A West Australian sheep farmer’s daughter and trainee livestock agent has penned an open letter to newly re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, urging him to rethink the Labor government’s ban on live sheep exports by sea.
Last year, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt announced the ban, which is set to come into place on May 1, 2028.
The government has also allocated a $107 million funding package to support sheep farmers during the transition phase.
Former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton vowed to scrap the ban if elected, but with a second term of Labor government at the helm, Jorj Downsborough is calling on the government to listen.
Downsborough grew up in a farming family, with her great-great-grandfather first clearing and cropping 6,000 hectares of wheat and grazing land in 1923.
The Burracoppin local took to sharing her letter to Albanese publicly on Facebook after an email to the prime minister’s office was met with a generic, automatically generated response.
“I hail from the small town of Burracoppin, Western Australia. If you look at it on a map, you’d just see a town siding. And if you looked at it on Google Maps, you would see nothing more than an abandoned pub, a string of run-down buildings, and a football oval that gets played on once a year,” Downsborough said.
“But, if you were to ask anyone who lives there, they’d tell you that it is the nucleus of the 70 families that farm within a 35 kilometre radius of that dot on the map—my family being one of them.
Livelihood Depends on Sheep
The land farmed by Downsborough’s family is some of the driest land, with a really “good year” occurring only once a decade, and an average year about every five.“What gets us by all those years in between? Yearly, we sell our wether lambs, a line of ewe lambs, our oldest line of mutton, and our wool clip,” she said.
“At a surface level, farming sheep provides us with cashflow—a way to put food on the table, clothes on our backs, pay school fees, water bills, fuel bills and electricity bills.
“From a business perspective, they pay for our shearing contractors, mechanics, fertiliser, chemical, fencing, agronomists and labourers.
“But most importantly from a community perspective, they ensure more people on our school bus run, more people that play local sport and a family-owned farming operation that trades with over 10 local businesses.”
Downsborough said the live sheep business was her family’s lifeline.
“Without sheep ingrained in our farm for the last hundred years, we wouldn’t still be farming, it’s as simple as that. And thousands of farmers are in the same position,” she said.
“Taking away the live export trade takes away our livelihoods.”
Australian sheep farmers say the ban is unfair because the nation has strict animal welfare standards and that Australia’s live exports are healthy and sought-after globally.
Getting the Message Heard
The intergenerational farmer questioned whether Albanese understood the bans would lead to job losses for shearers, truck drivers, and livestock agents.“How have we been so misunderstood and why has our message been so fiercely ignored?” she said.
“As an industry, we have established multiple avenues in The Livestock Collective and the Keep the Sheep campaign in hope of educating and giving you insight into what really happens on farm and paddock to plate.”
She urged the newly re-elected leader to contemplate the flow-on effect on the local community reliant on live trade.
“We filled the streets of Perth with trucks, vehicles and banners, pleading for you to see reason, to see our cause, not once, but twice,” she said.
“We even came all the way to Canberra, right to your doorstep. And you wouldn’t even hear us out.”
Live sheep exports are in demand in countries that struggle with production or demand live animals for religious slaughter.
In some cases, it is more cost-efficient to transport live animals than to transport prepared cold meat, which the government has suggested as an alternative avenue for export.
The practice of live exports has been a contentious issue among animal rights advocates who argue that long journeys at sea are plagued by high animal mortality rates and distress.
Advocates for banning live exports, such as Animals Australia, also express concern around the lack of control over humane treatment and slaughter once they arrive in a foreign country.
Senator Watt was contacted for comment.
