Flock it: The WA farmers hoping to turn live sheep exports into a live election issue

In a nondescript office at the top of St Georges Terrace in Perth, livestock veterinarian Holly Ludeman sits in front of two large screens. They track the fortunes of an unpopular industry she believes in; one, she will tell you, hundreds of West Australians on farms and in rural towns rely on.

Ludeman, a vet who has worked on farms, in feedlots and on export vessels, is personable and hard-working. Signs of tiredness around her eyes hint at the huge effort the 42-year-old has personally put into the live sheep export industry, one that RSPCA Australia describes as cruel and unnecessary.

On one screen are social media posts created by a team of content providers, many of them young women living in rural Western Australia who’ve been hired by The Livestock Collective, a not-for-profit body Ludeman created to “focus on growing the public understanding of agriculture”. Ludeman clicks on some of the positive posts: a sheep nuzzling a young handler; a sheepdog held in its owner’s arms; a wholesome image of healthy-looking animals penned aboard a live export ship I’ll visit in a few days’ time.

The latter image was taken on one of the ship’s previous voyages to the Middle East, and posted by an on-board livestock handler whose social media platforms include one called Rattle ya Dags. “We’ve got over a million views on this post,” says Ludeman proudly. “It went viral when it was shared around at the time of the inquiry. Sadly, it didn’t end the way we’d hoped.”

Ludeman is referring to the federal parliamentary inquiry into the Export Control Amendment (Ending Live Sheep Exports by Sea) Bill 2024, the Albanese government’s proposed ban on a trade that saw 684,287 live sheep exported in 2023. In July 2024, the bill passed through the upper house, meaning Australia’s live sheep trade will end in just over three years’ time, on May 1, 2028. Until then, RSPCA Australia chief ­scientific officer Dr Suzanne Fowler says sheep will “continue to suffer terribly in live export, with alarming levels of starvation, heat stress, injury and illness”. For many opposed to the trade, the end cannot come soon enough.

Indeed, Western Australia – with its comparatively close proximity to Middle Eastern markets and thus lower transport costs – is the last state to have live sheep exports. Most states exited the live trade years ago and the last sheep ship from South Australia left in 2018. When the ban starts, Ludeman’s employer, Emanuel Exports – a mini-empire spanning three ­generations of the Daws family – is expected to close, along with a small handful of other live exporters.

But they’re not going down without a fight. Astonishingly, one of the most reviled export industries in the nation has radically restyled its image and clawed back support, for which Ludeman can claim much credit. Through The Livestock Collective, which relies on 100-odd subscribers paying between $50 and $1000 each, and funding contracts from partners such as Meat & Livestock Australia, she’s helped craft slogans like the “Keep the Sheep” and “Bin the Ban”, which feature on stickers that supporters can plaster on their rubbish bins. That amplified voice has seen support surge in rural communities, to the point where they’re hopeful of putting a dent in Labor’s federal re-election chances in marginal WA seats.

It’s a stark turnaround from the situation six years ago, when I had to push through an angry crowd holding placards to get into the Emanuel Exports office. The scandalised protesters were reacting to TV footage showing deck-loads of sheep ­panting open-mouthed from heat stress, ­decomposing carcasses caked in a slurry of faeces and urine, and lambs lying dead, their heads turned upward as they gasped for air.

The shocking scenes had been aired by 60 Minutes a few months earlier, images secretly captured during an August 2017 voyage on a livestock ship hired by Emanuel, the Awassi Express, on its way from Fremantle to the Middle East. About 2400 sheep died of heat stress in searing temperatures on that ship; video footage from four other voyages captured by whistleblowers revealed similarly horrific on-board scenes, including a sheep thrown overboard while apparently alive.

Emanuel Exports’ office was under siege, and the lift door to its upper floor had been locked to the public. The then federal agriculture minister David Littleproud, now National Party leader, arrived in Perth that day to dress down the live exporters and signal tougher penalties for offenders. “You’re a ­cancer, and we’re going to cut you out and ­remove you out of the industry,” he said.

In the wake of all this, the Australian Live Exporters’ Council reluctantly admitted that exporting sheep in the sweltering northern summer to the Gulf states had caused mass deaths. It offered a “voluntary moratorium” on export during the hottest three months of the year. Legislative enforcement of the moratorium was introduced in April 2019, and in 2020 it was extended to the four months from June to September, a timeframe that still stands.

