Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to support the Biosecurity Amendment (Strengthening Biosecurity) Bill 2022. This bill will amend the Biosecurity Act 2015, inserting some new measures to provide for increased protection against diseases and pests that pose an unacceptably high biosecurity risk of coming into this country and spreading through our states and territories. This bill provides a regulatory framework for managing the risk, outlines Australia's international rights and obligations and contains a number of measures which have similarities with the biosecurity bill that the coalition introduced into the parliament last year. So we're supporting this legislation. Specifically, there are some key things in this legislation that allow for new measures to manage the biosecurity risk from travellers—those coming from anywhere, but particularly, with the risk that we've seen, those coming from Indonesia.

My electorate of Nicholls is one of the major dairy industry regions in Australia. It produces an enormous amount of Australia's milk and a very high percentage of Australia's milk exports. Everywhere you go around Nicholls, there is a small town that has been provided for and kept going by the existence of a dairy factory. We've got Bega Cheese in Tatura—formerly Tatura Milk—Fonterra in Stanhope, Saputo up in Numurkah and, of course, Noumi in Shepparton. We've got dairy farmers producing milk every day, and there are tankers all over the place, taking this milk into these factories. They provide huge export dollars for Australia as we send the produce over. When you go into many supermarkets in South-East Asia, you can see that the Australian brand, the Australian flag on those dairy products, is extremely prominent. That's how valued our products are. We've got to protect this industry and make sure that the risk of FMD is kept as low as possible, and this bill does some good work around that. It expands the pre-arrival reporting requirements for aircrafts and vessels and makes the owner of the aircraft or vessel also responsible, not just the operator.

As the member for McEwen rightly pointed out, varroa mite is a very concerning development and concerning risk for our almond industry, which has traditionally been in Griffith, the Riverina and also up in the Riverland but is also expanding into my electorate in Nicholls, up in the northern part. I think sometimes that the Australian population doesn't understand the importance of the bee. If you'd driven around my electorate a month ago, you would have seen the orchards flowering. They're cross-pollination varieties—they need bees to take pollen from one variety to another in order to fruit. So we've got to protect those bees.

In my previous career I had much involvement in this. I was an agronomist, and my job was to go to orchards in the Goulburn Valley and identify pests and diseases, particularly in fruit—apples, pears and peaches. If exotic diseases that exist in other parts of the world get into Australia, we'll be in real trouble. I want to mention fire blight. Fire blight badly affects apples, in terms of crop damage and tree damage, and it also affects pears. In places where there is significant fire blight, like the United States and New Zealand, there is not a viable pear industry.

Those opposite had their party room meeting this morning. I provided some apples and pears. It was some goodwill to all sides from the people of Nicholls. The member for Bean came over to me and said that it was a great initiative because everyone's looking for a 'pear' this week—boom, boom! Well done, Member for Bean.

Nicholls produces 95 per cent of Australia's pears. The majority used to go to the canneries—SPC and Ardmona. We still produce pears that go there, but with new storage technologies, such as controlled atmosphere storage, we can keep the fresh product and use the logistics chain to provide the fresh product to the table, not only in Australia but around the world. That industry would be seriously threatened if fire blight were to come into this country.

Many years ago when we were debating whether Australia should allow the import of New Zealand apples the people of my electorate were extremely concerned, because they felt that, if New Zealand apples came to Australia and brought with them fire blight and that got into our orchards, we'd be in huge trouble. There were fruit bins burnt in protest. It was quite a big deal. In the end New Zealand apples were brought into this country and can be imported into Australia, but the biosecurity regulations are extremely strict. We would have preferred that they weren't allowed in, but the fact that there are strong biosecurity measures in place, which I believe will be enhanced by this bill, means that we have not had an outbreak of fire blight and we continue to have a strong apple and pear industry.

We're going to have some challenges in that the United States is going to want to export fruit to Australia as well. The United States has significant fire blight in many areas as well. Again we have to assess the risk. If we do let in apples from the United States—and I'm not saying that I'll be supporting that—the biosecurity measures need to be extremely strong. It is not just the orchards. You can see through the orchards the result of when biosecurity did not work many years ago. We have had incursions of oriental fruit moth, codling moth and light-brown apple moth—all of which I used to try to identify and then provide a solution for to the local orchardists.

The federal coalition had a great record on biosecurity—$1.07 billion was available for biosecurity and export programs, an increase of $438.8 million, or 69 per cent of that, from 2014-15. In this year's budget that we delivered before the election we were pleased to commit $62 million to boost northern Australian frontline biosecurity over four years, including to safeguard our northern border against animal diseases, $10 million to support states and territories to undertake surveillance and control activities for japanese encephalitis virus—and that's a particular concern in the northern part of my electorate—and $20 million over three years for livestock traceability.

I just want to mention livestock traceability. We need to guard against foot-and-mouth disease coming into this country with everything we can. God forbid that there is an incursion of foot-and-mouth or something similar that affects our livestock industries. We need those traceability initiatives so that we can find it, isolate it, nip it in the bud and have a system and a program that are ready to go, so it's extremely important.

Last year in government the federal coalition launched Biosecurity 2030, a strategic road map for protecting Australia's environment, economy and way of life. The road map represented the great work of the former agriculture minister, the member for Maranoa, and it had five key enablers: firstly, governance, a strong commitment by governments, industry and the community to work together, and you can see that in my electorate on the fruit fly issue where there's a real community buy-in because everybody knows that, if these pests were to affect our export markets, it's not just the orchardists that lose out but all of the service industries around the orchards and the towns themselves lose out. The community gets involved, cuts down fruit trees in backyards that are not being sprayed, and the government helps to enable that.

The second enabler is people. We need a workforce that has the capacity, skills and flexibility to prepare for and respond to emergent biosecurity risks, challenges and opportunities. As a graduate in agricultural science from the wonderful Dookie college, Melbourne university's agricultural campus in northern Victoria, I know that we need more people who have skills in pest identification and biosecurity measures and who understand the technology and the ways to keep our agricultural industry safe. The third enabler is technology, and we need the technology itself. With data being used more and more in different ways, we can harness that data and use it to further enhance our ability to manage these risks.

The fourth enabler is regulation, having a regulatory environment that supports us to respond to current and future biosecurity challenges and opportunities. That environment needs both legislation and penalties as well as policing, and I commend the amendments in this bill. Increasing punishments for some wrongdoing when it comes to creating biosecurity risks is a further deterrent. The final enabler is funding. Obviously, we need money to do all these things. Biosecurity affirmed the coalition government's commitment to developing a national biosecurity strategy, and we took action to make that a reality. That was appreciated by the people in my electorate. It's really a bipartisan effort, and I thank those opposite for this. We all love our agricultural industries because they're so important to us. We might argue the toss on some other issues, such as water and labour, but on biosecurity we'll work constructively together to make sure that we keep our wonderful Australian agricultural industry safe. I commend the bill and the amendments it makes to the House.

See this speech in context