Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

It is hard to imagine that an international effort to guard against ‘mistreatment’ could be so interwoven with the ‘treat’ of chocolate. The mistreatment that this motion seeks to shine a light on is the plight of hundreds of thousands of West African children and how too many, enslaved by their family poverty, face back-breaking work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana, producing nearly three-quarters of the cocoa beans used to make chocolate. This is not the kind of ‘chipping in’ many kids from Australian farms or small business families may be familiar with at harvest or stock-take time; the exploited children often face dangerous, unprotected and unrelenting work, with the risk of being owned and traded as a bonded labourer, tending the cantankerous crop in a unique, extreme environment instead of attending school.

We commend World Vision Australia for its ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign to highlight this grave concern. I commend my friend and colleague the member for Sturt for bringing this motion forward and urging the Rudd government to take decisive action within its field of influence. While views vary on whether we can live without chocolate, we unite as one to say that kids must live without slavery, must be free not to be traded and must be free to be free.

This simple and unarguable premise has inspired many, including some within my local community. In early May I met with local ambassadors and allies of World Vision and the Oaktree Foundation—Lizzie, Sage, Tillie, Ella, Stacey and others—to discuss a campaign to end slavery. Year 12 Frankston High School student Emily Roycroft led the Mornington Peninsula ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign by organising a forum in conjunction with the student VGen vision group of World Vision. Having participated in this forum, I delivered a petition to the Confectionery Manufacturers Association and canvassed many of the issues with an open, interested and receptive CMA CEO, Trish Hyde, and communications manager, Kay Blanthorme. At a Melbourne CBD ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ forum in early August, Trish and I joined with the recuperating Jonathan Treagust, who shared his excellent international insights, and the irrepressible Ms Brett Louise Woods, urging the audience to get active. At this forum we learned about the many small farmers who combine their fragile and temperamental harvest through agents who then aggregate this production to supply the commodity market which in turn provides the vital cocoa input to the major confectionery manufacturers and boosts the fragile West African economy.

Yes, we know the supply chains are long and opaque, but it is not too much to ask that a non-essential foodstuff like chocolate is produced without slavery. Coordinated international steps are being taken to achieve and validate this most basic of ethical and humanitarian preconditions in partnership with NGOs, the governments of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and industry. I am optimistic that the independent verification report due to be completed and released in December will show that we can all have confidence in this most basic of supply chain requirements. As consumers and advocates, we can be clear in our call for meaningful progress and genuine action by the local confectionery manufacturing industry and retailers—a shared purpose to do what we can domestically to pursue objectives of the ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign.

Nurturing a distinctly Australian, fair dinkum partnership committed to sourcing cocoa from the most ethical and best verifiable suppliers that reliably label and convey this information to consumers; promoting the campaign on product packaging; aligning industry, philanthropic, volunteer and aid projects with international efforts; seeing confectionery executives travel to West Africa, perhaps with a young person from a manufacturing plant area, to see things first hand; for the industry to sponsor the ‘Art for Aid’ campaign; for CMA members to offer employees salary deductions for World Vision child sponsorship; and proactively reassuring concerned consumers, like my wife’s mothers group, that Australian confectionery manufacturers embrace our motives, endorse the ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ objectives and bat for our DTL team and are not merely bystanders—we can do all of this and we should.

My own experiences as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, with responsibilities including aspects of AusAID’s magnificent work, highlighted the plight of too many children where the kids themselves are the most valuable asset or chattel a profoundly impoverished family has or are too easy a recruit, forced or otherwise, in a world where as many as 300,000 children under the age of 18, some as young as eight, serve in government forces or armed rebel groups in 33 ongoing or recent armed conflict in nearly every region of the globe. There are examples close to home of sexual servitude where, according to a parliamentary inquiry, possibly hundreds of people from South-East Asia and China are traded as property in the sex industry in our own country. This motion advances the need to increase public awareness and action and to encourage all of us to take decisive steps. I commend the motion to the House and commend the member for Sturt for his excellent initiative.

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