Four months after the Awassi footage was aired, Emanuel Exports’ licence to export was cancelled by the Department of Agriculture. The company appealed, and continued trading by buying sheep and selling them to another licensed exporter. It won its appeal in December 2021. Two years later, the WA ­government dropped animal cruelty charges against its directors as “not in the public interest”, partly due to the new summer moratorium and “changes to operating practices made by the company to prevent similar incidents occurring in the future”. The company, and the live sheep trade, had survived.

It was after the 2018 60 Minutes program that Ludeman was hired as a compliance officer and, at the urging of her boss and the wider industry, launched The Livestock Collective. The idea was to argue the case to politicians and the wider ­public that responsible reforms had been made, from the summer moratorium to sheep having greater pen space due to smaller stocking rates, to new ventilation audits, even the selection of lighter-bodied sheep that weren’t as affected by heat stress. “The Livestock Collective came out of crisis; it’s been my full-time ­second job, and we’ve come a long way,” says Ludeman. “It was needed – we didn’t have a united voice, and we weren’t telling our story well.”

The collective launched a virtual live sheep ship tour funded by LiveCorp (the Australian Livestock Export Corporation), took roadshows to agricultural gatherings in the city and country, and conducted media training on behalf of Meat & Livestock Australia with 300 young “livestock leaders” to convey a message about responsible animal husbandry.

The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief in 2019 when the federal Coalition government retained power, since Labor had flagged its intention to ban live sheep exports. It then felt a “kick in the guts”, says Ludeman, when Anthony Albanese led Labor to victory in 2022. Indeed, the issue caused her to join the state Liberal Party, where she was recently elected a party vice-president. “After years of being politically agnostic,” she says, “I’ve nailed my colours to the mast.”

Despite the live export ban hanging like a guillotine over the industry’s neck, Ludeman’s office is filled with a sense of purpose, and propaganda slogans supporting the cause are popping up across the state. In the south-west WA town of Albany, a truck with a “Keep the Sheep” sign is parked behind the goalposts at the local football club, which has renamed its ­clubhouse the “Keep the Sheep Stadium”.

The renamed clubhouse was the result of a raffle to raise club funds, but the Keep the Sheep tag also served to attract media interest to a cause favoured by some residents of Albany, where outlying farm families come to shop or move there after retirement. At the clubhouse, Keep the Sheep spokesman Ben Sutherland tells a media gathering that the Albanese government “has thrown rural Australia away into the wind”. Sutherland runs a fleet of livestock transport trucks. “It’s 30 per cent of my bottom line. For one truck, we’ll move up to 15,000 sheep purely for live export over a six-month period. We’ll move them four times before they are brought down to Fremantle for export.”

‘There are so many complex reasons why we need live export.’

Steven Bolt, merino wool stud farm owner

The end of live export means “a driver and his family who won’t be spending money at the local pub or store. The flow-on effect on the supply chain is huge.” Sutherland introduces Alan McFarland, a furniture store owner from the inland town of Katanning, who won the raffle for his Keep the Sheep stadium-naming suggestion. “I came up with the name after a bourbon, I’ll freely admit,” he jokes, adding that his business relies on local farming families who run mixed wheat and sheep enterprises, including selling sheep for live export.

Steven Bolt, a merino wool stud farm owner who lives near Corrigin, population 1000, is one of them. “The east coast is not Western Australia,” says the Keep the Sheep campaigner and Livestock Collective director. “There are so many complex reasons why we need live export. The East Coast has more access to abattoirs, more consumers of the product locally and access to a longer season than WA. We have a Mediterranean climate with green feed for only five months of the year, so it’s difficult to raise meat lambs and finish them like the eastern states do in a longer growing season.”

At his farm, Bolt hauls a huge merino sheep into ­position and deftly shears it. “For every breeding ewe we want to ­retain on the farm, there’s a wether [castrated male sheep] that needs a market,” he says, spreading the ­animal’s heavy fleece onto the table. “The sheep we send to the Middle East are not the preference of the local market because they’re older and leaner.” He says foreign buyers already have access to chilled and frozen meat. “They won’t replace our live sheep with frozen meat, they’ll get it from other countries because many customers want a live animal.”

Bolt says Keep the Sheep will target a range of WA seats that are marginal for Labor in the upcoming ­federal election. “We’re angry about it. We’ve made it very clear it’s an election issue and we’re fully supported by the Coalition.”

