Live-ex ban to impact industries differently

With over one million head of cattle exported from Australia each year, Mr Herrmann said this would be an extraordinary amount of cattle to flow back into the country’s abattoirs.

Live cattle exports contribute $1.2 billion to the Australian industry annually, so the financial impact of a ban would be “significant”, he said.

While the importance of live cattle export couldn’t be understated up north, he said, the effects would flow-on to the rest of the country, as cattle flood into abattoirs that “don’t have anything in place to handle that”.

“The other thing to remember is that the cattle we’re selling via live export are not the type of beef that Australia is good at selling; we’re good at selling prime, lotfed and grain-finished cattle,” he said.

A ban during a drought year would cause even more havoc, as live export normally has the capacity to provide relief when needed.

“In the drought years of 2013 and 2014, there was record slaughter of cattle as farmers tried to manage their feed situation –  of that record number, 15pc went to live export,” he said.

For the live sheep export industry, it would mainly be Western Australia that was impacted.

Last year, 1.6 million sheep were exported out of Australia, 87pc out of WA, and that’s not going to change, according to Mr Herrmann.

“With the sheep population so low on the east coast, because of drought, there won’t be surplus sheep going around,” he said.

But the impact would be significant in WA, he said.

“There will be another 1.6 million sheep there, so there will be somewhere between an 18-30pc price impact, and not just on wethers, but on all sheep in WA,” he said.

“The meatworks would be swamped, and eventually, sheep will find their way to the east coast.”

Given the sheep and cattle industries would react differently to a potential ban, he predicted the two industries would be treated differently when it came to government decision-making.