Wilkie demands electronic tags on live exports

Mr Wilkie’s proposal is outlined in a bill he introduced into federal parliament late last year to try and enhance the tracking and traceability measures that underpin the animal welfare ambitions of the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS).

Under Mr Wilkie’s plan, licenses would only be issued by the federal government to exporters, subject to all livestock being fitted with the electronic identification tags.

Currently beef cattle are tagged locally but the MP said, by law, those tags are not required to be read once the livestock depart Australian shores.

The new identification tags would apply to animals leaving Australia on board ships and through to feedlot or processing facilities.

Any data collected from the electronic system would be made available to the Secretary of the federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, on request.

Mr Wilkie said most sheep, apart from Victoria’s new identification system, are not tagged and nor are goats and camels.

He said there were different arrangements in place for different animals subject to live exports but none of them “give us confidence of being able to track stock through the supply chain”.

“When you consider the core principles of ESCAS one of them is that there be reliable tracking but we know that’s not being achieved because we’ve seen footage of (cattle) with no tags in their ears,” he said.

Mr Wilkie has been a leading, vocal critic of the live export industry and was one of the most outspoken members of federal parliament in mid-2011 when the former Labor government abruptly suspended the live cattle trade to Indonesia which led to the implementation of ESCAS in all live export markets.

He still believes live exports should be phased-out over time in a move to increase on-shore processing.

But he accepts that may not happen in the immediate future and in the mean-time, electronic tagging of animals would help the industry to defend itself, to appease community concerns about welfare standards.

“Yes it will cost a little bit more money but it will also give the community more confidence in ESCAS and by doing so it helps to safeguard the future of the industry,” he said.

“It’s a bit of a funny spot I find myself in personally because on one hand I want to wind the industry up and on the other hand I’m happy to advocate for something to help the industry.

“But my view is the industry is not going to be wound up any time soon so in the interim let’s at least have reliable tracking of all livestock so that at every stage in the process, when they come off the boat, and they’re put on a truck to a feedlot or a slaughterhouse or sale-yard, we know where that animal came from and whose responsible for it.”

Mr Wilkie said his plan to try and introduce electronic ear tags resulted from talks with cattle producers in Tasmania while he’s also discussed the proposal with the new Australian Livestock Exporters Council CEO Simon Westaway.

He said his bill had been tabled in parliament and after a second reading speech had now been “parked” by the government and believed it was unlikely to proceed much further.

Queensland LNP Senator Barry O’Sullivan said he was “over” people from the main street of Hobart proposing new measures like electronic identification tags that made business tougher for agricultural industries, through added red tape and costs.

“Tell him (Mr Wilkie) not to sit down to another steak meal from this point forward until he starts and comes to understand the entire beef supply chain – this is absolute crap,” he said.

“There are 244,000 complaints of animal cruelty in Australia every year so when he starts calling out for a ban on budgerigars and cats and mice I’m happy to join him to look at this small issue within the live trade.

“Is he going to pay for it?

“If it’s something he wants producers and breeders to pay for then I’m a ‘no’.

“It already costs about $89 per head now with all of the bullshit we’ve imposed on live exports but if he wants to pull it out of his parliamentary salary, I’ll support it.”

Mr Wilkie also raised a motion in November last year to acknowledge the concerns of cattle producers about Agriculture and Water Resources Minister Barnaby’s Joyce’s lack of action on the seven recommendations made in a report from a Senate inquiry into the grass fed cattle levy, in the previous parliament.

Mr Wilkie said local producers in his home state believed the report’s recommendations should still be adopted; in particular to improve the way levy-money is spent through Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) to increase producer viability.

He said he first heard about industry concerns over MLA levy-spending and deficient industry representation when the Indonesian cattle trade was controversially suspended in 2011.

“Producers were just incensed that they’d been paying $5 per beast to MLA and it was just a waste of money and MLA betrayed them,” he said.

“That incident in particular alerted producers to the fact there’s a problem with this money.

“They’re paying this money but where’s it all going?

“Is it going to the right organisation, or should there be a new organisation?

“They’re questioning the whole framework and hence them wanting to adopt the committee’s recommendations.”

The motion accuses the government of offering “virtually no response” to the report handed down in September 2014 and also calls on the government to “act swiftly” to implement the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee’s prime recommendations.

The leading recommendation called for the establishment of an accountable and transparent producer-owned body to receive and disperse the research and development and marketing component of the cattle transaction levy funds.

It also called for an audit of the levy by the Australian National Audit Office and a dissolving of the Red Meat Advisory Council.

Mr Wilkie said a selection committee comprising government and opposition members had so far chosen to not deal with his motion and he’d be very surprised if it ever was.

“If there’s something like this and they don’t want to deal with, they don’t,” he said.

But he said he’d also written to Mr Joyce asking for follow up on the Senate inquiry’s recommendations to advance industry reforms.

“I know I’ve had a sometimes fractious relationship with some in the rural sector but both of these issues are areas where I think we could work together,” he said.

“I think it would be great if we could work together in these sorts of spaces because I bring new ideas, I speak to growers and producers who feel they’re being ignored on some issues and some people, particularly on live exports, who are concerned about the industry’s sustainability in the future and they know we need to find ways to improve the industry.

“And by addressing things like tagging, then they’ll start to address public concerns and perhaps then diminish that pressure of others trying to shut the trade down.

“I’m hearing from a lot of producers that they’ve got concerns so it’s not a case of ignoring me, it’s a case of don’t ignore the industry.

“This is something that puts industry on a more sustainable footing.”