Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The maxim ‘think globally, act locally’ is one that every member of this House should bear in mind when confronted with facts such as those set out in this motion. It is overwhelming to think that, as we sit here, children as young as six are being forced to work 80 to 100 hours per week to produce the raw ingredients for products that we consume here in Australia, to produce products that most members have probably consumed this week if not today—particularly the former member for Corinella, now the member for McMillan.

I have been corresponding with members of the government about the issue of child slavery and the cocoa industry since it was first brought to my attention by the Reverend Tim Costello in April this year. In April I wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to use the Australian government’s purchasing power to support people, especially children, who are victims of trafficking and slavery by stocking only Fairtrade chocolate in vending machines in Australian government buildings. As I pointed out to the Prime Minister, it is a simple economic principle that what the consumer demands, the manufacturer will supply.

The Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance responded to my initial letter to the Prime Minister by outlining a number of steps that the government is already taking to address labour rights abuses in the cocoa industry. I was informed by the Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance that the government supports the voluntary use of labels domestically to certify that imported goods have been produced without exploiting children. I was also informed that the Confectionary Manufacturers of Australasia are currently supporting an action plan, agreed to under the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol, to establish a global certification system. I am sure I do not need to point out to members that this protocol was agreed to in 2001 and that it is now 2008.

Not only has the cocoa industry been slow to act; it is now breaching deadlines that it has set itself. On 1 July 2008 the chocolate industry failed to meet yet another deadline to tackle labour exploitation in West African cocoa fields. World Vision has called on the Australian chocolate industry to make a genuine attempt to tackle the root causes of child labour and exploitation in cocoa production. This parliament should do the same. The Confectionery Manufacturers of Australasia, on behalf of Australian chocolate manufacturers, have been asked to make a statement that they are actively committed to eliminating the worst forms of child labour and exploitation from their cocoa supply chains and to guarantee farmers a fair price for their cocoa, an initiative I am sure all members of the House would support. I look forward to speakers from the government endorsing that goal.

The Confectionery Manufacturers of Australasia have been asked to publicly outline a detailed and costed plan of action to ensure that our products are free of child labour and exploitation by 1 December 2008 and to commit US$14 million per year for the next 10 years, or approximately one per cent of industry revenue in Australia, to the rollout of this plan.

Point 93 of chapter 14 of the 2007 Labor Party platform, I am sure I do not need to remind honourable members of the government, states:

Labor will also give high priority to supporting international efforts to eradicate the exploitation of child labour.

The parliamentary secretary specifically acknowledges that ‘practical measures are required to protect children effectively’ and cites the following examples as practical measures taken by the government to address the root causes of exploitative child labour practices: Australia’s international development assistance program, Australia’s support of UNICEF, Australia’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its two optional protocols, and Australia’s ratification of the International Labour Organisation Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour.

I accept and acknowledge these facts as important measures in the fight against child slavery but, with all due respect, isn’t all this good work undone by the fact that I could go to any vending machine in any Australian government building and purchase a chocolate bar that contains cocoa farmed by child slaves? How can the government claim that Australia is serious about eradicating child labour when it will not even use its own purchasing power to send a clear message to the chocolate manufacturers of the world that they must do more to stamp out slavery?

This government claims that ‘since control of concession agreements under which vending machines are operated was developed to individual agencies, there is no centralised control which would facilitate enforcing a requirement that all vending machines in Australian Government offices sell only fair trade chocolate’. That sounds like something the Prime Minister would say. Why bother doing the diplomatic hard yards of ratifying UN conventions and protocols and funding aid agencies and UNICEF when we cannot even ensure that chocolate consumed by employees of the Australian government is not made from cocoa farmed by child slaves? This government appears to be thinking globally, but I cannot urge them strongly enough to start acting locally. In every aspect of our lives, we can all act towards eliminating trafficking and slavery in our lifetime.

My office has recently been certified as a fair trade workplace by the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand, but I note with sadness that I am the only Australian member of parliament whose office is certified. I am sure that everyone present tonight will rush out to make sure that their office is certified as a fair trade workplace. I encourage all members to take action to convert their office to a fair trade workplace by complying with two simple goals: (1) using fair trade certified products within your workplace and (2) promoting fair trade within your workplace.

