Put tourists into quarantine
Foot and mouth disease sparksp real need for visitors returning from Bali to have a stint at Wellcamp
With foot and mouth disease in Bali, here is an opportunity to use the white elephant quarantine hubs that Labor wanted so badly. If you can slam Australian borders shut for a disease we already had, you can justify stricter controls for a highly-contagious virus wearing an $80bn price tag that will destroy our agriculture, supply chains and Labor’s green power dream.
Labor’s appetite for quarantine has diminished in government, where they prefer flying into foot and mouth disease-struck tourist destinations rather than staying in Australia to enact emergency biosecurity controls.
FMD is a brutal way for any lamb or calf to die. Painfully foaming at the mouth, unable to move, eat or drink. Even those philosophical anti-farming, glue-yourself-to-a-road types would find it challenging to embrace the shocking mass slaughter, shooting and burning of infected or at-risk herds.
The virus lives in soil for 48 hours, longer in the cold, and can be spread by wind, on clothes, hair, shoes and skin, especially inside the nose and throat. There are nearly 300 flights a week from Denpasar to Australia – it’s two-and-a-half hours to Darwin, five-and-a-half to Brisbane, and fourand-a-half to Cairns. From any city, travellers could contaminate farming communities within an hour or two of landing.
Everyone back from Bali should get a bonus 28 hours in the brand new Wellcamp quarantine station, which the Queensland Labor state government opened just in time for Covid quarantine measures to end.
As the $200m purpose-built station sits empty, a catastrophic biosecurity risk is being addressed on flights back from Bali with a bureaucrat reading out scripts and handing out flyers to planes of travellers wearing headphones and watching ipads.
In Opposition, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt was among the keenest proponent of purpose-built quarantine facilities for Covid, repeatedly calling for dedicated Covid quarantine facilities to be built in every state and attacking the Covid vaccine rollout at every chance.
With FMD on our doorstep, instead of enacting emergency biosecurity measures, he flew to Bali himself to be hosted by the Indonesian Ambassador.
Bali and Jakarta have hosted more government ministers than any Australian regional city since mid-june, with at least six visiting on four different occasions, and a swag of them planning to return to Bali in November for the G20.
While he and Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced $1.5m for vaccines in Indonesia, no landholder has any word from the government on a live vaccination program at home. Instead, they are bracing themselves for a national stock standstill, where no animal or truck can move, and milk gets tipped down the drain.
Because FMD in organic matter may live from weeks to months, nothing will be allowed to move in and out of farms around infected sites under emergency Aus Vet plans. Not people. Not dogs. Not milk. Not wool. Not trucks.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen and Energy Minister Matt Kean should be the biggest cheerleaders of urgent biosecurity controls because Animal Health Australia’s emergency plans to stamp out FMD spell the end of Albanese’s Reenergising Australia plan before it even starts.
No truck will be allowed to move from farm to farm for” business as usual”, stopping solar plants, wind towers and transformers from being built. Rampant FMD will be catastrophic for Australia and every country that relies on our meat, medicine, baby formula, dairy, wool and leather.
So far, the Albanese Government’s biosecurity response has been a new dog in Darwin and Cairns. Senator Watt admits they “aren’t so much about sniffing soil or sniffing footwear but particularly picking up animal products”.
Biosecurity officers read out a special message focused on foot and mouth disease.
“Certain numbers of planes” coming back from Indonesia every single passenger will be taken away or asked questions and then “potentially referred off for screening”.
He says passport profiling tries to “identify people who may have been in contact with the virus and then having those discussions and potential screening with them”.
Why have biosecurity laws when we can leave it to a lottery? No passport, bureaucrat, or detector dog nosing for meat product will pick up manure or mud hosting a virus. It can survive in organics for weeks.
Suppose Senator Watt won’t question his department when they give terrible advice on biosecurity that goes against his inherent preference for quarantine stations.
What will he do when the department starts pushing its urbane agenda?
He is not there for an autotelic experience but to lead a nation through a potential agricultural apocalypse.
Already, enduring cynicism from agricultural communities is that Labor’s refusal to quarantine, shut out or even force holiday-makers to wash their shoes when they declare they had been to Bali is a deliberate onebird, two-stones ploy.
One disease could potentially deal with two significant problems for the left-wing of the Labor Party - ending live export, which they announced during the federal election campaign, and reducing methane emissions, without the headache of fighting farmers.
As the world turns its back on us as their trading partner, slashing $32bn from the economy, it can be FMDS fault instead of Labor’s.
Any vet will tell you if it gets into our feral pig population, there will be no stopping it, even with the mass killing of livestock and strict quarantine of rural Australians.
But stalling on it now will be a massive own goal for Labor’s power targets unless, of course, they want to start building solar and wind farms in the cities.
It’s time that Wellcamp was put to use.