Meanwhile, Albany mayor Greg Stocks tells me his entire council voted to support the campaign. “Eighty per cent of GDP for this southern region is agriculture,” he says, citing a nearby town of 200 residents, “with a lot of people in shearing and transport. Take those jobs out and it becomes a ghost town.”

The mayor, his deputy and council CEO travelled to Canberra in September alongside a Keep the Sheep convoy of 40 West Australian trucks. Wearing a Keep the Sheep woollen scarf, Opposition leader Peter Dutton – flanked by Nationals’ leader David Littleproud – reassured the crowd “we will keep the sheep, we will end Labor’s live sheep export ban”. On a subsequent visit to Perth’s Royal Agricultural Show, Dutton declared WA would be a “key battleground state” in the next election.

Federal Liberal MP Rick Wilson, an ex-farmer, says the live sheep debate demonstrates the divide between city and country views on agriculture. “This is almost the last stand to fight against the closure of the live export trade,” says Wilson, whose O’Connor electorate in WA’s south-east is the nation’s third-largest, with an area of 1.1 million square kilometres.

‘Livestock export is not glamorous. It can be dirty, dusty and smelly, but it’s not cruel.’

Holly Ludeman

“Some other industry might be next, whether it be live cattle, pig farming, intensive broiler farming, it’s the thin end of the wedge,” he says. “That’s why the movement has been so successful in signing people up. There are probably only 4000-5000 farmers who are directly impacted by this [ban] but we’ve got over 100,000 sign-ups and $700,000 in donations. It indicates real affection for the farming sector.”

In reality, WA’s sheep flock had suffered a dramatic decline long before any talk of live export bans; numbers dropped from 38.4 million in 1989-90 to just under 14 million from 2010-11 onwards, according to a 2021 Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics report, due primarily to a move to crop production. Wilson warns the looming threat of a ban could see the state’s sheep numbers plummet further as farmers get out of running labour-intensive flocks; he says the sheep flock now is likely less than 13 million and Australian Wool Innovation forecasts it could fall to 7.2 million by 2026.

“That’s a 40 per cent drop over the next two years,” Wilson says. “It’s because of the government’s decision to shut down the live sheep trade. It’s absolutely a direct correlation. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the regulations introduced by minister Littleproud weren’t warranted. Regardless, the government is going to close the industry down. That’s the Keep the Sheep message: ‘We’ve done everything you asked, we’ve pleaded with government to hear our case and been ignored.’ ”

Down at Fremantle dock last October, the Ocean Swagman is being filled from gunnel to first, second and third floor decks with thousands of sheep. The scene is confronting to onlookers unused to large-scale livestock processing: startled animals being herded off truck transporters, run along narrow races and up steel ramps until they emerge on a ship deck and are swiftly confined in pens. Sheep shit drops between the cracks of the truck transporters and, despite open-sided decks, there’s a strong whiff of ammonia from peeing sheep. “Livestock export is not glamorous,” Ludeman tells me. “It can be dirty, dusty and smelly, but it’s not cruel.”

On board, the sheep seem to settle quickly; on the first floor many have laid down, others arriving on upper floors stand huddled and still. Owned by Perth-based Heytesbury Holdings, the Ocean Swagman is a purpose-built live export vessel with a capacity for 25,000 sheep or 7000 cattle; on this voyage, a smaller cargo of 17,705 sheep gives the impression of ample room in each pen for animals to lie down, and feed and water is plentiful.

A trio of wranglers – Mandy Matthews, Annabelle Broun and George Johnstone – are driving the sheep left and right, with the help of Filipino crew members. Supervising sheep handler Matthews was on board the last Ocean Swagman voyage; her social media posts promoting sheep husbandry and live export have ­attracted more than 450,000 followers.

Broun, her colleague, will travel on the Ocean Swagman this time, typically a two-week journey to Gulf ports in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It will be Broun’s 16th livestock export trip, which includes cattle and buffalo export from northern WA ports. “You’re checking on animals all day, every day. I go from pen to pen, check that all of them are feeding and drinking water. You have to make sure the receivers will be happy with their condition.”

‘The way I view it, is it’s like a feedlot on the sea.’

George Johnstone, vet and live-export wrangler

Two sets of Australian regulations must be observed by animal exporters: one imposes standards for the humane treatment of animals from farm gate to ship, while their treatment in importing countries is covered by the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, or ESCAS, to ensure that exporters, ­handlers, feed lots and abattoirs comply with local and Australian welfare guidelines.

