While Australia’s export meat trade becomes more heavily regulated and industrialised every day, the domestic abattoir business in NSW has been left to virtually regulate itself. When US and Asian markets are demanding the best meat we can provide, what’s really going on behind the very closed doors of the domestic meat processing industry? Sarah Porter investigates for Reportage.

Rusty hooks, dirty railings, potentially lethal chilling practices, and untrained staff with substance abuse issues are just some of the problems facing one small domestic abattoir in NSW, according to Barry Scanes, a third generation meat processor from Cooma, NSW.

But the domestic abattoir owners and managers don’t think there’s anything wrong. And neither does the State body responsible for conducting checks on the domestic abattoir industry in NSW.

It’s not something they like to talk about freely and it’s certainly not something they’ll all put their name to. But ex-abattoir workers like Barry Scanes are today ashamed of and horrified by an industry they used to be proud of.

Abattoirs are big business in NSW – and Australia.

According to Frank Costin, a meat processing analyst with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are around 48 abattoirs listed in NSW and other smaller operations that remain unlisted.

More than 2-million cattle and 7.7-million sheep and lambs were slaughtered in Australia for the June 2006 quarter. Hygiene is a vital component. People can die from unclean and illegal practices.

Yet this investigation shows huge gaps in the system – a system made up of rorts, drugs, slackness and laxity – and in the end – grave danger for the meat consuming community.

The criminal element within the meat processing business in Australia first came to the nation’s attention during the meat substitution racket in the late 70s and early 80s. Illegally mixed kangaroo meat, among other horrors, was found in export product bound for the US.

A Royal Commission was set up in 1982 to investigate and weed out those responsible.

Following this scandal, the once State-regulated meat processing business was put under the Commonwealth’s eye and the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS) took charge of the checks and balances required to maintain health and hygiene standards across the meat processing board.

In the early 90s, however, AQIS began charging domestic abattoir owners a fee for service; approximately $70,000 per annum for an AQIS meat inspector who was responsible for checking several abattoirs – and being paid an average salary of $45,000.

“That was the total cost for putting an officer in the field at that time and the decision then was made to have the total cost funded by industry,” said Peter Day, manager of the audit and verification unit at NSW Food Authority – the State authority responsible for checking all food outlets in NSW today.

But the fee for service arrangement was not to the domestic abattoir owners’ liking and before long they rallied against the fee, said Gary Keys a long-time TAFE meat inspector trainer with Open Training Education Network (OTEN) in Strathfield, Sydney.

“They said paying the meat inspector through AQIS was over the top and they refused to pay that money. So the only thing to do was to allow AQIS meat inspectors to become domestic inspectors,” said Keys.

Strangely, AQIS refuses to acknowledge a move towards deregulation in 1996, stating formally via email that the industry moved to co-regulation with ‘company inspectors to work under State authority supervision’.

Even if this is the case, and the current regulatory system should properly be referred to as ‘co-regulation’, after 1996 the domestic industry became a very different marketplace, with meat inspectors working directly for domestic abattoir owners – a situation most say is again dangerously open to bribery and scandal.

After the 1996 decision, Keys says a lot of the Commonwealth employed meat inspectors took the redundancy package offered to them before moving on to a full time position in a domestic shed.

But the transition was far from smooth for many of these employees.

“What a lot of them felt, the old AQIS inspectors,” said Keys, “was that the domestic abattoir owner would say that if you don’t toe the line, you’re gone.”

And that’s exactly what eventually pushed a lot of meat inspectors out of the industry altogether.

Allan Widderson spent more than 20 years as a meat inspector in NSW before moving on after deregulation occurred in 1996. Like many others working for AQIS at the time, he was offered a redundancy and encouraged to go and work directly for a domestic abattoir.

Instead, he left the industry altogether and today he sits back in his Victorian-based motel business and wonders why anyone’s in the game at all.

“I left the industry simply because I thought it would be too difficult to police someone one moment and then work for them the next,” said Widderson.

“When we were taken over by AQIS there were 2,300 meat inspectors. By the time I left there were just 600 left [at AQIS]. There were a series of redundancies and a lot of the one-man sheds [small abattoirs] were closed down.

And while AQIS was unable to confirm these figures, saying there were no records available to check, Widderson was more than happy to fill in the gaps.

“There were a lot of bad meat inspectors as well. I’d say anything up to 25 per cent of them were shocking.

“The government realised there would be some meat inspectors who wouldn’t move over [to the domestic side] so they started their own quick fix. They started putting out these wonder boys in six weeks. The government and the sheds – and by that I mean the owners of the domestic abattoirs.

