James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the Animal Health Australia and Plant Health Australia Funding Legislation Amendment Bill 2022. As previous speakers have outlined, it's a great partnership between government and industry, where we have these schemes that put levies in place to support important industry-specific funded activities that the government can oversee. We obviously understand the principle, which is that the individual producers cannot be expected to protect themselves alone from potential biosecurity risks and other risks to them. Equally, even if they tried, it's something that we have to do cumulatively as a government.

I was involved in the wool industry for a very long time. Most people will know of the Woolmark brand, which at one point in time in the sixties and seventies was the most recognisable Australian brand on the planet. I'm reliably told that a business in my electorate—Penfolds wine—is the new most-recognised brand in certain nations. Woolmark is owned by something called Australian Wool Innovation, which is one of these partnerships that puts levies in place on growers in the wool industry. I've been out of that industry for about 10 years, but that entity undertook a number of different activities on behalf of the industry as a whole. When I was there, they took in about $64 million a year, and exactly half was on the production side—both on-farm and off-farm—and the other half was around marketing and other product development and promotional activities that they would do to help expand the industry.

In terms of merino wool, Australia produces about 80 per cent of the world's apparel wool, and it was in the interests of Australian producers to have a levy put on them, at the greasy wool stage, that would be collected by Australian Wool Innovation. They would then use those funds under rules governed by statute—there's an act of parliament that covers them—and they would have an industry led process to select their leadership. There was a board of representatives, and they would determine and oversee the way in which the organisation was run, what its budget was each year and how it would select the various things that it would fund. They would then execute the spend of that levy which had come from the producers, to make sure that it was being used for the best benefit of the producers.

Having the industry in charge of their own levy fund was certainly something that meant there was the best chance possible of the industry supporting and backing the things that the money from their own levy was being spent on. So half of that was on the marketing and product development side, but the other half was on important measures that are not dissimilar to what this legislation goes toward: ensuring that the wool flock was safe from various threats of a biosecurity nature; investing in research and development to look at ways of improving the size and health of the flock; and looking at different techniques that could be used to help wool apply to more and varied uses, both in an apparel sense and in an industrial sense.

Australian Wool Innovation was heavily involved in developing the ways in which wool would be become shrink resistant. A very famous challenge in wool is that, when washed in warm water, the wool fibre does not like to be stretched and spun into a yarn. That's not the natural inclination of a fibre of wool. It's a crimped fibre, and, without appropriate treatments, you have a situation whereby you won't have shrink resistance in the garments. Australian Wool Innovation invested money in superwash technology and in other technologies that meant we could enhance the value of the wool fibre so that it would have a more significant value for growers.

That was the point of these levies: to put in place a levy on production and to use it in a way that would mean the paying of the levy would, hopefully, be less than the increase in value for the sector. The real unknowns in the sector were some of the preventative things that are envisaged within the framework that we're amending with this bill. Obviously, with a biosecurity arrangement in place to keep out potential pests and prevent impacts upon a particular sector or industry, you can never know that the preventative measures have worked but for the fact that nothing has happened to impact your industry. So when you're investing in preventative measures, as long as the prevention doesn't result in what you're seeking to prevent from occurring going ahead, then, of course, it's been a success.

Prevention in my industry, the wool industry, was always very successful. The unique challenges of raising merino sheep in Australia were also ones that that levy was able to help support. It's obviously a very different climate from where the Spanish merino sheep came, and there are some different challenges with local pests and the like. Flies and flystrike, in particular, are a very significant challenge and issue in the wool industry. It's also become a significant animal welfare issue, quite reasonably, but equally it's something that has been a big challenge for the sector to tackle. Thanks to an industry levy, like the one in this bill, individual growers have been able to receive a lot of support from that body to address it.

Mulesing is a well-known practice that is undertaken by farmers going back a long time in this country, because, due to the unique challenges of the Australian environment, flystrike can best be dealt with by crutching the sheep. There certainly have been developing animal welfare concerns about that practice. Australian Wool Innovation, through the raising of a levy that they receive from growers, like the Animal Health Australia levy, were able to look at a whole range of ways in which they could satisfy the important animal welfare concerns and issues that were consistently raised, not just by animal welfare groups but by a lot of participants in the supply chain, particularly out of Western Europe and North America, who were concerned about using merino wool because of the practice of mulesing. There was then this concept of a non-mulesed wool being something of value that you could advertise to animal welfare conscious consumers who would feel much more comfortable in purchasing garments with that sort of accreditation. So I really pay tribute to Australian Wool Innovation, the way in which they've been structured and the levy they raise.

What this bill does, exactly in line with the way AWI operates, is to make sure that there's a really strong, healthy partnership between the government, the industry and the individual participants in the industry to help protect them and respond to emergency circumstances to safeguard and protect the industry. We in the coalition are very happy to support this bill which effectively mirrors a bill that we introduced in the last parliament—it made it through this chamber but not the Senate—and we look forward to it being able to pass before the end of the year so it can proceed to provide the benefit it's designed to provide, to the various industries that rely on it. With those words, I commend the bill to the House.

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