Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

in reply—I believe that the speakers list on the debate on the second reading of the National Measurement Amendment Bill 2008 is now exhausted. I have a copy of it here in my hand, after having attempted to fold the piece of paper seven times. I got it to six and that is small enough. I think it is time to bring this debate to a close. I was fascinated with the contributions of our various speakers, including the member for Forde, who gave us a very good exposition of some of the benefits of the bill. He mentioned such weights and measures as kilograms. I had the honour, recently, of going to the National Measurement Institute to witness the handing over of what we call the perfect kilogram. It was grown from a single silicon crystal into a perfect spherical object weighing exactly one kilogram. It was important that this was done because the measure of the kilogram is in France and it has degraded. It is a piece of metal and it has degraded slightly over time. I suppose that does not matter too much when it comes to how many cornflakes you have in a packet but it does in matters such as space travel. Similarly, they are very important for caesium clocks and so on. A small error can have a spacecraft missing a planet or a solar system by a very large amount. So this is actually all very important, not only to the past but to the present and to the future.

I want to thank a gazillion—which is a very large number of millions—people: everyone who has spoken on this. The National Measurement Institute, which will have responsibility for administering the new system of trade measurement, has pointed out to me that the desire for an orderly system of trade measurement reaches back to very early times. I am sure that the member for Forde would be fascinated to know that this was all anticipated in the Bible, where Leviticus, chapter 19, commands: ‘You shall not pervert justice in measurement of weight, length or quantity. You shall have true scales, true weights, true measures; dry and liquid’. So, there you go, a command from on high that we have the National Trade Measurement Amendment Bill! I will now move to another religion. The Koran actually warns: ‘Woe to those who stint the measure’—so get your measures right because the Koran says that is a very good idea. Fast-forward now to the Magna Carta, which set out that there would be one weight and one measure in the realm. These are the sorts of measures that the member for Forde was talking about.

Indeed, I remember from primary school—and the member for Forde said that it was not belted into him, but it was close to belted into me—that there are 12 inches in one foot, three feet in one yard, 1,760 yards in a mile, 5,280 feet in a mile, 100 links in one chain, and 80 chain to one mile but also that one chain is a cricket pitch. I do not know if the chain came from cricket or that cricket got it from the chain, but if ever a fast bowler is wondering exactly why the length of the pitch is as it is and is thinking maybe it should be a bit shorter or a bit longer, the answer is that it is exactly one chain. And, of course, there are 16 ounces in a pound and, I think, 2,240 pounds in a ton?

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