Minister Watt continues to duck and weave on Foot and Mouth Disease

The PM has made a mistake in giving the Agriculture ministry to an accountant and lawyer from the Gold Coast. Even so, the country still needs to be ready for the worst. Our agriculture and economy depends on it.

Transcript

In serving the people of Queensland and Australia, my intention in advancing this motion was to protect the people’s interests from the economic devastation that will result from foot-and-mouth disease if it enters Australia. There is no time to waste. It is a distinct possibility that, given the substandard response from this government, foot-and-mouth may be in Australia before the next sitting. Suspending standing orders to debate this matter today was essential, and I thank Senator Gallagher and the government for this.

Senator Whish-Wilson yesterday suggested that this matter could wait for discussion at the inquiry into the government’s foot-and-mouth response. No, it can’t. That’s weeks away. We need to act now to get these vaccines into Australia.

I know the minister appeared on radio earlier this week and alluded to the ‘scaremongering’ coming from some people around this issue. It is not scaremongering to want to save the life blood of hundreds of communities in rural Australia. It is not scaremongering to want to preserve $80 billion in exports. It is not scaremongering to want Australia to provide our beautiful red-meat protein into the international market to feed the world. It is not scaremongering to want to protect the thousands of jobs, including union jobs in transport, that the livestock industry supports.

Why on earth did the Prime Minister give the job of agriculture minister to an accountant and lawyer from the city? That decision was a gross insult to the Australian agriculture sector. The minister’s actions in his very first test show that the minister hasn’t a clue. The minister misleads and uses false slurs to cover up his own deficiencies and to divert attention from his deficiencies. The minister misled the Senate and the public when he answered my question on bringing vaccines to Australia just in case. The minister replied that this would cause Australia to be considered as ‘having foot-and-mouth disease’—rubbish! Having the vaccines here is not considered having foot-and-mouth. Using them is, and clearly these vaccines would not be used unless we had an actual outbreak. I’ve repeatedly called on the minister to correct his reply, and he continues to ignore that request. Truth doesn’t matter.

The minister misled the Senate when saying vaccine production had to wait until we knew the strain that had arrived in Australia. That specious reply ignores the likelihood that the strain we could have in Australia is going to be the same strain present now in Bali. If we’re making vaccines for Bali, make some more for us and store those vaccines in Australia, ready for any outbreak that comes here from Bali. Minister Watt’s answer ignores the simple question: if we need to know the strain before making a vaccine, what are the million doses of foot-and-mouth vaccine Australia is storing in the UK right now that he told us about?

The minister called into question my support for vaccines yesterday in another diversion. The minister was clearly not listening. In my question last Thursday, I did reassure the public that these vaccines are safe. The first thing I did in drafting my questions was to check that and to add the fact that it does look after people’s safety. I have never spoken against vaccination. I have spoken strongly against, and will continue to speak strongly against, experimental gene based treatments for humans, with grossly inadequate safety testing. Experimental vaccine injections have caused so many horrendous human injuries and deaths the government has had to implement a compensation scheme. In contrast, the foot-and-mouth vaccine is not an mRNA gene based vaccine. It is a normal vaccine, a real vaccine. According to New Zealand health authorities, it’s safe to consume meat and milk from a vaccinated animal.

So once again for clarity, before the minister misrepresents me again, I’m suggesting we get these one million doses of vaccine that we already own, and any others we need to produce for this strain, stored here in Australia, ready to vaccinate 48 hours after a foot-and-mouth outbreak occurs, should one occur. Taking this precaution will meet the procedure in the minister’s own manual. It’s on page 18 of the foot-and-mouth AUSVETPLAN edition 3 manual, in case the minister wants to look it up.

I asked the minister to explain why these vaccines are being stored in the UK rather than Australia. The minister has failed to explain this very strange decision, despite repeated requests. In the event of an outbreak, it will take seven days to get the vaccines here from the UK. Yet vaccination is supposed to start after 48 hours. After one week it will be too late. The livestock industry will be done for. He said he had tabled a response. He did, but it was scant and did not answer my basic questions. Was he really badly advised or did he lie? We need the truth. People need the truth. There are two issues now thanks to Senator Watt: foot-and-mouth and trust and truth, because of what he has done and not done and what he’s said and not said.

