Sorry ax2503, you've got that a bit upside down. It was the unions that closed the Australia abattoirs, with their continual industrial action, & the farmers who adapted by developing live exports.

When the continual strikes had a days work for a meat worker down to 4 hours for a full day's high pay, the abattoirs started going broke, or going out of business while there was still a little salvageable equity.

You might be able to get away with talking garbage at some greenie love in, but you won't get away with it here ax2503.

Nothing to stop you building a nice abattoir, & making a fat profit if you believe your own rhetoric.

So will we phase out exports of wheat? Imagine how many biscuits all that wheat would make; wheat growers would be instant millionaires with so many biscuits to sell. And iron ore? ban that too. No cheating selling steel, we must value add - how about cars. we can make them better and cheaper than anyone else, can we not?

Actually the mistake that ax2503 made is that no abattoir workers lost their jobs because of live exports. Live exports are primarily because either the buyers are in areas where there is no refrigeration or because there are religious requirements in slaughtering the animals.

The net result is that when they don't get live exports from Australia, they get them from somewhere else. All these idiots have done is put Australians out of work, thousands of Australian cattle are starving, or having to be shot, and there no change in behavior at the abattoirs that simply get their cattle from somewhere else.

My thanks to Shadow Minister and Hasbeen for setting the record and myself straight on the issue of what exactly killed the abattoirs.