“You went from two years [training] to six weeks, if you were lucky. And I knew the teachers. And I still know some of them – and you would have passed no matter what.”

Although the six week course is a thing of the past (AQIS refused to acknowledge it had ever existed) and meat inspectors must today complete an industry-approved, 18-month to two-year correspondence course through TAFE, Barry Scanes’ eye witness account of the work practices in a NSW abattoir leave a lot to be desired.

“One of the major problems that I saw, and it’s a real no-no, they were putting hot meat in with cold meat. And that’s one of the things you never, ever do,” said Barry, who today enjoys a quieter life on the Monaro in NSW.

“The quality and cleanliness of the rails in the abattoirs – they were all rusty.

“And what happens when you put hot meat into a fridge, there’s all this moisture build-up … moisture gets on to the rust and that drops down and gets onto the product.

“The cattle themselves had been cut down with a bandsaw … it was an absolutely shocking job.

“One body … was absolutely ruined … it was absolutely devastated.

“The veins in the neck of the forequarter hadn’t been trimmed out properly, the kidneys hadn’t been taken out, and the stifle joint hadn’t been taken out properly,” said Barry.

And while Widderson said the worst thing you can get from a rusty hook is tetanus, he confirmed the chilling practices witnessed by Barry were “a different story”.

“You start putting meat up against each other … let’s talk about two hot pieces of meat going close together, in the case of heavy beef – that will give you bone taint.

“And that would kill you,” he said.

“That’s putrification of the meat. That’s the meat rotting against the bone. Because it’s the last part of the meat to cool off it stays at a very ambient temperature, which lets the bacteria multiply. It’s a very putrid smell and it gives off a gas. So you should know not to eat it.

“If you put cold meat against hot meat you get a slime across the body of meat. And that slime is bacteria.”

Although Barry admits it could have been a one-off “bad day” for the abattoir in question, both he and his son, Andy, say the deterioration within the domestic abattoir industry as a whole since the deregulation in 1996 has left them saddened and disillusioned.

“Drugs and alcohol are another big problem,” said Barry.

“Anything [abattoir workers] can get their hands on basically to give’em a high,” said Andy, a trained meat processor who, after 16 years, recently left the industry for good.

“Nope, I won’t be going back – ever,” said Andy from his home in Cooma.

“There’s a lot of blokes not trained up properly and a lot not doing their jobs properly.”

Mandatory drug and alcohol testing might be an invasion of privacy – but, according to Andy, the very few abattoir owners who insist upon it say it works.

“If I went back into the industry, I’d be asking if they had mandatory drug and alcohol testing because then I’d know that the bloke working next to me was in control of his senses. When you’re using knives, when you’re working that close to the bloke next to you…”

So why doesn’t the domestic industry state authority insist on compulsory training for anyone operating abattoir machinery? Why aren’t there more unannounced checks by the NSW Food Authority? And if drug and alcohol testing works – why isn’t it mandatory?

Last month Reportage visited a small domestic abattoir in Moruya on the NSW south coast to ask just a few of these questions.

We spoke to office manager Mark Galvin who has been working for abattoir owners Graeme and Peter Afflick for more than 10 years.

According to Galvin, the Afflick’s have been in “the game” for 40 years and have never been shut down – by either State or Commonwealth regulators

Galvin, who is responsible for running the day-to-day accounting operations as well as some daily administration duties, explained the business kills about 600 bodies of beef per week and “knocks over” between 100 to 200 lambs, depending on their orders. They also manage a few “private service kills” for local graziers.

“Well, I do 19 or 20 wages a week and that covers just about everyone here,” said Galvin when asked about staff onsite.

“We have people in here that are 15 or 16 and they might get maybe $10 per hour.

“A qualified slaughterman will get $15.50 an hour permanent. But the guys on the floor don’t have to have any formal training.”

So what would happen if an untrained 15 year old asked if he would be able to secure some casual work with the Moruya abattoir business?

“Oh, yeah. Sure. We’d throw you on the floor. You might be on the hose just washing the bodies down as they go through the process, and they’d give you a go on the knife, just doing a little bit of work. That’s the only way you’d learn.”

And what about the state introducing mandatory drug and alcohol testing?

“There wouldn’t be many blokes left,” said Galvin. “Half a dozen maybe. That’s about all. It’s just the type of guy that works here. It’s the sort of job that for a lot of blokes it’s the only job they could possibly get.

“And you know, drinking and drugs. That’s the sort of guy we often get.”

Galvin also admitted their company-paid meat inspection position was filled by up to three people.

