By Tony Wright
Poor Pistol and Boo.
If only they’d disguised themselves as cows. Maybe mad cows.
You may recall the border-busting adventures of Pistol and Boo, pet puppies of Amber Heard, who in those carefree, pre-bitter-divorce days was still on jet-setting terms with Hollywood’s Johnny Depp.
The cute little doggies shot to international fame in 2015 when Heard and Depp smuggled them into Australia, thus offending our famously strict quarantine laws.
Pistol and Boo, detained and deported for border-busting.
The plight of the two Yorkshire terriers went stratospheric when Australia’s customs and agriculture minister of the time, Barnaby Joyce, threatened to have Pistol and Boo shot if they weren’t led back to Depp’s plane and deported forthwith.
“If we start letting movie stars – even though they’ve been the sexiest man alive twice – to come into our nation, then why don’t we just break the laws for everybody?” Joyce foamed.
“It’s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.”
That, of course, was then.
Before Donald Trump.
Now, Australia, which has long boasted of having the world’s strictest quarantine laws – as Depp, Heard and Pistol and Boo discovered – has suddenly buckled to Trump’s demand that fresh US beef be allowed to cross our borders for the first time since 2003.
US President Donald Trump.Credit: Bloomberg
US beef was banned 22 years ago after the fatal neurological disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, was discovered in American cattle.
Ever since, Australia has insisted fresh US beef didn’t get a quarantine pass because we couldn’t be assured of the origin of cattle slaughtered. It might have come from Mexico, Canada or elsewhere, their health status uncheckable.
Trump, waging his trade war on everyone this year, wasn’t having any of that.
He is, after all, a big beef man, existing on a diet of Big Macs. How long, we wonder, until he issues an executive order requiring McDonald’s to be re-named simply Donald’s?
His administration has been belly-aching mightily that Australia got to sell $6 billion a year of its (disease-free) beef to the US, while American beef was locked out of Australia.
Retribution time, clearly, starting with Trump’s minimum tariff of 10 per cent on everything Australia exports to the US.
It may be mere coincidence that a few months into that trade war, with Australia desperate to pull off one of those magical deals that Trump keeps talking about to prevent worse horror being visited upon us, Australia has suddenly found it within its generous heart to lift biosecurity restrictions on US beef.
There’s a lot of coincidence going around in Trumpworld, you understand.
Consider the sort of coincidence that has Trump setting the dogs on former president Barack Obama, for transparently concocted reasons, at the very time Trump needs an extravagant diversion from the troubles visited on him by his old skirt-chasing buddy Jeffrey Epstein.
Australia’s agricultural authorities, of course, are keen to deny any trumped-up serendipity attached to the decision to lift quarantine barriers on Trump’s rump steaks.
No indeed. The US, we are told, introduced more robust stock movement controls this very year.
Cattle slaughtered in the US could now be traced back to their original farms. That meant there could be more certainty that their meat products were not carrying mad cow, or other diseases and pests, dangerous to Australia.
What a relief.
Could it be time for a retrospective pardon and apology to Pistol and Boo, who not even Barnaby suspected of potentially importing mad cow disease?
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