I am holding a ‘Walk Against Child Slavery’ in my electorate on 22 November to coincide with the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. The walk will consist of a series of interactive stations that will highlight the key issues that affect millions of children around the world who are victims of modern-day slavery. The aim of the stations is to educate the community on the extent of the global problem and how they can respond positively to stop the exploitations of children around the world. The stations will show how and where children are being trapped in conditions of slavery and what Australians can do to be part of the solution. I am delighted that the Reverend Tim Costello has agreed to be part of my Walk Against Child Slavery on 22 November and will be present to speak and lend his support to my campaign to change the way the Australian government purchases its confectionary.

These two projects have not been onerous ones. I cannot ask the government to act locally if I am not prepared to do the same. I ask that all members do everything in their power to support international efforts to eradicate the exploitation of child labour by acting locally. It is not an onerous task for the Prime Minister of Australia to ask that his department ensure that the chocolate offered for sale in the vending machines in offices of Australian government departments is fair trade certified chocolate. It is a small thing to ask. The reality is that when a public servant turns up to their vending machine and finds that the bar they have been used to purchasing is not available, they will inevitable ask, ‘Where is X, Y or Z chocolate bar?’ When they get told that it is not fair trade chocolate, it will spread virally throughout Australia and the world that at least the Australian government has been prepared to act. It will be one of those trigger points that cause the whole world to change the way it views the production of cocoa and to demand a fair price for a fair day’s work in West Africa; it will change the way we operate around the world. I urge members to support this motion and I look forward to the support of Bruce Billson, the shadow minister for cities and sustainable development and member for Dunkley, a longstanding member of this House who will be supporting this motion.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome this motion and thank the member for Sturt for bringing it to the attention of the House. I hold up my ‘End Slavery Now’ T-shirt—

Opposition Member:

An opposition member—Wear it with pride!

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wear it in the gym most mornings—which I had the pleasure of being presented with at a recent event that I and Tim Costello spoke to at the Syndal Baptist Church under the Catalyst banner. I have spoken now at about three or four of these events. One was held at Emmaus College, a terrific school in my electorate, under World Vision’s Stir banner. The interesting thing about the recent event was that they did not want a ban on chocolate. They do not want consumers to go out and ban chocolate buying at the moment. What they are asking consumers to do is to go into stores and purchase the chocolate, but write to the manufacturers, particularly Cadbury’s based here in Australia, and let them know that they would like to ensure that their product is not being made via the processes of child slavery. So they are not looking for a ban, but they are asking us as consumers to do our bit.

I have also had the privilege of having Oaktree Foundation members from Monash University and Deakin University come and see me in my office. They are a terrific group that operate in my area and they are pushing for fair trade on campus. I am supporting their moves there. Certainly in my office, like the member for Sturt, we use fair trade tea and coffee and we do not encourage too many people to eat chocolate bars out of vending machines.

I suppose when most people think of slavery, they imagine slaves shackled to a ship or to each other, as used to happen during the days of the African slave trade. I think we all hoped it had ended with William Wilberforce, but sadly it has not. The truth is these days the chains are often mental chains, psychological ones of coercion, fraud, deception and fear of harm to families. Many Australians would be shocked to learn that slavery and human servitude currently exist within Australia. This often involves sexual slavery and human-trafficking. We are not immune from it even here.

The issue of slavery, particularly child slavery, is something I feel very passionate about, and I have spoken on the issue at many, many local community events. It is an issue of great concern to my electorate. It is estimated that as many as 27 million human beings are enslaved across the globe in what is a multimillion-dollar trade. Slaves are found in Africa, Asia, South-East Asia, the US, Europe and indeed Australia. According to the Anti-Slavery Society:

Although there is no longer any state which legally recognises, or which will enforce, a claim by a person to a right of property over another, the abolition of slavery does not mean that it ceased to exist. There are millions of people throughout the world—mainly children—in conditions of virtual slavery, as well as in various forms of servitude which are in many respects similar to slavery.

