The ethical and pragmatic way to solve this problem is to pass an Act forcing Animals Australia, the RSPCA, PETA, and anyone who agrees with them to fund all the costs of the measures they advocate. End of problem.

The ABC is a disgrace of partisan bias and should be abolished. In the debate over animal exports, not once did they identify the real issue, namely, why the advocates of higher standards should not pay for them themselves. For example, many Indonesian places lack the equipment we have here for handling cattle safely: cattle-races and cattle-crushes and head-bails.

Instead of calling for other people to be locked in a cage to try to force them to pay for the animal rights' activists own values, those activists need to put their money where their mouth is.

What's a cattle-crush cost? $5,000? The RSPCA could have sent 20 of them to Indonesia for $100,000 and it would have solved the problem.

Instead we get this nauseating moral grandstanding, calls for government to control everything; they destroyed a whole industry, and in the process causing misery and death by starvation of huge numbers of cattle. Nice. But of course they don't care about that. It's not about animal rights, it's about their real love: ordering people around.

Why governments hesitate to repeal the rubbish passed by their predecessors is a mystery. Both ESCAS and the former reporting arrangement should be abolished, on the ground that their subject matter is none of government's business.

Mencken said "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule" and that applies doubly to the animal rights activists David Leyonhjelm criticises. They are fake and phony to the core, they are nothing but power-freaks.

JKJ what a crock so what your saying is the animals rights activist shoulld pay for the tools that the meat exporters are suposed to provide? That's like suggesting Australian unions should pay for saftey equipment for forgien workers. Bascil failure of logic JKJ but par for the course.

The fact is the policeman isn't doing their job and therefore the animal rights groups are doing it.

Thankyou NSW voters for putting this guy into the upperhouse.

What is he going to come up with next mission Australia hasn't got a view on digital tv thorerefore we shouldn't listen to them about the poor?

thanks David for a good article. The whole premise of valuing animals more than humans comes from the idiotic theory of evolution. Most people are to complacent to think through how this myth is used to justify just about every evil under the sun.

I suggest live--and permanent--export of this senator-elect.

False premise in this article - we do not export women to countries where they are abused (or anywhere else). We do, however, export animals to countries where we know we cannot prevent them being abused. We can't even fly a plane load of cattle to Asia without many of them dying in transit - so many that it was above the 'acceptable level'. Imagine that being applied to flights involving humans - 'The Minister for Aviation today announced flights from Australia had no more than the acceptable level of passenger deaths'.

We don't need to be exporting live animals. If people in the middle east or elsewhere want meat we can provide it to them humanely halal slaughtered in Australia. Its not as though there is an oversupply of animal protein in the world, we have a lot of it, we can set the terms under which we provide it. As we used to.

I simply can't abide unnecessary cruelty. And I've worked in abattoirs, and hunted game meat.
Trucking patently terrified and screaming animals halfway across the country; manifestly, simply toughens the meat!
If an animal is to be bled to death to satisfy some ancient stone age ritual, then animal should be rendered unconscious first.
Conscious or unconscious, the animal will still bled to death; and, the meat in the unconscious animal, will not flood with hormones, which both darken and toughen the meat.
However, I don't believe vegan tree huggers should be policing this trade, unless they can follow a particular animal, from the farm gate to the end user, if only to satisfy that it was initially an Australian animal? And just how many times it changed hands, as a commodity, before it was exposed to such barbaric cruelty.
And if there were middlemen profit takers, then how is any Australian able to be asked to wear any responsibility whatsoever, for any subsequent cruelty!
The simple solution to this problem is to build large freezers in the host countries, and then ship only boxed meat.
I'm almost certain it would be more economical/profitable, than shipping live animals halfway around the world in extraordinarily expensive ships, or parked in some port, to force down the price, with some imaginary disease, so that in effect, we operate at a continuing loss.
The only cited reason we don't already ship boxed meat, is the fact that many of these people just do not have fridges or freezers.
Now there's something we used to build. And done on a large enough scale with exports, something we could do again! If we we just smart enough to cut out all the profit demanding middle men, and sell these items direct to the end user or household. Even if that also meant, we needed to provide a finance plan, or loan various entities, enough money to buy our products! (Kelvinator anyone, and would you like a gas or solar powered genie to go with that?)
Rhrosty.