There is ongoing scrutiny and criticism regarding animal welfare in live trade exports.
John Hassell, a grain and livestock producer from Pingelly and president of the WA Farmers Federation, Western Australia’s largest farm lobby group, is concerned about the government’s election promise to phase out and eventually ban live sheep exports.
“It will decimate Western Australia. It is quite devastating what it will do to small towns and not just to small towns but to the entire Wheatbelt,” Mr Hassell said.
“The North Eastern Wheatbelt Regional Organisation of Council, which is about seven councils, did a study on this, and it’s in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for those seven accounts,” he said.
“Unfortunately, that’s going to have a massive effect. Small towns like all of us come from will be badly affected to the tune of millions of dollars.” In early February, the Israeli MV Bahijah, carrying 15,000 sheep and 1,750 cattle from Fremantle, was turned around by Australian government officials before it reached Israel after 15 days at sea, a response to
animal activist protests in Israel. “The reality is, that ship should have been restocked and resailed straight away,” Mr Hassell said.
“Live trade has been threatened because of political decision making, not anything else. There was a preference deal done between the Greens and the Animal Justice Party to provide preferences towards the Albanese government, and we’re the sacrificial lamb on the political gamesmanship.”
Rather than politics leading the collapse of live exports, Mr Hassell believes the trade – which he reiterates is heavily regulated – should be determined by market demand. “Don’t ban this. If it’s going to go, let it go by itself,” he said.
“The reality is, it’s good trade, it’s legal, it’s got massive oversight, it’s massively regulated, and it’s trade with other countries that want our products,” Mr Hassell said.
“Seventy per cent of the population thinks live trade is actually OK, and that’s the Labor Party’s poll,” he said.
While animal activists are calling for live export trade to come to a halt, the farmers believe it is not as problematic for the animals as reports and images leaked to the media suggest.
“The problem with our industry is you have well-funded and noisy activists who attract media attention therefore this is what the layperson believes, that all cattle and sheep going live export are being mistreated. That’s not the reality,” Jordan Wall, of Stone Axe Pastoral Company, added.
“You’re not going to change the activist mind and I don’t think we should be trying to change their mind. It’s the general public that we need to educate, in our business specifically and I believe in the majority of our industry we maintain high levels animal welfare practices and we are focused on producing our products in a climate neutral manner, however, as an industry we are not doing enough to promote our side of the story,” Mr Wall said.
Mr Hassell added, “If we allow the animal activists to get their way in doing this, then next in line are cattle and pigs and chooks. Any kind of animal agriculture is in the firing line.”