There are several organisations performing fantastic work advocating on the issue, including World Vision Australia, through its Don’t Trade Lives campaign, and Catalyst, through a campaign called ‘Not For Sale: Campaign to End Slavery’. On their website, Catalyst touch on the issue of child slavery being used to farm cocoa beans:

In the Ivory Coast young men are enslaved on cocoa plantations. They are forced to work long hours, receive no pay, and are mercilessly beaten if they rebel. Anti-slavery groups estimate that up to 90% of Ivory Coast cocoa farms have slaves. Given the Ivory Coast supplies almost half the world’s cocoa, it is quite possible the cocoa used in the chocolate you eat or the topping you put on your ice-cream has involved slave labour.

The pleasure that we derive from eating chocolate could possibly be at the expense of child slaves in Africa. As the Trade and Environment Database puts it:

The problem of child slavery then is not simply a faraway abstraction with no immediate implications for anybody else except those who are directly affected, but rather it is an issue that everybody around the world should be concerned about and demand action to eradicate.

Again I commend the member for Sturt for bringing this motion to the House, and I call upon people to do that, to eradicate slavery by letting manufacturers know that they object to the notion that child slavery has gone into the manufacturing of their chocolate.

Very interestingly, at one of the events I went to, someone from the confectionery manufacturers was brave enough to turn up and present to the crowd. She admitted that, yes, they had failed to meet their last two deadlines and that again there would probably be little hope of their agreeing to meet. But there was a good discussion between the manufacturers and Tim Costello at this event to recognise that it was an issue that the confectioners were taking on board. Again, this is something that has happened through public effort, through public concern, through action such as this today, through actions in the community to ensure that when people buy something—if they buy that Cadbury’s chocolate bar, for example—they write to the manufacturer and let them know that they are deeply concerned about this issue. And it happens through people trying to ensure that they purchase fair trade chocolate. It is just as good and it is out there. Coffee, tea and the whole range of produce are available, and we should be ending slavery. It is absolutely obscene that in this day and age people are still enslaved.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is hard to imagine that an international effort to guard against ‘mistreatment’ could be so interwoven with the ‘treat’ of chocolate. The mistreatment that this motion seeks to shine a light on is the plight of hundreds of thousands of West African children and how too many, enslaved by their family poverty, face back-breaking work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana, producing nearly three-quarters of the cocoa beans used to make chocolate. This is not the kind of ‘chipping in’ many kids from Australian farms or small business families may be familiar with at harvest or stock-take time; the exploited children often face dangerous, unprotected and unrelenting work, with the risk of being owned and traded as a bonded labourer, tending the cantankerous crop in a unique, extreme environment instead of attending school.

We commend World Vision Australia for its ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign to highlight this grave concern. I commend my friend and colleague the member for Sturt for bringing this motion forward and urging the Rudd government to take decisive action within its field of influence. While views vary on whether we can live without chocolate, we unite as one to say that kids must live without slavery, must be free not to be traded and must be free to be free.

This simple and unarguable premise has inspired many, including some within my local community. In early May I met with local ambassadors and allies of World Vision and the Oaktree Foundation—Lizzie, Sage, Tillie, Ella, Stacey and others—to discuss a campaign to end slavery. Year 12 Frankston High School student Emily Roycroft led the Mornington Peninsula ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign by organising a forum in conjunction with the student VGen vision group of World Vision. Having participated in this forum, I delivered a petition to the Confectionery Manufacturers Association and canvassed many of the issues with an open, interested and receptive CMA CEO, Trish Hyde, and communications manager, Kay Blanthorme. At a Melbourne CBD ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ forum in early August, Trish and I joined with the recuperating Jonathan Treagust, who shared his excellent international insights, and the irrepressible Ms Brett Louise Woods, urging the audience to get active. At this forum we learned about the many small farmers who combine their fragile and temperamental harvest through agents who then aggregate this production to supply the commodity market which in turn provides the vital cocoa input to the major confectionery manufacturers and boosts the fragile West African economy.

Yes, we know the supply chains are long and opaque, but it is not too much to ask that a non-essential foodstuff like chocolate is produced without slavery. Coordinated international steps are being taken to achieve and validate this most basic of ethical and humanitarian preconditions in partnership with NGOs, the governments of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and industry. I am optimistic that the independent verification report due to be completed and released in December will show that we can all have confidence in this most basic of supply chain requirements. As consumers and advocates, we can be clear in our call for meaningful progress and genuine action by the local confectionery manufacturing industry and retailers—a shared purpose to do what we can domestically to pursue objectives of the ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ campaign.

