3060 Mary Gilmore Way
Bimbi NSW 2810
Ph 02 6347 1220To The EditorDear Sir/Madam,

The latest avalanche of propaganda and threats from the National Livestock Identification System Compliance section of NSW Dept Primary Industries mirrors the thinking of Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi.

There is no NLIS requirement for market access, sheep or cattle, mob based or individually identified. The threat of electronic tags for sheep confirms the failure of the current system. There is no price discrimination or stock segregation because of this failure. We have had this electronic nonsense with cattle for 6 years and not one carcase has been identified and withdrawn from the food chain, or transferred to a different market because of non compliance with NLIS.

It is impossible to verify, if the current tag attached to an animal is the only tag ever attached to that animal. Many producers simply change the tags to save hassles; checking saleyards compliance is a sick joke.

The impact statement to justify the introduction of NLIS clearly states it is NOT for an exotic disease outbreak such as Foot and Mouth, yet we are constantly bombarded with propaganda, as to how essential it would be. The millions of wild pigs, goats and deer would indicate to any sensible person the impact statement was correct.

It is well past time the perpetrators of this nonsense came clean and an opportunity for compliance officers to tell Minister Hodgkinson the truth.
Yours sincerely,

John Niven
Bimbi

To The EditorDear Sir,The recent National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) comments by

Dr Tony Britt are simply astounding.Victoria Police’s Detective Sergeant Steve Brown has pointed out tags may easily be removed and replaced. NSW Police I have spoken with are also well aware of the futility of NLIS in the prevention of stock theft. Dr Britt said NLIS was for other reasons rather than the prevention of stock theft.If it is unreliable for stock theft, it certainly is unreliable for all the irrelevant nonsense it was introduced for.Dr Britt’s comments then become really silly. He said, if sheep had electronic tags and a thief missed replacing one the database would be alerted. WOW!

The cattle NLIS must be getting close to the last card in the pack, as now Dr. Britt says a very valuable service for the cattle industry is identifying cattle that have strayed on to another property and inadvertently sold by the producer responsible for that property. What about the strays that have lost a tag and replaced by a breeders’ tag, or the strays that didn’t even have a tag?

NLIS is a $100- million per annum white elephant that is nothing more than nonsense based on fantasy. In fact it has compromised the tail tag system it replaced. It has failed dismally the ridiculous justifications for its introduction and should be abandoned immediately in favour of the tail tag system it replaced

John Niven
ABA Director
3060 Mary Gilmore Way
BIMBI NSW 2810
Ph 02 6347 1220

Editor Weekly Times

Dear Sir,
The relentless push to introduce NLIS using electronic tags for sheep is evident in the report
Tag Crisis, Weekly Times Jan 12, 2010. The Report ignores the fact that after six years of
cattle NLIS using RFID tags and a centralised data-base, the system has failed dismally. An
independent Audit into the scheme in 2009 involving the movements of 57 000 cattle, revealed
that 34.5% had lost whole of life traceability.This concludes that cattle NLIS could not be used as a means of effectively controlling a major
disease outbreak. The Audit also revealed that over time the incidence of lost traceability is
increasing. This is consistent with the findings of the Price Waterhouse Audit that inaccuracies
in the system if not remedied would snowball over time.

Government and the Weekly Times through the editorial in the same edition of the newspaper
are irresponsible in using scaremongering tactics such as the control of a Foot and Mouth
outbreak for the implementation of RFID tags for sheep. With an estimated 24 million wild
pigs roaming rural Australia, any measure to trace cattle and sheep would be irrelevant in the
containment of the disease. With an estimated 24 million wild pigs roaming rural Australia,
any measure to trace cattle and sheep would be irrelevant in the containment of the disease.

The NSW Impact Statement for the introduction of NLIS states on page 39, “high risk
movements through saleyards and abattoirs over the critical few weeks of the incubation
period for the disease may be satisfactorily traced by the current transaction identification
schemes”.

The 10 million dollar cost of bolstering sheep NLIS, pales into insignificance considering
the cost of RFID NLIS. With over 90 million tags registered on the cattle data-base and an
additional 34 million dollars of Federal and State Government money thrown at it, cattle NLIS
has become a half billion dollar white elephant’.

The ABA congratulates the Sheep Meats Council in their opposition to Sheep RFID NLIS.
They are aware of the extra cost and associated workload to producers of mandated RFID tags.
Unfortunately Animal Health Australia and The Weekly Times are not sensitive to the costs to
producers.

State Labor Governments were responsible for the Cattle NLIS mess; – let’s hope that the new
Coalition Government in Victoria will ask the farmers themselves if they want RFID mandated
for sheep; – after all it is the producers who must wear 90 % of the cost.

Yours sincerely,

Brad Bellinger
Chairman ABA
Trevanna
ASHFORD NSW 2361
02 6725 4282