Animal Activists

THE live-export industry is mounting a campaign to dismantle government regulation and take back control for policing animal welfare standards, as activists produced fresh allegations of Australian cattle being abused overseas, this time in Mauritius. Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said it was “the worst possible time” to raise self-regulation.

“A debate about greater self-regulation is the last thing the Australian community wants to hear right now, (when) confidence in this important industry has again been undermined.”

Ah…so it’s an important industry now.  Didn’t seem important when Joe Ludwig arbitarily closed it down based on a video shown on the ABC. The hide of Fitzgibbon to say anything about the confidence when it was the ALP/ABC that totaly scrapped any confidence our trading partners had in the industry by their sheer stupidity and hatred of the man on the land. City folk don’t reaslize that Ludwig’s stupidity didn’t just impact on the live export industry but on the entire industry.  With  one stroke of the pen he destabalized cattle prices across the entire country as a surplus of cattle, once intended for Indonesia, suddenly came on the market. Cattle prices plumetted with the glut; mortgages couldn’t be met; truck repayments were missed; staff were let go and it is still in the doldrums.  I noted one “expert” on the ABC say “the live export industry was closed down for only one month!” Bullshit!  Two years later and is is still in trouble. One friend, not involved in the export industry but cattle breeding generally, now has an $8 million  mortgage attributed solely to Joe Ludwig.  Two seasons of rediculously low beef prices where his costs far outweigh prices per kilo paid has left him in trouble. So I’m glad Fitzgibbon now thinks it is an important industry.  Maybe the ALP won’t stand in the way of any remedial work Abbott and Joyce have to do to get it back on track. We’ll see. I find it somewhat strange that  radical animal rights activists can take videos of cattle or sheep being mistreated anywhere in the world, sheet it home to Australia and use it as a base in their program to close down the cattle and sheep industry.   How can the cattle breeder out Chinchilla way be expected to have any impact on what happens to the cattle he sells in far away places like Mauritius? He can’t really and whereas no one likes to see animals treated poorly we can’t be held to account what other cultures do.