Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment (Removing Re-approval and Re-registration) Bill 2014. This bill amends three acts in the Agriculture portfolio: the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Code Act 1994, the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment 2013—the amendment act—and the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemical Products (Collection of Levy) Act 1994. The bill also amends the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Act 1991 to correct an incorrect reference to part of the Agvet Code. Additionally, it makes other minor corrections at the request of the Department of Health. This bill fulfils the 2013 election commitment to remove re-registration and improve the efficiency of agvet chemicals regulation.

By way of a quick background, the amendment act was passed by the parliament, as the member for Dawson has said, under the former Labor government in 2013. Unfortunately, their legislation added red tape in the form of reapprovals and re-registration of chemical products and it was to commence on 1 July this year. The bill was initiated by Labor due to their 2010 election commitment to placate the Greens at that time, as the member for Dawson has also said. It is amazing the amount of influence the Greens had on the Gillard-Rudd government. Labor's bill essentially caused the industry to become more efficient. This was despite the former Finance and Deregulation Minister, Penny Wong, using agricultural and veterinary chemical reform as one the key areas where the former government said it would reduce regulatory compliance costs for businesses. It did not happen. So even when the Labor Party set out to make life easier for businesses, they managed to wrap industry in more red tape and bureaucracy. This is a prime example of what we are having to fix up.

Let's not forget that under Labor more than 18,000 additional regulations were created by the Rudd-Gillard governments. In contrast, the Abbott coalition government believes that industry needs efficient regulations so Australia can have sustainable production systems that are fair on farmers and businesses. We believe that, prior to the introduction of the amendment act, existing chemical review mechanisms sufficiently allowed for the examination of newly discovered risks about the safety, efficacy or trade impact of a chemical. New schemes that duplicated the existing system and imposed additional costs on industry were not, and are not, required. Labor's approach would have added red tape without improving health and safety. The coalition when in opposition did support other changes in the 2013 amendments, but we do not support the bureaucratic processes of re-registration, for all the reasons I have just outlined.

Reforms in this bill include new processes for notification of very simple changes to a chemical registration and very simple applications for less complex variations. For example, if a company wants to change a packet size or its contact details on the label—phone numbers et cetera—it will not need a technical assessment or to lodge a costly application, as it would have to do under current legislation. This bill also reduces the frequency of renewals. Some periods of renewal will be extended up to seven years. A renewal is only an administrative process to extend the registration and contains no checks for safety and performance. We must remember the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, APVMA, has established systems to trigger a review of agvet chemicals if potential safety and performance risks are identified, and I will speak more on this aspect later.

The bill rewrites provisions that allow the APVMA to collect information from chemical suppliers to ensure the products being supplied are the same as those the APVMA has already registered and will allow the APVMA to amend the maximum residue limits standard in the Australia and New Zealand standards code. Without this change companies can register a product but, in turn, producers may not be able to supply produce treated with that product because the maximum residue limits standard has not been updated. You can see that there are a whole lot of corrections that need to be made.

Reforms in this legislation highlight the Australian government's commitment to removing $1 billion a year in unnecessary red and green tape. Primary producers are already doing it pretty tough in an industry that is under siege from the Greens, as well as having to face issues such as a strong Australian dollar and cheaper overseas imports. This is an important industry sector of our economy that requires support from the Australian government.

The government's amendments will save the agvet chemical industry something like $1.3 million in time and fees annually by removing unnecessary red tape. The APVMA estimated that re-registration would cost them $2 million a year to process and assess applications—a cost that would have to be recovered from industry. And industry calculated that removing the reapproval and re-registration scheme would save them up to $9 million annually.

Like the member for Dawson, I have some electorate-specific concerns about the APVMA and the registration and availability of chemicals. This has never been more important than it is to the stone fruit growers in the Hills in my electorate. The local farmers, including those stone fruit growers, rely on access to effective chemicals to protect their crops from dangerous pests and diseases. For growers in my electorate the Mediterranean fruit fly or medfly is the pest in question.    Fruit fly is a severely damaging pest that has serious economic implications for Australia's horticulture industry.

Last week the APVMA, as the independent statutory authority with responsibility for regulating agricultural chemicals and veterinary medicines in Australia, announced it was cancelling all horticultural uses of the chemical fenthion, except for post-harvest treatment of tropical fruits with inedible peel, such as mangoes and avocadoes. The APVMA has published its preliminary review findings on the continued use of fenthion and has commenced a three-month consultation period prior to a final decision being made. This is a process designed to thwart a Senate inquiry. In fact the APVMA is almost out of control and needs direct intervention by the minister because of its activist behaviour over a period of time.

The three-month consultation period closes on 22 August, and the APVMA states it will consider all submissions before making a final regulatory decision. Having attended the meeting with the APVMA, I am convinced they have already made their decision. There is no denying there needs to be safeguards in relation to the registration and use of agvet chemicals in Australia, to protect Australians from dangerous and suspect chemicals. But, as I mentioned earlier, in relation to the deregulation aspects of this bill the process cannot become overly bureaucratic, so much so that the regulatory agency is disengaging itself from working with producers. And really that is what they should be doing; backing up the producers, because they are the people who actually add something to this economy.

