Exports vital to many
THE Townsville Bulletin over the years has published both sides of the live cattle export saga.
A ruling in the Federal Court has now stated clearly that the ban was reckless.
The Labor minister acted without calculating the risk and consequences of such a decision.
Australia exported 676,000 head of cattle to Indonesia alone in 2019, while the ban of 2011 had devastating effects on a chain of businesses, farmers and support organisations, taking many years to repair our trade relationship to our important neighbour.
The narrow argument purported by the vegan/green/ animal extremists needs to be called out for what it really is, a radical play to bring the cattle industry to its knees, and turn all of us into vegans.
In any business, customer demand is what drives that business, vegans/animal extremists say that a farmer earning an honest living, is greedy, ruthless and cruel.
Just because that farmer sells cattle, he is vilified and hunted by people who will sit down to a meal of weeds and seeds and never know what effort goes into their salad.
The culture of our neighbour may not be what we practice, yet no one has the right to demand a one-sided view from a white Western country, denigrating any country’s practice, no matter how pungent that practice is.
The people hurt by the live cattle ban were forced to shoot cattle, surrender properties, beg for assistance (which they rarely do), and hand generational knowledge to a ruthless bank or overseas buyer.
Growing cattle is a skill that is not recognised by the smashed avo eaters in the cities.
Certain breeds of cattle do better in different environments, management practices must change as the season and market changes.
The current market is valued close to $2 billion a year, yet the real value is difficult to calculate.
From the farm to the plate in Asia, hundreds of supply chains and people depend on live cattle.
The customers do not always have electricity, or the taste for aged chilled meat, nor can they afford to buy processed food from a rich country where the workers get more in a week than most of them get in a year.
Yet, we buy from China and India where workers are treated worse than animals in that country. We have no demonstrations or wild television stories demanding that trade be shut down.
If you draw a line across a map of our country, from Rockhampton in the east to the Western Australian shoreline, then nearly every grazier above that line depends on the live export trade.
Every truckie, every roadhouse worker, every agent that sells the cattle and supplies the husbandry products, to the tyre changers, oil providers and grease. It is nearly impossible to detect the number of people that not only depend on the trade, but allow people in a poorer country access to a better meat supply than a wet market of wild animals.
Like China says, the wet markets must remain open, to feed their people.
I’ll take the live cattle trade over the wild meat wet markets that gave us our current plague any day.
DEBRA GIBSON, Pinnacles.