STATEMENTS BY SENATORS – Beef2024

I want to take a moment to congratulate the team at Beef Australia who successfully put on a fantastic Beef2024—’beef week’, so to speak—in Rockhampton last week. It was a very successful event. It was a celebration of all things beef. I think it was the best agricultural show in Australia and
probably in the world, too. There were over 119,000 movements through the gates at beef week last week, and 600 international delegates came from all over the world. It was great to welcome them back after a closed-border Beef2021. There were massive new innovations, like Beef TV, which you could watch all around the country—79,000 people watched through Beef TV. A great job was done by Andrea Crothers and her team. There was a new feature called M’Eat Street, with food vans with cuisines from all over the world. It was great for people in town. I took my kids and family there. It was fantastic. There were 5,000 students who turned up to learn about the beef industry through beef week, including one of my children, Henry. He was there for the day. It was fantastic for schoolkids to be involved. There were lots of politicians as well. They weren’t as welcome, probably—except for the local ones, of course—but it was great to see so many of us turn up to Rockhampton! It was great to see so many colleagues up there during beef week. It was a massive benefit to the town of Rockhampton—$100 million, reportedly. We all saw the traffic jams and snarls that we’re not really used to in Rockhampton, but that did represent so many people visiting our town, spending their money and helping lots of small businesses as well. I’m sure the next beef week, in 2027, will be just as successful. We’ll have the Rocky ring road, hopefully, by then, so the traffic won’t be as bad. But we desperately need a convention centre in Rockhampton. That’s something I will be fighting for. We have to rehabilitate a basketball stadium, at the moment, to hold major events like beef week. We deserve a proper convention centre for Rockhampton to make the next beef week even more of a success.