Leadership Quote by Julie Bishop

Bishop’s sentence is a pressure-release valve for an unpopular policy moment: the live-export ban isn’t framed as an ethical reckoning but as a supply-chain shockwave, a kind of economic weather system the government has irresponsibly triggered. The opening move, “not just the cattle producers,” widens the blast radius. It’s a politician’s classic rhetorical pivot from the visible victim to the invisible workforce: transport, shipping, feed. By stacking “and… and… and,” she turns a policy decision into a cascading list of jobs, invoices, and regional livelihoods. The effect is to make the ban feel less like targeted regulation and more like collective punishment.

The subtext is strategic. Bishop is not disputing the moral premise that prompted the ban (animal welfare scandals were the immediate backdrop); she’s disputing the competence and proportionality of the response. “Attendant industries” signals that even if you don’t care about exporters, you should care about the knock-on effects for ordinary workers and peripheral businesses. The phrase “enormous ramifications” is deliberately vague but emotionally loaded, inviting listeners to imagine worst-case scenarios without committing to specific numbers that could be challenged.

Her most pointed charge lands at the end: “the Government’s decision to ban all exports to all of the abattoirs.” The repetition of “all… all” paints the policy as indiscriminate, a blunt instrument swung where a scalpel was needed. In that framing, the government isn’t protecting animals; it’s panicking, overreaching, and leaving an entire industry to absorb the consequences.