Cattle 'only one stuff-up away' from same fate as sheep live-ex: Sue Middleton

West Australian producer and agribusiness leader Sue Middleton's emotional talk at the Cattle Australia Symposium has sent ripples across the Beef Australia grounds in Rockhampton.

She told cattle producers if there was any part of the supply chain they thought was an issue, anything that doesn't measure up to what the middle section of society expects, they should address it with a pre-emptive strike.

"There is absolutely no doubt that animal welfare organisations are conducting ongoing investigations, probing into all our industries," she said.

"If there is ever anything at all that you as a producer are not comfortable with, address it.

"It's a lot less costly to do that than end up in a situation like 2011 - you know well the gigantic costs of that.

"This is what it is to be in animal agriculture today. It became clear during the panel process that we are all only one stuff-up away from being in the same place."

Ms Middleton provided some fascinating insights about the controversial delay by the Albanese Government in releasing the report outlining the findings of the panel's extensive consultation.

She emphasised it was her personal opinion but said she believes "somewhere in the process the government has realised there is a price tag involved, someone has finally realised this was a bit more serious."

"The wait, I believe, is for the budget," she said.

"There is no reason we'd hand in our report in October last year in a rush if we didn't think they'd put it out straight away. Something has happened in between and I believe it is the realisation of the costs involved."

She said she hoped the report's release was now imminent because people desperately need a date.

"They don't need to know exactly what the government is going to do but they need to know when," she said.

"That will allow them to plan their future."

She spoke about the fundamental misunderstanding of just how big a deal banning the live sheep would be and how much that surprised the industry.

Her discussion of farmers facing oversupply of sheep, challenges with feed and water and a hot summer and the collapse in confidence was confronting.

And her summary resonated of just how enormous an undertaking eliminating one market from an industry would be - the challenges of finding new markets, the sizeable investment required, changing flock structures and even solving issues like regional labour.

It was never a like-for-like swap out, the way many of the proponents of the ban insisted.

But it was perhaps Ms Middleton's conclusions about how politics and alliances drove the decision to ban the trade and how emotion was able to win out over science that has been the biggest talking point.

"Behind the politics there is no doubt alliances were formed; they were formed with influential people who then swayed the government," she said.

She said there was no doubt political deals happened in the background that prompted the policy being enacted, despite the industry reforms and regulations that had taken place.

Why didn't the science win?

"We now have generations who are detached from nature," Ms Middleton said.

"The world we live in does not understand how a farmer orders the natural world to produce food. We haven't been hungry in this country since World War II.

"We might think society's understanding of the world should be driven by facts, by science, by things that can be proven but actually what's happening is understanding of the world is driven by emotion and that emotion drives decision making."

Former New Zealand prime minister Sir John Key also spoke at the symposium and he said the live-ex trade had to be very tough on itself to ensure it stayed in business.

"You are kidding yourself if you think the people who oppose it are going to play nice and play fair," he said.

"If you want to win those arguments long term, you have to make sure they can't deliver those stories because if they produce footage of cows dying on a ship it's over."

Australian Live Exporters Council chief executive officer Mark Harvey-Sutton, speaking after the event, said Ms Middleton's comments were enlightening.

"Sue Middleton reminded the audience that the phase-out panel was given an impossible task: to treat all interests as equal when they aren't, because some people stand to lose everything," he said.

The policy should be reconsidered. It was clear the impacts were reverberating through the entire agricultural sector and that the phase-out panel members had heard the real impacts that would be faced by WA farmers, ALEC believes.

"It's disappointing that the government won't come clean with farmers that it intends to put out of business. Farmers aren't calling for anything other than to let their industry, which is reformed and sustainable, continue to feed the world," Mr Harvey-Sutton said.