Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Mulesing

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (19:13): (1193) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Agriculture, and the action I seek is for the minister to meet with FOUR PAWS, Humane Society International and the Australian Alliance for Animals to discuss their recently published report titled The Broken Promise: The Australian Wool Industry’s Failure to End Live Lamb Cutting (Mulesing), and Why Governments Must Step In. Live lamb cutting, also known as mulesing, is a mutilation using shears to cut a chunk of skin and flesh off a lamb’s hindquarters, between the ages of 2 and 12 weeks. They are flipped upside down as someone hacks off their skin, leaving them with a huge, raw and bleeding wound. This is often done with zero or inadequate pain relief. Some of you may not be aware and others may be all too aware that the Australian wool industry in 2004 made a commitment to phasing out live lamb cutting by 2010. It is now 14 years later, in 2024, and 52 per cent of wool producers are still performing this mutilation.

The purpose of live lamb cutting is to prevent flystrike, where flies lay eggs in a sheep’s skin folds. Yet flystrike is entirely preventable through the breeding of plain-bodied and naturally flystrike-resistant sheep who have low wrinkle and dag scores. In 2020 a BG Economics report revealed that of 97 wool producers surveyed, 83 per cent said transitioning to breed plain-bodied merinos was not costly; 87 per cent received a price premium for wool from sheep not subjected to live lamb cutting; and 86 per cent recommended the transition to other wool producers.

The calls for the end of live lamb cutting are not just from animal welfare advocates but from ordinary consumers and from the industry itself, with the CEO of WoolProducers Australia Jo Hall declaring that ‘anyone who tries to claim that mulesing does not cause pain is living in Disneyland’, and there are even demands coming from Australia, EU and UK trade negotiations. Many brands are opposed to live lamb cutting, including BIG W, David Jones, Nike, H&M, Hugo Boss, Myer, Patagonia and Target, and as a result they are sourcing their wool from outside of Australia.

Australia is currently the only country in the entire world where live lamb cutting is still legal – how utterly embarrassing for this nation. The industry has failed to live up to its promise. It is now time that the Victorian government steps in to ban it, and I hope that the minister will meet with these organisations to discuss the findings of the report and the steps forward in order to do this.