Tim Hammond (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to rise and speak in support of the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Country of Origin) Bill 2016. The bill, as we have heard, will simplify and improve our country-of-origin labelling to assist consumers to identify—as they should be able to know and ascertain—where their groceries have come from. The new regime is also supported by the Country of Origin Food Labelling Information Standard 2016, which I note has been tabled in this House and the other place and which may yet be subject to a disallowance motion.

This new system of labelling for the country of origin in relation to foodstuffs has been a long time coming. Parliamentarians have been talking for literally decades about improving labelling systems, pointing to example after example of anomalous outcomes where non-Australian food has somehow been described as having been made in Australia. It is my hope and my expectation that this legislation will go some way to addressing the bulk of the concerns raised about the existing system.

In relation to the current regime, Australia's laws require all imported and domestically produced food to be labelled with the country of origin and preclude the making of country-of-origin representations that are false or misleading. The current system governing country-of-origin labelling is in the Australian Consumer Law, schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. The ACL's provisions for Australian labelling are as follows. 'Made in Australia' requires goods to have been substantially transformed in Australia and requires that at least half of the cost of production or manufacture occur in Australia. 'Product of Australia' is used to label goods where all significant ingredients or components have Australia as the country of origin and all, or virtually all, of the manufacture or production of the good happened in Australia. 'Grown in Australia' requires every significant ingredient or component in a good to have been grown here in Australia and virtually all processes involved in production or manufacture also to have happened in Australia.

In many cases, this regime led to strange outcomes that may have fitted the letter of the legal requirement despite actually being against the substance or the spirit of the law. Because 'proportion of production cost' was the topic or issue defining the Australian-made products, producers could include the costs of packaging and labelling of products and even the cost of water involved in reconstituting dried products. So it could lead to somewhat perverse outcomes: fruit juice made with foreign fruit but Australian sugar, and bottles and labels could have been labelled as 'Made in Australia' despite the obvious. The same goes for cured meats. So bacon or ham cured in Australia but made from foreign pork also could have been, perversely, labelled as 'Made in Australia'.

Obviously, with Australian consumers deserving to know where their products have come from, something had to change. So what happened? Let us go back to a time in which the Labor Party was in government. We took this issue—

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