Nurturing a distinctly Australian, fair dinkum partnership committed to sourcing cocoa from the most ethical and best verifiable suppliers that reliably label and convey this information to consumers; promoting the campaign on product packaging; aligning industry, philanthropic, volunteer and aid projects with international efforts; seeing confectionery executives travel to West Africa, perhaps with a young person from a manufacturing plant area, to see things first hand; for the industry to sponsor the ‘Art for Aid’ campaign; for CMA members to offer employees salary deductions for World Vision child sponsorship; and proactively reassuring concerned consumers, like my wife’s mothers group, that Australian confectionery manufacturers embrace our motives, endorse the ‘Don’t Trade Lives’ objectives and bat for our DTL team and are not merely bystanders—we can do all of this and we should.

My own experiences as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, with responsibilities including aspects of AusAID’s magnificent work, highlighted the plight of too many children where the kids themselves are the most valuable asset or chattel a profoundly impoverished family has or are too easy a recruit, forced or otherwise, in a world where as many as 300,000 children under the age of 18, some as young as eight, serve in government forces or armed rebel groups in 33 ongoing or recent armed conflict in nearly every region of the globe. There are examples close to home of sexual servitude where, according to a parliamentary inquiry, possibly hundreds of people from South-East Asia and China are traded as property in the sex industry in our own country. This motion advances the need to increase public awareness and action and to encourage all of us to take decisive steps. I commend the motion to the House and commend the member for Sturt for his excellent initiative.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start by commending the member for Sturt for bringing this issue of child exploitation to the House. I think it is a very important issue and, whilst I did not hear his contribution tonight because I was in another place, I did hear the contribution that he made on 29 May this year. When I heard his contribution then it raised my awareness of this issue and it is from then that I became interested in it.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remember you were in the chamber when I said that.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, and I am happy to do everything I can to raise community awareness to see whether we can get some action on this important issue. As a person who is committed to seeing that the millennium goals are achieved and as a person who is committed to the elimination of poverty, I was horrified on that particular day to learn of the abuses and exploitations that take place in the production of chocolate.

West Africa collectively supplies nearly 80 per cent of world cocoa. Large cocoa producers such as Cadbury’s, Nestles and Hershey buy cocoa from the Ivory Coast and it is mixed with other cocoa. Thirty per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in child labour, mostly in agricultural activities, including cocoa farming. There is a lot of recorded information on this. In 1998 a report from the Ivory Coast office of UNICEF concluded that the Ivory Coast farmers used enslaved children. From then on there have been a series of reports. In 2001 there was the report A taste of slavery: how your chocolate may be tainted. The BBC reported on children from Mali being sold as slaves. A British television documentary also claimed many Ivory Coast plantations were using slave labour. In 2002 there was another report and in 2005 there were a number of reports. In 2006 there was a study showing children working on the farms. In 2007 UNICEF representatives on the Ivory Coast made some pretty telling statements.

The one thing that has remained constant is that no matter where you go in the world you find reports on the fact that this abuse of children exists. Children are being abused, sold into slavery, bashed and made to work long hours—between 80 to 100 hours a week, it is reported in just about every piece of information I have read on this issue. Nothing changes. There have been attempts in the US to introduce a voluntary code. They failed to meet the time requirements and there was an extension to 2008. Once again that was not met. It really is time that some action is taken.

The Don’t Trade Lives campaign by World Vision should be supported not only by members of this parliament but by all Australians. There are little ways that we can make differences. When we go along and talk to community groups, we should be raising this issue. We should be making people aware of the fact that this abuse exists.

In today’s Newcastle Herald there is a report that tonight at the University of Newcastle a convention of 350 health students is being run where this particular issue is being looked at. Students in the area of health are going to be looking at the production of chocolate and how as individuals they can make a difference. My message to the parliament tonight is this: join together, make a difference and do not let this abuse continue. Once again, I would like to congratulate the member for Sturt for bringing what I believe is a very important motion to the parliament.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.