'Help us help Australia' eID subsidy call from Cunnamulla

That was the general consensus of the 34 men and women packed into a room at the Paroo Shire Council civic centre at Cunnamulla, when one of the first Biosecurity Qld information sessions on the upcoming changes to sheep and goat electronic ear tagging in Queensland took place.

Unlike the sometimes fiery meeting in Bourke last December, where producers left NSW Agriculture Minister Dugald Saunders in no doubt of their opposition to the plan to start applying electronic identification tags to new lambs and kids from January 1, 2025, the south west Queensland growers were resigned to the scheme's introduction.

Most accepted the words of presenter Doug McNaught, that the days were about providing information rather than undertaking consultation, but were still vocal about a number of aspects of the execution of the plan for the compulsory identification of sheep and goats.

Among them was the burden of shouldering extra cost, especially if it involves buying expensive equipment to apply tags to unruly goats.

"The main thing is the funding," Wyandra grower Kane Lucas said. "We keep hearing foot and mouth disease would cost the country $80 billion, but does the Queensland government give a stuff about what it costs us."

Mr McNaught, a DAF principal biosecurity officer with 25 years of experience in NLIS and emergency animal disease responses, said it was unlikely Queensland would receive anything like the lion's share of the $46m allocated by the federal government for implementation.

"There's $26m for NLIS software updates and the rest, $20m will be spread across the states," he said.

"While the state split hasn't been decided on yet, we don't have the sheep numbers of NSW and Victoria. If it goes like cattle, it will be broken up pro rata, and NSW has 32 million sheep while Queensland only has 2.2 million."

He said it made sense for legislators hoping for a high take-up rate to put money in now and encourage early adoption.

AgForce sheep wool and goat board president Stephen Tully has been pushing for a 50 per cent subsidy from the state government.

He believes many parts of the industry will benefit from the traceability that compulsory tags would bring, not just growers, and so the cost of the tags should be shared around.

Wyandra's Jesse Moody has already tried eID tags and believed if the Victorian example of using electronic tags since 2017 was being put before Queenslanders, the heavy subsidies given to Victorian producers should accompany that.

"They talk about it being an $80b issue to the industry but we have to cough up all the costs ourselves, so if we don't do it properly and we have this $80b issue, it's our fault, not theirs," he said.

"I'd say that if they want to reduce the risk of biosecurity issues, they should be able to help us reduce this potential threat to the industry."

He said a subsidy would make the cost equivalent to a conventional visual tag.

"I see the industry has a lot to gain from eIDS in management, but in this point in time, from a biosecurity angle it would be good to see Queensland get on the front foot and help us a bit," he said.

Mr Moody runs 3000 Merino sheep and 10,000 rangeland goats, and started using eID tags in 2017, at about the same time they were brought in by the Victorian government.

He said they wanted to use the data they potentially would have captured from the tags, but then they ran into drought and their priorities changed.

"We've gone back to using conventional tags until we have the facilities and equipment to properly manage that data we were hoping to gather," he said. "It would have been a big cost in getting an autodrafter and readers."