Broun has made trips to Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Brunei and Indonesia. “You see animals from other countries and then you come to the Australian animals and they have much nicer pens, clean feed and water, and stocking densities are better. You really see the difference.”

So what about those horrific deaths on the Awassi Express and other ships? Like others I ask, Broun falls back on largely discredited arguments that the footage was selective or even fabricated by the animal welfare groups that released it. “Everybody has a price and you can twist things to make it look bad,” she says. “I wasn’t happy with the footage from the Awassi Express. I didn’t sail at that time, so I can say what I see now I’m truly happy with. The changes that have happened ­afterwards are really good to see.”

It’s a view shared by the third wrangler, ­government-accredited vet George Johnstone, who is making his third livestock voyage this year. “The way I view it, is it’s like a feedlot on the sea, with feed and water that’s exactly the same, even the same spaces, but with ocean views,” Johnstone says. He’s been to the Gulf states. “The animals get off and go to a feedlot or an abattoir, which Australia has oversight of. They’re not going to small, unregulated abattoirs, but to ones that are as good as, if not better than, Australian abattoirs.”

Johnstone’s presence on the Ocean Swagman is paid for by the livestock exporter; only about 10 per cent of ­voyages have independent, government-appointed vet observers on board. He explains that if sheep deaths reach more than 1 per cent, or a spike emerges on a ­particular day, it raises a flag and must be reported to Australian authorities. Much later, I receive the death rate statistic aboard Ocean Swagman on its arrival: 21 sheep died, meaning a 0.12 per cent mortality rate.

It was an eye-opening experience, even for Johnstone, when he first visited the Kuwait abattoir, which opened in 2019 with several WA farmers attending. A children’s playground sits in front of the abattoir; inside, he witnessed entire families turning up to select their sheep and then watch through a glass window as the animal is bled out and, after death, butchered into portions. Children are often among the onlookers.

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“They are ­obviously comfortable in the Middle East seeing what happens when an animal is slaughtered,” says Johnstone. “It’s very different in Australia, where you go to a supermarket and grab a steak or lamb chops off the shelf. I think it would be better for those who choose to eat meat to have an understanding of the entire process.”

What isn’t stated is that what Johnstone witnessed would be illegal on Australian shores. The Kuwaiti ­abattoir kills sheep without stunning them, whereas all sheep in Australia – even halal-killed animals for boxed meat export – must be stunned before slaughter.

Dr Jed Goodfellow, an expert in animal welfare law from the Australian Alliance for Animals, says the ESCAS regulations permit unstunned slaughter, even though it is contrary to our domestic standards. Why? “Because they wouldn’t have a trade in the Middle East if they didn’t.”

In May, RSPCA Australia released an analysis of data gathered by independent government observers on 53 live sheep export journeys carrying 2.5 million sheep between 2018 and 2023. They reported that more than 6551 sheep had died on board, mostly from gastrointestinal disease, pneumonia, injury or exhaustion from lack of food or water. Over 60 per cent of the reports found clear signs of heat stress, including sheep open-mouth panting. “Put simply,” RSPCA Australia’s Suzanne Fowler said at the time, “the data doesn’t lie.”

Back in Fremantle, Labor’s federal member for the electorate, Josh Wilson, stands on one side of the dock with the Ocean Swagman visible on the far side. On this day, a stiff breeze spares coffee-drinking patrons in the port city from the smell of 17,000 ­urinating sheep.

‘[Live sheep exporters] have denied the problem existed … At no stage have they ever said, “You know what? This is wrong.” ’

Josh Wilson, Federal MP for Fremantle

The defiant pose Wilson strikes for our camera is not contrived – he’s fought against the live sheep trade for years. He’s heard every ­argument in the book about prolonging the trade, and disputes every one. “The year-on-year export of live sheep is like a staircase on a 45-degree downward angle: it’s ­harmful, unnecessary and virtually defunct,” he says. “Once the trade was all over Australia. Now it’s gone down 92 per cent since its peak 20 years ago – between 2012 and 2022 alone, it declined by 73 per cent. Yet the rural towns still exist.”

He says Australia is the largest sheep-meat exporter in the world. “The total export quantity of meat has gone up 400 per cent, we set a new export record in 2023 and another record is predicted for 2024.” (In December, the federal government said, “Australian lamb and mutton exports were the highest on record in 2023-24 by a large margin.”)

