Keep the Sheep decline meeting with Ag Minister Julie Collins
Lobby group Keep the Sheep has declined a meeting with Agriculture Minister Julie Collins ahead of its rally next week.
Lobby group Keep the Sheep has declined a meeting with Agriculture Minister Julie Collins ahead of its rally next week.
A spokeswoman from the live export lobby said Ms Collins had invited representatives from the West Australian-based group to meet her in Canberra this week to discuss their grievances, which centre on her Labor government’s phasing out of the live sheep export trade in four years but extend to water buybacks in the Murray Darling Basin and a failed push to charge farmers a levy to raise $150 million for biosecurity activities.
“She is welcome to address the rally. There’s a lot of people hurting off the back of the Government’s agriculture policies, and they think it would be appropriate, particularly given people will have made the effort to travel to the rally, for the Agriculture Minister to face the people the government is hurting,” the spokeswoman said.
Ms Collins has not confirmed whether she will speak at the rally, scheduled for the entrance of Parliament House in Canberra next Tuesday.
The new Agriculture Minister, who is only four weeks into the role having taken over from Brisbane senator Murray Watt, is taking annual leave this week, but has previously told The Weekly Times it was her job to make sure the transition period for the live sheep exporting industry was as “smooth” as possible.
“We want to maintain the highest possible welfare standards across the board,” she said.
“We took to the last election phasing out live sheep and we were very clear this would not happen with cattle.”
More than 1000 people have registered to attend the September 10 rally.
“We haven’t required registration to attend and people are bringing friends and family. It is difficult to predict (numbers of attendees) but we’d be happy if as many people take time out of their busy lives to support the cause,” a Keep the Sheep spokeswoman said.
The rally is being billed as the largest of its kind in forty years.
Lobby figurehead and WA livestock transport operator Ben Sutherland said he was encouraging as many people to attend as possible to send a clear message to the government, “support agriculture or face the ramifications at the ballot box”.