Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to talk on this most important bill, the Export Charges (Imposition—General) Bill 2015. As the previous speaker said, we are a country that exports significant volumes of food—that is self-evident—but we also import over 37 per cent of our manufactured fruits and vegetables and in particular frozen vegetable produce, and we import well over 80 per cent of the fish product consumed in Australia, very often from countries whose food safety standards are very different to our own. We have had in very recent times some extraordinary examples of contamination of frozen berries from China where the hepatitis A sickness affected a number of people. It was a case of faecal contamination of that product. You should not really be surprised at that faecal contamination when you understand the growing conditions of berries and vegetables in the country of China. They do a very good job with productivity but often by using faecal contaminated irrigation water and soils. Indeed, in their factories, there is not yet a common understanding of what in Australia we would call standards of hygiene and food safety measures that must be met for both our domestically consumed food and also food that we export.

This particular bill is looking at the charges, the costs and the way we charge for inspection services of product coming to this country. It is important that we do that. The problem of double standards always concerns me where we have certain inspection charges for product coming into the country and a different regime for inspection services, audits and testing of product that is to be exported. I think the previous speaker also made mention of the fact that we have not as yet in Australia arrived at a situation where all imported product is fastidiously and comprehensively inspected to the point where we do not face health dangers from product contamination.

I have mentioned the hepatitis A problem with contaminated frozen berries from China—that problem was also found in Europe with a number of people becoming sick from contaminated berries, not all from China but from other European countries—but I am most concerned because in my electorate we grow fruit for manufacture. We have the famous SPC Ardmona fruit manufacturing company, the last big Australian fruit manufacturer. They have been so concerned that when they try and compete fairly in the domestic market in Australia, not to mention the export market, they are confronted by Coles and Woolworths, who are determined to increase the numbers of products in their own home brands and to increase the quantity of product that goes through their home brand labels. Our labelling laws then become critical and key. The Australia consumer is not stupid. They are aware that there are different standards of food safety throughout the world. Some people say: 'We only buy on price for our food in Australia. We only buy on price for food and drink.' That is just not true. When we did have the crisis with SPC and it looked like they would simply be put out of their 100-year-long business because they could not compete with cheap dumped imports—Coles and Woolworths were taking them to the cleaner with prices and they could not compete with the horrendous costs imposed by things like the carbon tax and the refrigeration gas tax—we put out a nationwide appeal to save SPC by buying the product even though it was often 30 per cent dearer than the cheap imported dumped tomatoes from Italy or the canned peaches from China, even though the cost was so different. The Australia public went out and bought the Australia product—the Australia peaches, apricots, baked beans, spaghetti and tinned tomatoes. And they have doubled the buying of those products. They cleaned out the shelves of Coles, Woolies, Aldi and IGA of SPC products. Basically, the Australian public saved the SPC company from going broke. All of those orchards were being bulldozed. We lost hundreds of hectares of prime fruit trees, but we were able to save the ones that had not yet gone under the bulldozer with the enormous response of the Australian public wanting to have the choice of an Australian product in their shopping trolley. That is what they wanted, that is what they bought and I am very pleased to say they continue to buy at rates that far exceed the levels before the crisis.

Australians want to be assured that, when the product comes into this country, it is carefully and effectively inspected. Unfortunately, our Australian biosecurity import inspection services and issues like recall of contaminated products are divided between both the federal government and the state governments. In all things where we have lots of different jurisdictions, there is often a lot of slippage and often a lot of dysfunction, and that is certainly the case in the business of inspecting foods and responding to contaminated products in Australia. I will give you some examples; but, before I do, I will explain just how we inspect product that comes into Australia.

We conform to the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, which is the overarching code that applies to all food for sale, including those manufactured in Australia. In addition to the department's imported food testing, as I said before, the state and territory jurisdictions also have responsibility for ensuring that all food, including imported food, meets the requirements of that code at the point of sale. Food failing to meet the requirements of the Australian New Zealand Food Standards Code must be re-exported, destroyed, treated where possible or downgraded. In order to decide what imported foods will be inspected and how often, long ago we decided there would be a high- and medium-risk set of categories and a surveillance category. If the food is regarded as medium to high risk, it is referred to the department by Customs at a rate of 100 per cent of all consignments, but they only have to show that five consecutive consignments have passed inspection before that inspection rate drops to 25 per cent. After a further 20 consecutive passes, the inspection rate is reduced to just five per cent.

Any smart importer of products to Australia, whether it is frozen berries from China or fish fingers from Taiwan, knows that regime and knows that it must have very good product for the first five consignments and, if it passes, it will be on a lower rate of testing for the next 20 consignments. That is 25 consignments in all. After that, it is virtually never going to be inspected. I am concerned about that regime inspection rate. If the food is regarded as in the surveillance category—in other words low risk, and canned fruit is in the low risk category— (Time expired)

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