I raised the APVMA's attempt to ban the use of fenthion when I spoke on Labor's Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill last year. Today, I speak about the topic again, this time regarding an actual ban of the fruit-fly combatting chemical. It is my fourth time speaking on this issue in the parliament; it is an issue I am deeply concerned about because of the effect it has on my fruit growers. It appears that no matter what evidence growers in the industry have provided to the APVMA in relation to both the science they use and the need for industry to have a period of adjustment to new methods or a phase-in period, the APVMA are acting as a stand-alone body, independent of the government—which they are—but also independent of the industry. And they are just thumbing their noses at the industry they are meant to be acting for and on behalf of.

This was evident in December last year when members of the Hills Orchard Improvement Group, HOIG, from my electorate, led by spokesperson Brett Del Simone, travelled to Canberra to meet with the APVMA and the Agriculture Department. There are avenues for appeal against the decisions made at the APVMA, but it can be very time-consuming and very costly; the Australian Administrative Tribunal or the Federal Court are the alternatives. They are massively costly in terms of legal representation.

I fully support measures that are in place to protect public safety, but these decisions cannot be so bureaucratic that people who have never worked on a stone fruit orchard in Perth, people who are sitting in a Canberra office some 3,000 kilometres away from the Hills orchards, can make final decisions without adequate concern for firsthand submissions made direct from growers of the produce.

To date, there have been no reported incidents of Australians being harmed by ingesting fruit treated with fenthion. In fact today in the shops when you go in and buy stone fruit, if it is from almost any area in the south of Australia, it will have been sprayed with fenthion. They have extended these by permits. If it is safe today and it has been safe for the last 30 years, why is it not safe tomorrow? It is not safe tomorrow because there is a determined agenda by those activists within the APVMA to win this battle, which I suspect they probably will, to ban fenthion.

The APVMA's decision is based on a worst-case scenario. If a six-year-old ate a barrel of fruit treated by fenthion, yes, there is a chance he will probably get sick, but maybe not from fenthion but from getting a stomach ache from eating a whole barrel of apples. In fact, even though the APVMA proposed a ban in 2012, the agency continued to allow the use of the product by permit, with several new conditions attached—in terms of withholding a number of sprays for another 12 months. When that 12-month period was over in 2013, the APVMA reintroduced another spray of fenthion for the current growing season as a cover spray. So the fruit at the shops was fine to eat then, and the fruit that would soon hit shops and market stalls would be fine, but somewhere in the future, it would not be okay, according to the APVMA! It is ludicrous what the APVMA is doing to our stone fruit industry in Australia. This sort of bureaucracy, red tape and hoop jumping is out of control. It is why I completely support the deregulation amendments in this bill. The member for Dawson rightly suggested that the minister might want to write a veto because the APVMA has become such an out of control body and unrepresentative of the people it is meant to be working for.

Fenthion was considered by local Hills growers as the last remaining effective chemical that could control fruit fly. It is the only chemical that controlled the maggot as well as the fly. This has been the crux of growers' concerns all along. Growers are now faced with no choice but to use alternative chemicals to fenthion. Growers, though devastated, have accepted this fate. WA fruit growers are now considering they may have to use four different chemicals to combat fruit fly, as opposed to just the one in fenthion. Those four chemicals are: Clothianidin, Thiacloprid, Trichlorfon and Maldison. Any one of those four have not had the same track record as fenthion with no sicknesses or ill-health caused by that spray.

My fruit growers are saying: 'Yes, we will be involved in area-wide management. Yes, we will be involved in orchard hygiene. And, yes, if you allow us to eventually settle on another alternative spray that we can try over a period of time through a phase-in period of three years, that could be the case.'

There is currently a Senate inquiry into the implications of the use of fenthion on Australia's horticultural industry. This inquiry had a public hearing in Perth in February this year, with Brett Del Simone and Wilma Byl from HOIG presenting information to the inquiry. I attended this to show my support, particularly in light of a recent outbreak of fruit fly in the South Australian Riverland area, and in Queensland just the year before.

What we need in this parliament is our Minister for Agriculture to stand up for this industry. He has been blindsided, willingly unfortunately, by the APVMA saying that he cannot direct them. That is correct but he could also send a strong signal as to their out of control behaviour and he could possibly do a review of the activist behaviour of the scientists involved in this particular independent organisation that the government relies on for information.

The minister needs to do what he can to make sure we do not lose a unique stone fruit industry because that would have a detrimental effect not only on my growers but on our export trade—we export these fruits—and generally on the whole economic situation surrounding our orchards. The problem is that they are only a small group so they are seen as being almost irrelevant. I am so disappointed that this action has been forced on my fruit growers. The minister, unfortunately, in this case does not have the same passion for the fruit growers that I do. I know other members in this House have the same sort of passion for wanting to see this industry survive.

If there is going to be an inquiry and a group is going to examine the way forward, there could be a three-year gap. If they cannot use fenthion in those three years then that industry will be decimated. I feel very sorry for the people I represent.

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