Vikki Campion: The great hypocrisy behind Australia’s live sheep export ban

Australia is planning to ban the live export of sheep on welfare grounds, so why do we not stop importing farming products which are contributing to the extinction of species from around the world, asks Vikki Campion.

If you want cancel culture for animal welfare’s sake, let’s start with banning coffee at Parliament House.

Those politicians and bureaucrats, who could not grow themselves a single complete meal, banned live sheep exports based on a 0.17 per cent risk of an older sheep dying on a sea voyage while refusing to examine their habits, such as contributing to the imminent extinction of a particularly lumpy frog half a world away.

For years, academics have warned of the links between Australia’s insatiable thirst for exotic coffee and biodiversity loss in those other overseas countries that grow it.

Researchers at Sydney University, their favourite sandstone-turned-middle-class-tent-city-for-Gaza, published a study in 2022 tracking the death of foreign frogs directly to our coffee consumption. In their press release, researchers said: “The purchase of a coffee in Sydney may contribute to biodiversity loss in Honduras.”

Enter the Nombre de Dios Streamside Frog. A slimy, bumpy, olive greenie brownie amphibian whose coming extinction is directly linked to coffee drinkers.

But did Agriculture Minister Murray Watt who banned sheep export stop importing coffee from the other side of the planet and start drinking our own from Mareeba family farms, with no forced child labour, just 2000km away when the study was published in 2022?

Nombre de Dios Streamside Frog (Craugastor fecundus) is a critically endangered frog found in Honduras. CREDIT Joe Townsend

Did he cast his ruler on any other product on a supermarket shelf or Pitt St mall rack?

According to him, our choices don’t count as long as we don’t see their impact.

We didn’t care about the rainforest birds in Brazil losing their habitat. We whacked a Fair Trade sticker on some and didn’t on others and bought it anyway, importing $192 million of coffee from Brazil, some 14,052km away, according to DFAT’s latest trade reports.

That same year, we bought $102.5 million from Colombia, $22 million from Peru and $21.6 million from Guatemala with no forensic observation of their coffee plantations like there is on our sheep graziers.

Before you start caring about an animal, how much must it remind you of your fluffy (puppy-milled purebred) pet?

We have a government determined to protect Australian sheep (cute) while we kill Honduran amphibians (gross) to satisfy our addiction.

Apparently, it is okay to overlook extinction of foreign frogs so long as we get our caffeine buzz, while we deny protein to foreign people to stop our sheep from encountering a 0.17 per cent chance of dying on a boat?

The same people who are vehemently anti-export for their love of sheep express no such concern about native wedge-tail eagles, which are also an apex predator of young lambs, being slaughtered by industrial wind installations.

It is frightening how many people do not understand how their food and fiber is produced and what is sacrificed to put it on a plate or on their backs, who blithely giggle through life in silk scarves and oil-based plastic sunglasses believing their consumption is perfect.

For all Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s talk about how important it is to reduce our emissions, Labor seems quite happy to generate scope three emissions by importing products Australian farmers create, even export, without any subsidy or slavery.

Sheep being loaded on trucks bound for live export at Peel Feedlot, Mardella, WA. Picture: Philip Gostelow/The Australian

Assuming Canberra’s coffee has come from the Honduras capital, Tegucigalpa, it has travelled approximately 13,934km as the crow flies — equal, according to the Food Miles website, to 3118 kgCO2 if it came by plane.

Apparently Albo’s desire to stop carbon emissions ends at the beach.

Once you start moralising about feeding Muslims mutton, it is a slippery slope before a whole range of other food and fibre sources are declared immoral.

To grow the crops required to feed a vegan world as it does a carnivore one, Australia would require mass land clearing, and every single drop of environmental river flow would need to go to irrigators or people would starve.

The government’s report on banning live sheep found “boxed sheep meat is not directly substituting live sheep in Middle Eastern countries”.

It’s because of Australians that sheep slaughtered in the Middle East are stunned – it was a massive fight to convince them it was halal.

Because of Australians, subcontinent workers were trained to handle animals humanely.

And it’s because of Australians that every sheep death on a sea voyage is published every six months – and investigated.

That’s how we know how low the mortality risk is – yet the government has made a very high bar that if this ruler was taken over other industries, especially our imported food and fibre, there would be very few left.

We don’t see Minister Watt out there defending billions of larval lives lost for Parliamentary silk ties.

If fabric is not natural, it’s predominantly oil-based; if it is natural, something gave its life to make it.

No food or fiber is truly vegan, some form of life died somewhere along the line. All that varies is the weight of the carcass.

Unless, of course, bacteria is worth less than a moth, which is worth less than a silkworm, which is worth less than a Honduran frog, which is worth less than your cup of coffee and silk tie?

In which case, there is a hierarchy, which logically enough puts humans right back at the top again.

KEEN’S BAD GAMBLE

Former NSW Treasurer Matt Kean made a big gamble on renewables and lost big time.

Like an addict hiding in the corner of pokies room under the delusion that one more spin will deliver the impossible jackpot – he kept playing – and now we’re paying.

Big energy companies get a $300 boost for each household.

We are underwriting a coal power station for nine times what we sold it for. Big “green” Origin has done so well. It told us renewables were the answer while storing Kean’s subsidised coal. Now, they are getting an extraordinary $450m to keep Eraring open for two years because it turned out renewables can’t keep the answer.

Eraring provided 2880 megawatts for 24/7 baseload power 365 days a year and we sold it for $50m.

To replace it, we were to have Snowy Hydro 2.0, which was supposed to provide 2000 megawatts for just ten days, now costing between $12 and $20bn.

Shhh, the pokie bosses say it’s fine. The new addicts on the stool keep playing Kean’s game and once in a blue moon, they’ll give you $300 of your money back.

Sit back on the stool, sucker

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Originally published as Vikki Campion: The great hypocrisy behind Australia’s live sheep export ban