While the live sheep trade declined to $77 million in 2022-23, Wilson says, sheep meat exports are currently worth a whopping $4.5 billion a year and growing. Chilled and frozen sheep-meat exports are worth 58 times more than live export. He says even Kuwait – the largest live importer – buys twice as much sheep meat in chilled and frozen form as live animals.

Wilson doesn’t disguise his contempt for live sheep exporters. “They’ve denied the problem existed, they’ve blamed inner-city greenie communists and animal welfare activists, everybody else but themselves. At no stage have they ever said, ‘You know what? This is wrong.’ ”

Early last year, Middle East tensions led to more ­adverse headlines. Thousands of sheep and cattle spent more than 10 weeks – instead of the normal two weeks – confined on board the MV Bahijah. Halfway to its destination, the ship was ordered by the Australian government to turn back due to the threat of attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. The ship returned and, after a delay, the 14,000 sheep and 1000 cattle were briefly offloaded into quarantined feedlots south of Fremantle. Animal welfare groups called for the ­export to be cancelled; instead the livestock were loaded a second time for a five-week voyage around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to be delivered to an Israeli port.

Alliance for Animals’ Jed Goodfellow says the federal government decision to allow reloading of the MV Bahijah “defied decency and common sense … It’s again a reason why the Australian government must get on with phasing out this cruel and unnecessary trade.” Goodfellow accepts that the transition from live animals to boxed meat will require investment in cold storage, slaughter facilities and labour. “We support a phase-out period and assistance, but the suggestion it’s impossible is not realistic.”

Ludeman contends that the MV Bahijah incident was “an outlier event, and unfortunate. We’re ­always monitoring the situation and contin­gency plans are in place. We can offload sheep in other ports.”

Last October, new federal agriculture minister Julie Collins arrived in Perth armed with the promise of more money for the federal government’s transition package: another $32.7 million, bringing the total up to $139.7 million. Of that, sheep producers and associated supply chains would get $97.3 million, primarily to equip them to “supply the growing global demand for sheep meat”, Collins said. Other sums would fund market promotion of Australian sheep products in Australia and overseas, including agriculture counsellors in Dubai and Riyadh.

“We want WA sheep farmers and those associated with the industry to benefit from new markets,” Collins said at the time. “We are investing more in the tran­sition of the Australian sheep industry and supply chain, growing the sheep-meat industry, maintaining Australia’s commitment to animal welfare and increasing national and export trade markets.”

Some industry players may have seen the writing on the wall. WA’s largest sheep processor, WAMMCO (owned by 900 sheep producers), has committed $60 million to expanding capacity to process a further 500,000 head of sheep per year.

Meanwhile, Keep the Sheep ­backers argue that, more than a year on from the ban announcement, a genuine transition plan is still lacking. Labor’s Wilson admits he doesn’t have all the ­details, and an agriculture department official told Senate estimates in November that the first payments were not likely to materialise until mid-2025.

On her visit to WA, agriculture minister Julie Collins found herself banned from visiting the biggest export feedlot south of the city. “She asked but we said no,” says Ludeman. “We couldn’t see the point: her mind’s made up.” In December, Keep the Sheep ­campaigners demonstrated outside a Perth venue where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was opening a new train line. “We wanted to let Albo and his MPs know that we won’t give up until the ban is reversed,” says Ludeman. “This is just a taste of what Labor MPs can expect at the election.”

The live sheep issue has become a tool in the Liberals’ arsenal to win back crucial WA seats lost in the last federal election to Labor – Hasluck, Pearce, Swan and Tangney – and Curtin, held by teal MP Kate Chaney. And there’s a new seat up for grabs: Bullwinkel is a new electorate on the urban fringe of Perth’s hills that tantalisingly extends into regional areas to the east and north. Both Liberal and National Party contenders for Bullwinkel have pledged to ­support the live sheep trade.

So is the issue a credible danger for Labor? Josh Wilson waves away such arguments. “I haven’t seen any hard data to suggest that’s the case. And not everyone living in rural Australia is joined at the hip to live sheep. I have people say, ‘I’m glad this rotten trade is coming to an end.’

“If [Liberal MP] Rick Wilson puts up a poster saying, ‘I will keep the live sheep trade going forever’, and walks up and down in parts of his own electorate, ­people would throw eggs at him. I’ve seen lots of ­circumstances where people have said, ‘We’ll make Labor pay.’ But it’s not often the case that their issue is what tips people out.”

Is he so sure? He shrugs. “We’ll see.”

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