AN URGENT need to save Australia’s live cattle export trade and to fix its animal welfare issues was common ground when Gympie became part of the federal election trail this week.

Katter’s Australian Party lead Senate candidate Rowell Walton said he agreed with Sen Glenn Lazarus on the need to address evidence of cruel mistreatment of Australian cattle, most recently in Vietnam.

Both shared a view that serious action to address animal welfare issues or Australians would move to ban live exports, something potentially disastrous for the cattle market nationally.

But Mr Walton says he does not share Sen Lazarus’s view that increased Australian processing could help fill some of the gap.

Sen Lazarus called on the federal government to establish an independent animal welfare office immediately.

“I watched the Animals Australia footage of Australian cattle being sledge hammered to death in Vietnam and was sickened to the core,” he said.

Mr Walton says a failure to take action to protect Australian exported livestock would lead to pressure for a shut-down, from Australians and from many importing countries.

“Any suggestions that we should stop live exports are simply wrong.

“We necessarily have to keep them going so we can maintain the incomes of cattle producers in northern Australia and for that matter in the whole of Australia.

“You take hundreds of thousands out of the export market and try to feed them back into the domestic market and you’ve got real troubles and you’ll have another cattle collapse if you’re not very careful.

“But what does need to happen is the government, who is responsible for this failure in transport and slaughtering in places like Indonesia and the latest one in Vietnam, has to take responsiblity for those failings and they need to put some independent people in place who can adequately report back to government.

“If the standards are not good enough, they need to be rectified immediately.

“There’s no room in the minds of graziers and producers of beef and there’s no room in the minds of the Australian community for the kind of performance we’ve seen on the television to continue.

“We simply will not find that acceptable and government is responsible for actually fixing it up, and they can and they should.”

“There’s a high risk that if the government doesn’t take on the responsibility and tell the Australian people that it is going to fix it, and mean it, then the Australian people and other people in the world, some of our markets in fact, would not allow us to continue the way that we’re going,” he said.