Thursday, 20 March 2025

Bendigo Livestock Exchange

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (00:25): (1083) My request is to the Minister for Agriculture, and I request that the Minister for Agriculture have the department do the work necessary for the Bendigo Livestock Exchange at Huntly to be declared a sensitive receptor site under the EPA guidelines to protect it from biosecurity risk in the future. Bendigo Livestock Exchange is the major livestock selling centre in northern Victoria, with sheep and lamb sales 46 weeks of the year, as well as special sheep sales from time to time, and total livestock trades of more than 1 million head annually. To assist the logistics of transacting livestock numbers on this scale, there are holding paddocks adjacent to the selling yards in which livestock can be held for a short period. The Bendigo Livestock Exchange also creates employment for the equivalent of 70 full-time employees, many of whom are on site for three days a week. All this is being put at risk by Bendigo City Council’s decision to allow Western Composting Technology Pty Ltd to develop a composting site within 70 metres of the selling yards at the livestock exchange – effectively the width it takes for a truck to pull in and back up to the unloading ramps. Western Composting Technology will be receiving commercial garden waste and food waste at the site.

Alarm bells should be ringing about food waste being trucked in from anywhere in the state to this site. Meat product illegally imported into Victoria could easily find its way into this site, and there lies the biosecurity risk for our national livestock sector. Estimates put the cost to the Australian economy of a foot-and-mouth outbreak at more than $50 billion, and that is on top of the devastation and heartbreak of slaughtering millions of livestock. Those who recall the UK foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001 will remember the TV news coverage of the huge fire piles, as slaughtered livestock were burned to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth. Generations of livestock breeding were destroyed in one outbreak. Foot-and-mouth is endemic in many parts of the world, but not here, and Australia needs to be vigilant to keep it out. So why increase the risk by putting a composting facility which will receive food waste within 70 metres of a major livestock selling centre? No layers of protocols and rules of operation can guarantee there will not be an outbreak of a livestock disease from locating this composting facility so close to the centre. As I understand it, Western Composting Technology has already had a number of noncompliance issues at its Shepparton site, including fires in the maturation piles. The risk is too great.

Minister, on behalf of the farmers who sell through the Bendigo Livestock Exchange and the Australian livestock sector in general, please have the Bendigo Livestock Exchange declared a sensitive receptor site and protect the industry from the risk of a major disease outbreak, from locating this composting facility within 70 metres of the selling centre.