Peta Credlin: Foot and mouth disease could cost Australia $80 billion
Anthony Albanese’s government is going to have a cattle crisis on their hands unless Agriculture Minister Murray Watt takes off his training wheels, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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As federal parliament begins this week, the Albanese government’s priority will be new legislation to set an emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030.
But forget the cries of a climate emergency, there’s a real emergency at our border now with foot and mouth disease — and Labor’s new Agriculture Minister is asleep at the wheel.
Minister Murray Watt might come from the big cattle state of Queensland, but he’s born and bred in the suburbs of Brisbane and, clearly, he’s barely left.
Some believe he’s better known as a factional string-puller in Labor than someone who gets their head around a problem and fixes it.
Because of the approach taken to this risk in Indonesia, Australia’s agricultural industry is a sitting duck given the 300 flights a week out of Bali with every person on board a potential disease bomb for our farmers.
It would be easier to accept the government’s refusal to impose a temporary travel ban on Indonesia if the measures they had put in place were fair dinkum.
But the sanitising foot mats that the Watt belatedly announced last week were reportedly only in place, as of Friday, at Darwin and Cairns airports while the vast majority of Bali flights landed elsewhere.
Ten days ago, well after the Bali outbreak of foot and mouth disease had started and as I reported in last week’s column, Minister Watt refused to order foot baths for all returning travellers from Bali on the grounds that it would be dangerous as a child might trip.
He’s just relented on foot mats but because these take time to put in place – along with the extra staff – as of now, travellers are still reporting just an announcement when they’re getting off the plane plus the kind of random checks that happen anyway.
Foot and mouth disease is now out of control in 22 Indonesian provinces, including Bali. In 2019, about one and a half million Australians visited Bali.
All it would take is for one of the tens of thousands of Australians returning every week to wear contaminated shoes on to a farm for an outbreak to start.
Because this deadly animal disease has been unknown in this country for over a century and hasn’t been a nearby threat since the 1980s, we’re not well prepared to cope.
That’s why so many farm leaders are now close to panic about a threat that the Bureau of Agricultural Economics has estimated could cost our economy $80 billion, which is about twice what we spend annually on defence.
Foot and mouth disease affects cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and other cloven-footed animals. Infected animals develop blisters on their feet and mouth, struggle to move, find it hard to get food and to eat, and, especially if they’re young, often die.
To prevent spread, infected animals normally must be put down and big outbreaks are usually controlled by mass culling.
There was a big outbreak in Britain in the 1960s, with about half a million animals put down; and again in 2001, when up to six million animals reportedly had to be destroyed at a cost to the economy of about $15 billion.
If there was an outbreak at a farm here most of our beef, lamb, pork and dairy exports would be in immediate jeopardy and the movement of animals and farm equipment around the country would at least partially cease.
It wouldn’t just affect farmers and the rural economy that depends on them. There would be immediate shortages of meat and dairy in supermarkets and prices would skyrocket.
That’s why biosecurity matters.
And it’s why people who aren’t familiar with life on the land need to take this threat seriously at the border.
Having grown up in a small town in the Mallee and with a sister still on the land as a dairy farmer, I know this is a big deal and even more than its emissions obsession, this should be the Albanese government’s No. 1 priority next week.
Any serious outbreak here would almost certainly be worse than the British crisis two decades back.
For one thing, with more than 20 million cattle and over 60 million sheep, we’re much more of an agricultural economy. For another, we have a large feral pig population where the disease would be almost impossible to eradicate or even control by culling and vaccination.
You don’t even need to visit a farm in Bali to bring back foot and mouth disease, given cows freely wander the streets in many urban areas of the holiday magnet.
And this makes every piece of footwear Australians wear in
Bali a risk. Not to mention all the people trying to bring back foodstuffs that they lie about at the border, like the contaminated meat products detected last week at Adelaide airport.
That’s why many farmers are terrified that, unless much more is done, an outbreak here is not a case of if, but when.
The federal Opposition is divided with some such as former agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce and former trade Minister Dan Tehan calling for a travel ban and the recent home affairs Minister Karen Andrews, too.
Yet others, such as the Nationals new leader David Littleproud (along with the National Farmers’ Federation), are only calling for close inspection of all returning travellers because they’re scared of trade retaliation if we close our border with Indonesia – harking back to the Gillard government’s disastrous ‘live cattle ban’ that damaged the relationship.
They’re wrong here. This is different and if our response, while the border is shut, is to send government vets to Indonesia along with vaccines and funding to help them get this outbreak under control, if done diplomatically, I’m certain they’ll support this level of action.
A shut border would also give us plenty of time here to get all the sanitation and inspection resources in place at all the entry points into Australia.
At the very least, this issue needs to get off the desk of an Agriculture Minister on training wheels and on to the desk of the Prime Minister, lest farmers across the country are left to take a rifle to their herd because the Albanese government didn’t listen and didn’t act.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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