Senate debates

Thursday, 27 October 2022

Statements by Senators

Beef Industry

1:55 pm

Photo of Malcolm RobertsMalcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Australian beef and, best of all, Queensland beef are here to stay as Australia's main source of protein. A recent CSIRO paper published in the journal Animal, found that pasture fed beef returned 1,597 times more human edible protein than it consumed. What a wonderful way to produce natural, nutritious and affordable protein to feed our world.

The CSIRO, though, couldn't help themselves of course and went on to denigrate the cattle industry for its methane production. This fearmongering fails on the most basic of tests: the biogenic carbon cycle. Methane in the atmosphere combines with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide which are then reabsorbed into pastures through photosynthesis, encouraging plant growth. For those who swallow the United Nations' climate rubbish and think that nature's trace atmospheric gas, essential to life on earth, needs to be sequestered: it is being sequestered!

There's no environmental harm from cattle methane production. Cattle can be raised in a sustainable manner that not only protects but improves soil health. The war on red meat doesn't have a leg to stand on! I call on Meat & Livestock Australia to dump its Red Meat 2030 plan—a plan designed to create a false scarcity of red meat in order to double meat prices and increase profits for a lucky few large beef producers. Red Meat 2030 will end grazing in lower rainfall areas, which will then be returned to nature in a process called 'rewilding'. This land is where affordable meat is grown. Meat will become an elitist food; everyday Australians will be forced to source protein from food-like substances grown in labs or concocted on a process line from bugs, nuts and chemicals—lots of chemicals! Pick up a pack of fake meat and check the ingredients.

Meat & Livestock Australia must stop pandering to the climate change fraud and globalist elites. We are one community, we are one nation and climate change delusion is a danger to people's cost of living and to our very food supply and security.