A month on from Agriculture Minister David Littleproud’s furious theatrics in response to revelations of the sickening conditions of live export sheep carriers, nothing has been done — despite even more horrific footage emerging. That’s exactly as some of us predicted, and exactly how the National Party has handled the issue since the Coalition got back into power.

In that time, three more live sheep export vessels have been allowed to depart for the Middle East by the Department of Agriculture despite violating the department’s own standards for on-board stocking. And the company at the centre of the appalling Sixty Minutes footage, Emanuel Exports — which has overseen tens of thousands of dead sheep on its vessels over the last two decades and which has been found to have breached regulatory requirements over 40 times since 2013 — has another vessel, the Al Shuwaikh loading in Adelaide today, before travelling to Fremantle to load more sheep — right at the start of the warm period for live exports to the Middle East when on-board deaths double.

Once you remove the theatrics from Littleproud’s response, what did he do?

  • A review of the Department of Agriculture’s role of industry regulator, which isn’t due until late August, at the end of warm period.
  • A review of live export in warmer months by Dr Michael McCarthy, which is due this coming Friday. There is little confidence within the animal welfare community that McCarthy can provide a review that is both independent and seen to be independent. There is no doubt as to McCarthy’s strong veterinary skills and experience; but his company works with the live export industry as well as the broader livestock industry, and his CV shows that he has previously provided veterinarian services to Emanuel Exports on board its vessels as part of a long-term participation in the live export industry. 
  • The Department of Agriculture placed a departmental observer on board one vessel and committed to using their observations “in the future” — in effect using further live export voyages as trials to provide more data about animal welfare, when it has many years’ worth of its own data and has refused to act on it.
  • The Department has boasted of decreasing on-board stocking densities by 17.5%. This impressive-sounding figure translates into an additional 540 square cms per sheep, or less than an A4 sheet of paper. The Australian Veterinary Association has called for an increase of at least 30%.

Indeed, in one of the most significant shifts in the live export debate, over the weekend the AVA — which is hardly an activist organisation on live exports — called for an immediate cessation of all live sheep exports to the Middle East from May to October, in effect declaring to Littleproud that any scientific debate on the warm-months shipping issue was over. 

The heat issue is only one aspect of the non-regulation of live sheep exports. While heat inflicts significant shipboard losses (and then even more after sheep have been disembarked, due to organ failure), the primary cause of death on ships is “inanition”, or failing to eat, because many sheep simply can’t get to on-board feed troughs due to over-crowding. According to the Department of Agriculture’s own regulations about live exports (if you can download them — the department has the single worst website in the Australian public service; it is impossible to download regulations from its site, handily), sheep “must have access to food and water on demand and enough space to lie down”. And under the Meat and Livestock Industry Act, the Department of Agriculture must not licence exports unless it is satisfied that “the applicant is, and is likely to continue to be, able to comply with the conditions to which the licence, if granted, would be subject.” As photos from live export vessels show, the department has been happily licencing, and continues to licence now, exporters like Emanuel Exports despite knowing that its own regulations around stocking densities are being breached. 

All this is consistent with the National Party’s long-term approach to the live export issue, which is to deflect the outrage of the community whenever the brutality inherent in live exports draws media attention and do only enough to regulate the industry so as to keep it going.