Bush Summit: Farmers feeling fleeced by live sheep export ban
Loss of competition and the end of a viable trade has farmers in Western Australia frustrated by the Albanese government’s live sheep export ban.
Growing grain crops and raising sheep is all Makaela Knapp has known.
It’s all she’s ever wanted to do, despite her parents’ best attempts to steer her into a less challenging career and away from the family farm near Katanning in Western Australia’s southern wheatbelt.
Ms Knapp, 24, also knows the vital role the live sheep export trade, based out of the port of Fremantle, has played in offering an alternative market for their merinos.
It created competition for domestic processors and provided an option for farmers to offload older wool-producing sheep that have little value among Australian meat consumers.
It was a vital way for farmers to be able to offload their stock if the weather turned bad, as it did last year, and their feed ran out.
Those lifelines will come to an end in 2028 when the Albanese government’s live sheep export ban comes into effect.
“Never did I think a fair, ethical, profitable trade would be shut down,” Ms Knapp said. “This sets a precedent for other industries facing challenges from activists.”
Ms Knapp said policymakers had forgotten about human welfare when making the decision.
“By shutting down one trade, we’re just going to have a processor monopoly, and they can’t actually keep up with all those sheep that are in live export,” she said.
Ms Knapp acknowledged the past failures of the trade, particularly well-publicised heat-related deaths of thousands of sheep during the Middle Eastern summer of 2017.
She said the industry had gone through significant welfare-based reform since, including a moratorium on exports during the heat of summer. “We did what we needed to do, but still they shut us down,” Ms Knapp said.
She wants more Australians to learn the facts about the industry and its importance to farmers.
The issue has caused red-hot anger in rural WA, where there’s an abundance of banners, signs and local chatter about the looming ban. A campaign set up in protest has amassed half a million dollars in a bid to unseat Labor MPs in the state at the next federal election and bush balls and fundraising gala events are being held to build the war chest. “There’s nothing like bad policy to bring people together,” Ms Knapp said.
National Farmers Federation president David Jochinke this week encouraged all farmers to join a Keep the Sheep rally in Canberra on September 10 to protest against the ban.
“We’re seeing a growing number of decisions being driven by anti-farming activism, not evidence,” Mr Jochinke said.
“We want policymakers to work with us to grow more in Australia. Too often it feels like they’re just working with our detractors.”
The Australian can reveal that the Australian Live Exporters Council has withdrawn its membership of the Live Export Animal Welfare Advisory Group formed in 2018 and including representatives from industry, animal welfare organisations, academia and state and territory governments.
In a letter to Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry secretary Adam Fennessy this week, ALEC chief executive Mark Harvey-Sutton criticised the perceived lack of “transparency, good faith and professionalism” from other participants in the forum, accusing activist groups of “dishonesty” in their bid to influence public and political opinion.
“If the other groups were genuine partners interested in facts and transparency, the forum could have been used as an opportunity to set the record straight and develop an agreed set of facts that all participants would abide by in their public commentary to maintain confidence in DAFF as the regulator,” he wrote.
Speaking at a Bush Summit event in Adelaide on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged the pain the government’s policy was causing but said the $107m transition package and the four-year phase-out time was designed to help the industry. “I think it is true a lot of people are upset about it; it’s also true a lot of people in Australia … support this.”
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