Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Are there any threats to Australia’s biosecurity and quarantine budget which will disadvantage agricultural exporters and increase the risk of pests and diseases entering Australia?

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Leichhardt for the question. It is a deeply important issue, given what happened in the Senate on Tuesday night. Late on Tuesday night the coalition took a sledgehammer to Australia’s quarantine and biosecurity budget, ripping $103 million out of our biosecurity defences. This was done by the same mob that presided over equine influenza—the same Leader of the National Party. It might be 95 per cent of Australians who do not know who he is, but every person involved in the racing industry knows exactly who he is because they took a $1 billion hit when they were dealing with the system with a previous government that was not willing to commit to biosecurity in Australia. The same people who in government gave us quarantine incompetence and neglect, in opposition have decided to vandalise Australia’s quarantine and biosecurity systems—vandalism against the same issue that I always thought was above politics. I actually thought, if we were going to have an argument about quarantine and biosecurity, the argument from the opposition would be that there needs to be more money, not that you need to take $103 million out of our quarantine and biosecurity.

Every year new fees come in. Every year new fees are introduced, and yet in the history of Australia’s biosecurity cost recovery never has either side of politics disallowed the new fees. It has never been done before. We had only eight years in the history of biosecurity where the 40 per cent export subsidy was there, and when it was introduced last time by the Leader of the Nationals he himself said it was a four-year program. He himself announced the expiry date—that there would be no funding beyond 30 June this year. We kept to that date, but we went one step further. We put through a transition year, a further $40 million on the table. Then on Monday, when the Senate inquiry reported and said more transition money was required, Senator Back himself stood up in the parliament and nominated the figure of $20 million. We put a further $20 million on the table to help with the transition year, to help our exporters.

What did they do? Let’s not forget their proposal: zero dollars on the table. We put $60 million on the table. They were faced with a choice between driving policy reform at $60 million or sabotaging the quarantine budget, and they just could not help themselves. They had not done enough damage to quarantine in government; they had to continue the assault in opposition. The shadow minister himself only a few months ago said any cuts to the biosecurity budget would be ‘criminal’—and look at what you have now done. Look at what the opposition has now done in slashing the biosecurity budget by $100 million.

The government did the right thing. We made sure these fees were gazetted earlier than they ordinarily would be so that, if the opposition were minded to behave this way, it could have been done before the end of the financial year. But instead they chose the option of maximum chaos—have the new fees come in, have industry, in good faith, begin the process of reform and then steal the money from underneath, despite the support from the Meat Industry Council, the Livestock Exporters Council, the Dairy Industry Council, GrainCorp, ABB, Horticulture Australia, the Seafood Export Consultative Committee, the Red Meat Advisory Council, Dairy Farmers, Grain Traders, Biological Farmers and the Aquaculture Council. All of these groups want the reform process to go ahead, and against all of them the National Party decided, ‘Let’s just play politics.’

Every month this goes on, $3 million to $4 million disappears because of the underfunding of biosecurity that Australia now has. There is time when we come back to be able to fix this and to allow industry to have its reform process and not have the cut which is currently being made to quarantine. I would ask the opposition to think very long and hard about the demands of industry and actually deliver on a reform package that they were incapable of in government.