BILLS – Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024 – Second Reading

Tonight is a potentially historic night in the short history of our Commonwealth, because, in our 123-year history as the Commonwealth of Australia, I don’t believe we have ever banned the export of a farming product, until tonight. This is an extremely historic night. As my learned colleague Senator Scarr has pointed out, we’re going to do so without a Senate inquiry, without a committee stage to ask questions of the minister and without an opportunity to debate amendments to this bill, the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024. You can only hazard a guess that the government is doing this because it is ashamed that it will go down in history as the first government to criminalise farming in this nation. Potentially, after tonight, if you have the temerity to grow some food for people to eat around the world and if you export that food to others, you will be designated a criminal by this government. This government is criminalising farming, making farmers who are just trying to feed the world into criminals. This is not about regulations. It would be fair enough if there were regulations around, making sure we protect animals and the environment. All states and territories and the federal government have regulations on that, but this
is not about that; this is just a straight-out ban. It doesn’t matter what you. It doesn’t matter how high a water mark you reach; you’ll be banned. You’ll be a criminal for farming in this nation. It’s a shocking day for a proud farming nation like Australia. As I said, we have introduced regulation changes to farming, many times, and many of those regulatory changes have had the effect of some farmers going out of business not a whole industry. I can’t find a situation where we’ve banned a whole industry. I thought we might have done that to the tobacco industry, but, when I looked at it, in fact, we just removed subsidies and imposed tariffs and effectively the tobacco industry became uneconomic. So we have made those sorts of changes in the past. Another reason the government might be ashamed and doing this dirty deal late at night to sweep through these historic once-in-a-century changes to our laws is that any reasonable look at the assistance the government’s offering to shut down a whole industry is clearly inadequate and, in fact, a complete insult to our nation’s farmers. A few weeks ago this government put aside, in the budget, $107 million to shut down an entire industry. But, when you read the fine print, only $64 million of that goes directly to farmers. The rest employs bureaucrats and does a lot of other things that probably won’t amount to much. So there’s $64 million directly to farmers to shut down an entire
industry. The government gave no rationale at Senate estimates as to why and how it calculated the precise figure of $64.6 million. There’s no stated rationale behind it. It looks inadequate, on the gross numbers. There are about 4,000 farmers in Australia that engage in the live sheep industry. So that $64 million amounts to $16,000 per farmer—to be exact, $16,150 per farmer. That’s an insult. Imagine if someone came along and shut down your business and said, ‘I’ll put you out of a job. You’ll no longer be in the industry you trained for and you’re skilled in. We’re shutting it down. You won’t have a job anymore. But here’s $16,000. Don’t spend it all at once.’ That’s what this government has done. Even if you take the higher figure, the $107 million, it’s still only $26,000. It’s nothing. When you compare this to many of the other adjustment packages that governments have done in the past, it’s a total insult. It’s unclear how the government came up with this. Take, for example, the dairy industry, which had major changes made to it around 20 years ago. Twenty years ago there was a highly regulated dairy industry across Australia. There were different regulations in different states. There were, in effect, restrictions on the trade of milk between states. That helped protect the industry. We had a much larger dairy industry in my home state of Queensland. But in the 2000s those regulations were progressively removed—largely at the state level, not the federal level. It wasn’t even a federal decision or change to regulations. All governments recognised the heartache that would be imposed on many dairy farmers from these changes. In total—keep in mind the figures—there’s $64 million for live sheep exports. Twenty years ago, the Australian government put aside $1.3 billion to help the dairy industry. That was around 2005. There was $1.287 billion, to be precise, for the dairy industry. I checked ABARES’ figures. In 2003, when this process kicked off, there were apparently 11,239 dairy farmers in Australia. So that $1.3 billion amounted to $114,000 per dairy farmer. These guys are offering $16,000 to shut down the whole industry. The dairy package wasn’t shutting down milk production; it was just some regulatory changes that would put thousands of those dairy farmers out of a job. On average, they received $114,000. Obviously, those who went out of business would have received many multiples more than that, because not all 11,000 got out of their livelihood. It’s a total insult. How does the government come up with these figures? It would be nice to ask some questions about this in a committee stage, which we would normally do on normal legislation, let alone a one-in-123-years piece of legislation that has never been done before in our Commonwealth. The government had very few answers to all of this in Senate estimates. For the record, I should briefly add figures for the packages to other industries. These figures came from the Productivity Commission report that was done in 2010-11. They calculated the assistance to various industries from the mid-nineties to that time. The sugar industry over those years received $480 million. Again, we weren’t shutting it down or anything; we were just changing some tariffs and opening up trade. For the fisheries industry, it was $462 million. For forestry, it was $215 million. These are all in dollar terms that are 20 years or so old, so you’d add at least 50 per cent to them because of inflation. All of them are higher than this one, which does a much more radical thing than any of those changes a generation ago. The government have very few answers here. You would think one thing the government would do before they shut down an industry is work out: if we are going to shut down this particular business in live sheep exports for farmers, how many farmers might go out of business and how many of them might decide that they won’t farm anymore? That might help us calculate the assistance we might need. I asked the government how many of these
