If we limited live trade to our autumn and their spring? Most of the problems with the live trade would disappear. Leaving our summer and their winter a possibility for live cattle. And or an intense abattoir season and an increase in chilled meat exports. And killed here using traditional and humane methods. The current system sends meat as cooked before the kill, trade and entirely unacceptable. We could invest in some offshore refrigeration and eliminate the foreign profit demanding middleman. So as to enhance the chilled meat direct sales trade and our onshore job creation and maintenance. In any event, our economy is far too reliant on a trade which can be terminated tomorrow by the outbreak of regional hostilities! And needs to be replaced by other means, say by using our brains and what we still own and control to quite massively reduce all on-farm costs! Thus ending the need for endless price taking to survive. I've seen the other possibility of a niche market on-farm abattoir supplying their own select paddock to plate local markets restaurant chains etc. Alan B.

Yet another hugely promising northern industry bites the dust.

The Ord River Scheme, which dates back to the 1960's... reduced through the years to a shadow of its promise.

The northern abattoir industry... gone.

Cattle enterprises dating back for a hundred years or more... flogged off to speculators.

What next?

Alan B:

Ever heard of paragraphs? Slabs of hundreds of words of unformatted text are not exactly easily comprehended.

Yes SE, but even if I incorporate the required paragraphs. A partially disabled word replaces them with the slab. And designed it seems, to allow Microsoft, to replace my current Email provider with theirs. And as a consequence, making most of my concurrent online account servicing problematic. I'm retrying paragraphs to see if the unhelpful interference/elder abuse has been remedied. Alan

Very interesting article. Thanks.

The stench of Julia Gillard lingers on!

Al B

Best advice for the poor souls still battling with the fruit of the Microsoft Lemon tree, is to pick it up and chuck it in the bin. Go buy a simple IPad for yourself.

Got a brand newie on my lap now Diver and still the same problem. Microsoft a system designed by hackers and for hackers, masquerading as IT engineers. When I replace this system it will be with the other non- Microsoft system, always providing it hasn't been outsourced to the land of slumdog millionaires. Alan.

Alan B.
I use Microsoft Windows 10 and Office suites for everything except the browser. Somebody warned me away from Edge, so although loaded, I don't open it.

Mozilla Firefox works fine for me, with one or two exceptions. Ditto Chrome. I hadn't realised that the problem lay elsewhere, so my apologies for the snarky earlier comment.

Allan B. It doesnt matter how you kill animals at this end. You can have the most religiously rigorous and supervised slaughter possible and that still wouldn’t help because one of the biggest reasons for the need of live stock at the other end is a simple lack of refrigeration from retail customers.
Poor people in these countries don’t own fridges and freezers so they need to buy a live animal and keep them alive until required

Big Nana is exactly correct there

For the record. We have a commodity. Someone wants that commodity. Part of the process is how they want that commodity. They supply the money, we supply the commodity. All the reasons why we are doing what we are doing have been gone over, again and again. The first hurdle. Our labour costs are WAY too high, so minimal local input. You can't get more minimal than what we are doing at present. Notwithstanding all the intermediate other reasons we go straight to the end user and as has been pointed out, they do not have the level of refrigeration we do, if at all in some cases. So when all the brainiacs from the brain bank have finished fantasizing over what we should be doing about our livestock exports, don't you think there are smarter and more knowledgeable people already working on it? Until Aussies realise they have gouged themselves into the labour wilderness, don't stop those who can still survive, even prosper from a disastrous upbringing led by a history of leftist greed and an avaricious lifestyle. Aussies are not going to like what is coming, sorry, has already begun. For us to simply survive, in this new future, we must take a significant financial hit. This means, our house prices must drop, as with our earnings and of course the net result is a drop in our standard of living. This has already begun. So I would suggest stop focusing on destroying what is left that helps Australia, and start looking at how your going to handle the pain that is coming.