Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the importance of choosing Fairtrade certified products for our homes and workplaces around Australia, including the Australian Parliament House. World Fair Trade Day was held on 8 May 2010. It was a fantastic day to raise awareness about how a small choice that we can make can mean big changes for some of the world’s most impoverished and vulnerable people.

World Fair Trade Day and Fair Trade Fortnight are events which aim to encourage people to make the switch from conventional products to ones bearing the Fairtrade certified logo, which indicates that agreed labour, environmental, and developmental standards have been met. Organisations like the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand, along with Oxfam Australia, World Vision, Uniting Care and many others have all been working hard to help people make the connection between poverty, human rights, and fair trade.

Many Australians do not realise that some of the big brands of coffee, tea, sugar and chocolate that they see on supermarket shelves use suppliers who pay unfairly low prices to producers. This means that communities are driven into poverty and cannot afford basic amenities and services, including housing, education and health care. Fairtrade certified standards guarantee a minimum price to coffee growers and add a Fairtrade premium which goes towards local development and environmental sustainability, ensuring basic health care and education is available to local communities.

I was very concerned to hear that forced child labour is widely used on coffee, tea, sugar and cocoa plantations and that children as young as five-years-old are forced to perform backbreaking labour for many hours a day under extremely brutal conditions. These children are exposed to hazards on a daily basis, including injuries from heavy machinery, poisoning from pesticides from which they are given no protective equipment and beatings and torture from the plantation bosses. Most importantly, they are denied their basic right to education. This compounds and reinforces the poverty cycle. They have no access to health care, no freedom and no rights.

Last year the US Department of Labor released a report entitled The Department of Labor’s list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor, which details the origins of products made with child labour. The report reveals that there are four countries where child labour is used to produce tea, five where it is used to produce cocoa, twelve where it is used to produce coffee and an astonishing fourteen countries where it is used to produce sugar.

This data along with the information I received from campaigns run by World Fair Trade Day recently helped convince me to make the switch in my own office. All the coffee, tea, sugar and drinking chocolate in my electorate office is now Fairtrade certified, and we promote this fact to our constituents and within the office. I am proud to say that as a result my electorate office has now been awarded fair trade workplace status by the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Fairtrade certified products not only ensure fair prices and environmental sustainability but also prohibit child labour and sanction companies who are found to be breaking the rules. We know that Fairtrade is already working to help address these fundamental issues of human rights and poverty. More than five million people across 58 countries are already benefiting from the improvements Fairtrade brings.

While I am proud to have a fair trade workplace at my electorate office and am encouraged by this good news, I also feel that there is a fantastic opportunity now for other workplaces to make that switch. As leaders we have a responsibility to set an example for the community with our values, as Australians we have a responsibility to assist those people far less fortunate than us in developing countries and as consumers each and every one of us—at home or at work, whether we are at the supermarket, at our local cafe or buying for our workplace—have the opportunity to help make poverty history just by looking for the blue and green Fairtrade certified logo before we buy.

That is why I am going to write to each member and senator. In the coming weeks they will receive a letter from me asking them to choose Fairtrade certified products for their electorate offices and to support the campaign to make the big switch here in Australian Parliament House. You will recall, Mr Speaker, that to kick off the campaign in February this year I wrote to you and to the President of the Senate asking both of you to make the switch throughout Parliament House. I am eagerly awaiting your responses, which, I am told, are on their way. I note the previous commitments of various members and senators from both sides of the House and encourage all of them to make the change.