The minister’s briefing on foot-and-mouth last Tuesday appears to have made a factual error. It was in a casual reply, so I’m only going to mention this in passing. The comment was made that foot-and-mouth disease stays resident on hard surfaces for hours. The American College of Veterinary Pathologists briefing sheet on foot-and-mouth puts the residence period at one month. Between hours and one month, there is a hell of a difference—a huge difference. If it’s indeed one month then the protocols we’re following for foot-and-mouth need to be much stronger, more like the disinfectant protocols the government rushed to implement for COVID.

Some of these issues can be covered during the Senate inquiry. Vaccines, though, cannot wait. We must have them here now. We must have stronger airport screening now. How can it be that, after all these weeks the virus has been in Indonesia, we still have several international flights arriving directly from Indonesia all at the same time and then no flights for hours? If you do not have the staff to check every passenger from infected areas, Minister, here’s an idea: work with the airlines to stagger their arrivals so we can screen every single person.

I have no confidence that this minister, in being in charge of the department, is working from a set of protocols that are designed to stop foot-and-mouth. Rather, these protocols seem to be about looking as if government tried to stop foot-and-mouth. Perhaps this has something to do with the Left’s policy to reduce livestock to save on carbon dioxide production. A 43 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide output below 2005 levels by 2030 must include substantial reductions from agriculture. I’ll speak to this absolute nonsense, this garbage, on many occasions in the years ahead. For today, let me say that cows are not climate vandals. Graziers are wonderful custodians of the land, as Senator Nampijinpa Price just pointed out. The government is not a wonderful custodian of the land.

I’m aware there is work that suggests that foot-and-mouth will not spread amongst feral pigs and other feral animals that can get foot-and-mouth because of the sparse population. What utter rubbish! These researchers-for-hire clearly have not been to the national parks I’ve have been to. Nobody in the government seems to care that infestations of pests in national parks encroach on farmland, putting hardworking farmers under enormous strain, when all they want to do is grow food and fibre to feed and clothe the world. Why the political Left want to stop farmers feeding and clothing the world is beyond me—and it’s clearly beyond Senator Nampijinpa Price. I know your climate gods need the ritual sacrifice of farmers to reach a target that makes no scientific sense, no moral or ethical sense, no human sense. And, really, how can rewilding productive farmland be more desirable than feeding and clothing the world and the people on our planet?

This agenda dovetails very nicely with Premier Andrews’s recent agriculture bill, which allows the Premier to declare quarantine on part or all of rural Victoria based on the threat of a disease outbreak. Animals can be culled on the threat of getting a disease. Farmers can be told what they can and can’t produce. Lockdowns can be hard border lockdowns extending for years. Victoria is coming for their graziers in the name of sustainability. All it will take is one disease outbreak. What could that outbreak be? If every rural media outlet in the bush is not getting onto their local Labor member or Greens candidates and asking them, ‘What is the go here?’ then I don’t know why they’re not doing it.

There’s a story here. It’s a story that is so much more than an inexperienced minister with no knowledge of his portfolio tripping over the first hurdle. It’s more than a minister who refuses to accept he’s made a mistake and, as a result, refuses to fix it. That’s not honest. It’s more than Australian farmers being thrown under the sustainability bus by wealthy city dwellers anxious to make others pay for their climate religion. It is about the very future of our Australian agricultural sector, and that’s terrifying.

Minister Watt made this an issue by misleading the Senate. Quoting others about foot-and-mouth disease does not change a thing with what’s happening with the government. Continually derailing the discussion and diverting the discussion onto what other people are doing or not doing does not answer questions. It shows the man lacks accountability and responsibility. And I will continue to do my job for the people. I’ve been elected by the people—not the people that Senator Watt quoted. It’s easier to get a human being vaccinated in this country than to get a cow vaccinated. We have one flag above this parliament. We are one community and we are one nation. Labor, in its policy on foot-and-mouth disease, is a clear and present danger to agriculture.