding the birds and the bees and how the world actually works.

One of my best mates, who I grew up with, is a long-term vet who has worked for what was Australian quarantine. He's worked in abattoirs all his life, and he's travelled on many ships over to the Middle East. As he said, they are fed better and looked after better on those ships than they are in the paddock. We know that LiveCorp themselves said that the death rate on those ships is half the death rate of sheep in the actual paddocks, so I can see no real reason why the Labor Party feels the need to shut this industry down.

Over time, as these poorer countries get better electricity and better refrigeration and better freezers, I'm sure this industry will slowly decline over the years. We have seen that over the last decades. As the standard of living has increased in poorer countries, more and more households can afford freezers. But, until such time as they have freezers, they are still going to be buying sheep or butchered meat from a butcher to take home and cook that night. That is just the way it is in many poorer countries. Until the time that these countries are able to actually freeze meat, there is no reason to destroy an industry that is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet if the Labor government would just get out of their lives.

We are talking about the lives of thousands and thousands of farmers and hundreds and hundreds of towns and all the related people who make a living off the farmers in those industries. Particularly in Western Australia, but even out in my hometown of Chinchilla and further west, there are still thousands of sheep out there. There are not as many as there used to be, I might add, thanks to the dingoes and the decline in the wool price on a relative basis, but it is still a viable industry, and it's one that we should maintain. If we turn our backs on the sheep industry in this country, we turn our backs on our own history, heritage and culture and, most importantly, on the livelihoods of hardworking Australians who deserve a fair go.