“We’ve got one bloke who works three days a week, he’s been here for 10 years, and there’s two other chaps we trained up who do the other days.”

NSW Food Authority’s Peter Day said the training varies across the board, with some larger domestic abattoirs insisting on the TAFE approved training but others choosing to employ untrained workers.

“I think you’ll find the bigger abattoirs, the more progressive ones, actually have contracts with training agencies and TAFE and other bodies to actually put their staff through the national training framework … but … it’s not compulsory.”

So while training is not compulsory and mandatory drug an alcohol testing might leave abattoirs like Moruya severely under-staffed, is the Food Authority at least conducting regular and unannounced checks on the in-house, company-paid, meat inspectors over whom they have regulatory authority?

While Day told Reportage the Food Authority conducted “100 per cent unannounced visits” on domestic abattoirs, unless they required senior management staff to be present, Moruya’s office manager, Galvin, believes otherwise of the Authority.

“They often let you know they’re coming. You get more announced visits but you do get some unannounced.

“They can just come through and they’ll find something they don’t like. You can get fined and they’ll give you so many days to fix up the problems. We’re audited all the time, but we’ve never been shut down.”

So after a decade of ‘co-regulation’, and with NSW Food Authority at the helm today, it would seem the domestic abattoir business in NSW might well need a 10-year review.

Tim Dorahy is one of the senior managers responsible for the medium-sized export abattoir business in Cooma called Monbeef. And he agrees wholeheartedly that his industry is an entirely different game. He says it has to be.

“It’s the export game – it’s very different. A lot of people need to know the product is the best we can provide.”

According to Dorahy, Monbeef is checked relentlessly and via unannounced visits by a multitude of market regulators, including veterinarians from the US, animal welfare representatives from McDonalds in Japan, as well as Commonwealth-paid veterinarians working for AQIS.

“Anything with food safety, you have to be very careful,” said Dorahy who says he’s been in the industry since he was born.

However, having worked in both domestic and export industries, Dorahy reluctantly reminisces on his days in the domestic trade.

“At one stage we had six Commonwealth inspectors, six State inspectors, a head inspector of each, as well as a Commonwealth vet.

“That was all duplication and we had to pay the fees,” he said.

“Since deregulation that’s all gone. On a domestic plant there’s no vet. And they have their own inspector.”

While Dorahy questioned Barry Scanes’ findings, saying domestic abattoir owners “can’t afford not to do the right thing”, he did admit the system was open to abuse.

“Yes, it’s human nature, cutting corners. That happens. If you’re busy. The hooks are supposedly cleaned every time they’re taken off a beast and put through. But we don’t have that problem here.”

Long-time TAFE meat inspection instructor, Gary Keys, disagrees with Dorahy’s outlook on the domestic system, but says the business did change enormously after 1996.

“I believe the [meat inspection] course we had prior to ’96 foundationally covered more product that we do today.

“Product such as animal physiology, anatomy, those things were covered in depth in the pre-96 course.

“Then with the [new] training packages, we dropped a lot of that stuff.

When Reportage presented Keys with Barry Scanes’ findings, he initially said it “sounded like a whole lot of stories put together”, but later admitted there were abattoirs in NSW who “did not do the right thing all the time”.

“Some abattoirs are shonky and some are not shonky. Having said that, every abattoir is trying,” he said.

“There are abattoirs that do as minimum [sic] as possible. But having said that I’ve been in the one’s [currently under surveillance] and they are very much trying to rectify things.”

So if Keys, who has been in the industry for more than 30 years, knows this is going on – shouldn’t the public be alerted?

NSW Food Authority’s monthly publication called Foodwise openly states the number of inspections, audits and closures enforced on all meat and seafood industries in NSW.

In their February publication, just one abattoir is listed as having being closed in October last year, however, the Authority would not name the business.

And while Keys did not want to mention which abattoir was temporarily closed down either, Reportage discovered it was an abattoir in Wilberforce, NSW – and that it had recently been allowed to reopen again under new management.

In their defence Keys said: “Peter Day is on their case and we’re all working together to get that plant workable. They just weren’t following all the procedures.”

But is that good enough?

Where was the meat going that came out of that abattoir in Wilberforce? Why was it closed down? Who might have consumed their meat before it was closed? And when will NSW Food Authority stumble upon the type of unhygienic and potentially lethal practices witnessed by Barry Scanes?

Reportage invites meat producers and consumers alike to demand the domestic abattoir industry in NSW undergo a 10-year review of the regulatory system governing it today.

If countries all over the world are demanding – and getting – the very best from our export abattoirs, shouldn’t Australians be demanding the same of the NSW domestic industry?