Comment on ABC 2025 Election Watch Party
ziltoid101@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
As a Perthlet, I’m pretty happy overall. Only real disappointment is Canning; would have thought it’s within Labor’s grasp but currently looks like a 5% swing against Labor, even after sitting MP Andrew Hastie said we should give our mineral stockpiles to Trump to stop the tarriffs. Any Mandurah locals have some insight into the sentiment - is it the Keep The Sheep campaign maybe?
Its definitely gona be Keep the Sheep for part of it. I’m surprised it wasn’t more of an issue in the end.
A friend, (not a farmer), at the start of the WA election campaign was getting hot under the collar about Labor’s live export ban. I said to him, “this is a minority issue, its hardly going to touch the sides in terms of political issues.”
I stand by that comment, but man, they’re a noisy bloody minority! They certainly made me feel i’s gona have to eat my words.
Here in Albany those fucking keep the sheep signs are everywhere, a noisy minority indeed.
Personally I’m not sympathetic. Farmers just have a lot of tax concessions. It’s been plain to see for years that live export was going to stop sooner or later. If you were exposed to that risk, well, you should have taken action to manage it.
Yeah, they’ve been insane all over my area as well. I struggle to remember any campaign that has been so active.
I haven’t read an argument for it that doesn’t rely in the greater part on emotion. I’ve seen very little sober argument for the negative effects of the ban.
The key argument i’ve read is it delivers the industry into an abbotoir monopoly, this is undoubtedly a problem, which is in old Economic parlance a market failure. I’m slowly going to the Mariana Mazzucato view of Economics, so i see the live export closure as an opportunity for market shaping, by the stakeholders, gov, busines individuals, farmers, involved in it.
An idea the WA Government should consider is a government owned abbotoir which can set a steady floor on the prices farmers get for the sheep. Sorry if i get a little gross hereafter. But the meat from this abbotoir doesn’t necessarily have to find a profitable buyer, but can be used to deliver high protein food to disadvantaged communities here, and internationally. Abbotoir meat purchases could constitute a part of the Australian international food aid budget, or sent out to aboriginal communities, food shelters in the city, or island communities or nations in the pacific.
Ah, sorry… the “negative effects of the ban” are the deleterious effects on graziers. There are many farmers who had a flock worth $500k which is now worth $100k. Some large graziers are not breeding more sheep because they can’t sell the ones they have.
A lot of these operations are big businesses and in some cases the existing format just isn’t viable any more.
As I said I’m not very sympathetic because that’s just how things go if you want to run a business, but it’s definitely a big deal for some people.
For example, a farmer might be in their late 60s and saying “I’ve been working with sheep for 50 years and it’s all I know” and for their farm to continue they need to transition to cropping or some such.
One silly argument against live export that I heard some people parroting is that if Australia doesn’t do it some other country will and the standards of care for the sheep will be much lower than ours. That’s just bullshit IMO.
The requirement for live export is, as in all things, a money thing. It’s cheaper to ship them live because you don’t need refrigeration, and you don’t need Australian-Standards-Compliant abattoirs paying Australian wages.
Durack has a 7% swing away from Labor (against the trend of the whole state), I think it’s safe to say that Keep The Sheep was successful in regional areas. However it doesn’t seem to have had much effect in the metro, aside from Canning if you include that.
ziltoid101@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Actually, now that I dig deeper, I see that Canning has an 8% swing to One Nation, dayum…