4,000 businesses it thinks will just pack up sticks and say: ‘Okay. That’s it, I can’t farm anymore. I can’t make this a viable business.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to reskill as a cropping person or a cattle person.’ I don’t think the government quite understands the agricultural industry, or the Labor Party seems to struggle with it. They’re not farmers. They do different things. Very different skill sets are required to work with cattle, to work with crops and to work with sheep. Even within the sheep industry there are different skill sets needed for wool compared to meat sheep, and many farmers who might be in their 50s or 60s or even younger might think: ‘I don’t want to reskill into a whole new trade. I might get out of this business now that this has been shut down on me.’ When I put to the government, ‘How many do you think will go out of business?’ the answer was, ‘We don’t have
those figures, Senator.’ Yet I was then able to pull up a government commissioned report by Episode 3 in Senate estimates, and in that report they’d done surveys of farmers to work out how many would potentially leave. Episode 3 said that when they surveyed the industry, 44 per cent of sheep producers were intending to leave the sheep farming industry. Another survey by the sheep producers themselves found it was 14 per cent. There’s a bit of variance there, but either of those figures is a lot of people going out of business. That’s thousands of farmers facing the end of their livelihoods. The government didn’t even know those figures. It’s not just the farmers, though there is an understandable focus on the farmers. They are at the front lines of the impact of what we’re doing tonight, so we’re criminalising their industry, making them feel like criminals in their own country just for having the temerity to grow food. It’s not just them in the supply chain. There are truck drivers that come and pick up the sheep to take them to the port. There are fencing contractors on the farms. There are also shearers in the wool industry, which we’re not shutting down, but, if we shut down one part of the sheep industry here, there is evidence in these lengthy reports the government commissioned which no one seems to have read—the minister hadn’t read them—that the shearing industry will be affected as well because some will get out of sheep farming completely. Some of their sheep would have gone to live exports and some would have been shorn, but now there’ll be fewer sheep shorn according to this government commissioned study by Episode 3, which calculated this. In that study it found that 40 per cent of truck drivers said they would exit the industry. The government comes in here constantly and says it’s in favour of workers and it believes in supporting the working class in this country. These are truck drivers, and 40 per cent want to go out of business. There’s nothing in the assistance packages for them at all. They’re not even getting the $16,000. What are they going to get? They get put out on the streets. Some of these truck drivers will own their trucks, so it’s not just their job they’re losing but their capital equipment, or it could be a loan to the bank they probably won’t be able to service. What happens to them? Are they going to be bailed out? No. They’re just going to be left to pick up the pieces, all because the government has done a political deal here with its friends in the Greens to rush this through. You’ve got to wonder why they’re doing this. We don’t actually even need this legislation. The government has all the power to end this anyway. They don’t need to push this through parliament. Why are they going through this hassle? They’re obviously not doing the inquiry, and they want to rush it through. There’s legislation called the Export Control Act, which they could use tomorrow to issue a ministerial declaration which would ban the export of live sheep or whatever they like. We’ve got constitutional powers to do this, and there are powers in the Export
Control Act to do these things. Why aren’t they doing that? It might have something to do with the fact that the last time the Labor Party used the Export Control Act and used ministerial discretion to ban the export of live cattle—as I said, there was no legislation then, so this is an historic night—it was found that that government decision was completely negligent and did not go through the proper processes. The taxpayer is now on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars or possibly billions of dollars in compensation, which the government is dragging its heel on. It’s amazing that they’re shutting down another live farming industry before they’ve even compensated the farmers for their last complete debacle in trying to shut down live cattle, now more than 13 years ago.
Perhaps the rationale for rushing this legislation through is that this decision won’t be justiciable—it won’t go through the courts—and the farmers can’t take any action against the government if it’s passed through parliament. If it had been a ministerial decision then the minister would have been held to account through our court processes. We have a minister who is rushing from any accountability—from parliamentary accountability, from judicial accountability and from any accountability to the people—because the Labor Party are ashamed of what they’re doing. I know many people in the Labor Party are ashamed that they’re criminalising farming and putting truck
drivers out of a job. It’s a shameful day for the Australian Labor Party when they’re teaming up with the radical activists in the Greens to shut down the farming industry in this country. When you look at it, we don’t prohibit that much stuff at the moment. I was surprised by the list of what we prohibit. I’ll quickly read it out. We prohibit biological agents; certain chemical compounds; defence and strategic goods; human body fluids; nuclear material; precursor materials; prescription medicines; native animals; cat and dog fur products; counterfeit credit cards—fair enough; cultural heritage goods; rough diamonds; endangered animal species; firearms; hazardous waste; ozone-depleting substances; pesticides; pornography; radioactive substances; exports to sanctioned countries; security-sensitive ammonium nitrate; suicide devices; viable material derived from human embryo clones; and toothfish, which is an endangered species itself. That’s it. That’s what we ban. And now we’re going to add to that list farmers growing food! They’re also going to be on the very special
prohibited list thanks to this government and its deal with the Greens. We now know that this government is not on the side of Australian farmers. The problem with this legislation is that it will send a chill through all productive industries in this country. Your industry can be shut down due to an election result and an election deal. That’s what has been done. The government has done a preferences deal with the Animal Justice Party and the Greens party. They’ve done a deal to shut down your industry, and they’ve done so without even basic, adequate compensation, as I’ve gone through. What’s to stop them doing this to any industry in the country? Does every industry have to watch election results to know whether its business is still viable in this country? That is no basis to build a productive economy. That is no basis to encourage people to invest in this country, to grow businesses and to take a stake in this nation. This is a shameful day in our nation’s history. For the first time tonight, potentially, we will criminalise a farming activity, and we should all be embarrassed about that.