Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak with great pleasure to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s report to the parliament on livestock mortalities—or, I will say, livestock deliveries—during exports by sea for the reporting period of July to December 2010. I would like to place on record for the Senate the outstanding figure that 99.9 per cent of 408,700 cattle were successfully delivered from Australia to their end ports, and 99 per cent of 1.5 million sheep were so delivered. It is an outstanding result, particularly when you consider that the actual gross live weight of those who arrived was greater than 100 per cent of what the purchaser bought in the first place.

I compliment the many people in the trade for this outcome—the producers, transporters, feedlot managers, shippers, veterinary service providers and those responsible for the overall supervision of the trade. More than $1 billion of gross regional product comes directly from the live export trade, and there is a further $1 billion or more in the multiplier in regional Australia for people who would otherwise not gain reasonable employment in that sector. Our cattle go principally from the Northern Territory, northern WA and Queensland to Indonesia, Israel and Jordan. I am pleased to say that during this six-month period there was the introduction of a new market—Turkey. What a wonderful success that has been, both for Australian exporters and also for the Turks themselves. Sheep are principally going to the Middle East.

I will comment briefly on a couple of aspects associated with welfare and again make the observation that Australia stands unique in the world for the attention given over many years to improvements in health, welfare, husbandry and nutrition of cattle and sheep in the markets to which we send our livestock. There is continual improvement. Nobody else does this. Can we continually improve? The answer is yes. We have come a long way. I am the first to say that we can do better. We can do better, for instance, in slaughter handling of cattle, and we are already investing in this area, in Indonesia, Egypt and other places. We are using Australian technology and expertise. The challenge is there for us to improve. Can we do better with sheep? Yes, we can, but it will be a different form, simply because the demand by the customer for the sheep product, in the main, is different.

I will comment briefly on food security in the time available. I saw email evidence from the Turkish government at the time we introduced the cattle trade to that country pleading for us to pull out all the stops because of their urgent need for protein. That brings me to the point about chilled or frozen versus live export. There is a continuing and growing need for both. It is absolutely wrong for people to be saying we can replace the live trade with the frozen or chilled product. We cannot, and it is important for this country and for our farmers, producers and exporters that this trade continue.

The point has been made that we could phase out the live sheep trade in my home state of Western Australia. Let me tell you, for the last 30 years competition between meat and live exports has underpinned the value of the sheep market in our state. It is already in a parlous state because of drought conditions affecting cropping, and if we were to lose the live export trade it would be a very severe blow. Anybody naive enough to say that if we were to stop the live export trade those in the meat trade would continue to pay the same price for the carcass, as many have said, does not know very much about competitive markets. I have spoken previously in this place about the need for the live trade in markets where electricity supplies are unreliable, affecting freezers and chillers, and also in markets where most of the consumers, particularly of sheep, are what we would call ‘wet market’ consumers. They do not have refrigeration in their own homes and the markets themselves very often do not have chilling or freezing facilities.

Time does not allow me to respond to many of the negatives that have unfortunately come out in this parliament and in the wider community. There is misinformation, wrong information and an attempt to remove the viable income of many producers in this country. I commend this report to the Senate.

Question agreed to.