China has eased restrictions on Australian beef imports, with five major Australian meatworks now able to resume business with Beijing.
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00:00 This is great news for Australia's red meat industry. Learning overnight that Beijing
00:06 has lifted suspensions that applied to five Australian meatworks. They were all producing
00:11 beef in Queensland and northern New South Wales. And they'd all been locked out way
00:17 back at the beginning of the trade war. Of course, we're all so familiar with it now,
00:21 but the red meat industry along with barley were some of the first commodities to be hit
00:25 with trading suspensions. And this is certainly welcome news. Here's the Agriculture Minister,
00:32 Murray Watt, with a little more detail this morning.
00:36 That is fantastic news for Australia's cattle producers, for our meat processing industry,
00:41 for the workers in those industries, and of course for Australian exports. What we've
00:46 worked out is that even so far over the last few months with the different export bans
00:51 that have been lifted by China, that has worked out to $3 billion in extra exports for a
00:55 part of Australia. So the work that we've done to stabilise our relationship with China
01:00 is paying real dividends for our farmers, our processors.
01:04 We know that this is big business, Cath. What is the exact value of this to the Australian
01:07 economy?
01:08 Well, four of these five exporters actually represented about a third of the trade in
01:13 red meat exports to China at that time. And before these trade suspensions were imposed,
01:18 we were selling about close to $3 billion worth of red meat to China. Now, these exporters
01:23 have been able to sell their beef while locked out from China. They've been able to go to
01:27 different markets, but they certainly haven't seen the high prices for their commodities
01:32 that they were used to or had become accustomed to receiving from China. So it's really welcome
01:38 news for the red meat industry. And hopefully, Cath, there'll be some good news to follow
01:42 soon for the Australian lobster industry, which remains, I think, perhaps the only commodity
01:47 that's still locked out as a result of this trade war.
01:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]