Thursday, 16 October 2025

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:49): (2021) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Skills and TAFE, and the action I seek is for the minister to make the certificate III in meat safety inspection course available online and free for primary producers who establish microabattoirs on their farm. At the start of the year a large commercial abattoir announced it would no longer service small-kill requests, leaving small-scale farmers completely in the lurch. I spoke in Parliament to call on the government to urgently implement recommendation 27 from the final report of the inquiry into securing the Victorian food supply, to make it simpler and easier for farmers to operate microabattoirs on their farm. The government recently announced that it would indeed implement several of the report’s recommendations to ease the regulatory burden involved in establishing a microabattoir, but it has not gone far enough. There is still significant red tape preventing small-scale livestock producers from easily operating abattoirs to slaughter their own animals. In particular, the onerous certification and registration requirements present a difficult hurdle for small producers. PrimeSafe requires all those who slaughter animals for sale as consumable meat to have an abattoir licence and comply with the Australian standard for hygienic production and transportation of meat and meat products for human consumption. That standard requires a qualified and registered meat safety inspector to be present during the slaughter and dressing of each animal. That is right, every time you slaughter an animal, a meat safety inspector must be present.

So how can a farmer become a qualified meat safety inspector in Victoria? PrimeSafe says that to be registered as a meat safety inspector you must have a certificate III in meat safety inspection. But the certificate III in meat safety inspection course is not offered anywhere in Victoria. The course has no listings on the government’s skills gateway website. One of my constituents is a small-scale sheep farmer in central Victoria who sells his top-quality lambs at farmers markets. He told me that a large commercial abattoir received training subsidies to offer the meat safety course to their employees. However, small producers who establish microabattoirs on-farm cannot access the same subsidies and cannot even register to take the meat safety course in Victoria. He said that small-scale farmers should be supported to obtain the required certification, and I completely agree. Victorian farmers who want to operate their own abattoir cannot afford to spend two years studying full time and pay thousands of dollars in fees when they are already under severe financial stress because of ongoing effects of the recent Victorian drought. The government must step up and assist them.