John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill 2012. Let me start by saying that I support, in fact the whole coalition supports, the stated objectives of the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Senator Wong, on the agricultural and veterinary chemicals reform to reduce regulatory compliance costs for businesses and to improve competitiveness.

On the Department of Agricultural, Fisheries and Forestry website it says the reform aims are to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Again, these are goals the coalition and I support. But—and it is a big but—that is not what this alleged ag vet chemical reform is all about. This reform is a smokescreen for the Labor government to deliver an election promise made to the Greens that will further cripple agricultural communities and farmers and those who work, need and live around them. This promise was made as far away from farming communities as possible by the then minister for agriculture, one week before the 2010 election, but not explained in Labor's pre-election statement on agriculture, so as to hide its impact on the agriculture industry.

This bill is a hoax. It is completely about winning favour with the Greens by making it cost-prohibitive to register chemicals and more costly to conduct agriculture. Who was the minister who announced this one week prior to the election without explaining the true motive behind it? It is the man who is now the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities and who is charged with responsibility for agriculture in this House. Or should I say charged with the job of making far harder and more expensive to conduct. He will respond by, in his relaxed manner, laughing it off as a joke. But this, make no mistake, is the smiling assassin to agriculture. Let there be no doubt that this government, via the Greens, is intent on putting our agricultural business if not out of business then damn close to it.

I was the first minister or shadow minister in Australia to have 'Food Security' in my title. It was to highlight the damage to our industries and our long-term food security from irresponsible policies like this. There is a huge risk for our long-term food security, a huge risk for the standard we set not just for Australia but for the world on how to produce good food from having ambitious politicians using the agricultural sector as a sacrificial lamb to feed a ravenous green lobby. Myths are perpetuated and balanced reporting is ignored as ambitious politicians see this as an easy way to win favour with their electorate without having to solve the real issues of government in health, education, jobs, economic development and helping farmers make a quid. There are classic examples like Labor using the 457 visa issue to placate unions while towns and industries in rural and remote Australia are in genuine need of workers. It is a bit like doctors: in regional New South Wales—and I suspect probably in Western Australia as well—half the doctors out in the bush are foreign doctors who have had to come in, not because we do not have doctors but because it is very hard to get city based doctors out where they are needed. It is the same issue when it comes to agriculture and mining.

So this bill is not about reform for the chemical registration process to improve efficiency. This bill is about Labor's promise to the Greens or—now that the coalition is all over between the Greens and Labor—about competing with the Greens to feed the green lobby. This bill is seen as an easy way to win favour without causing any major distress to Labor electorates—where they have very few prospects, I would suggest to the House, in the coming election.

I did speak earlier about how the finance minister said this bill was about efficiencies and improvements. I can see this bill does fiddle around the edges to improve efficiency but this is a side-effect, not the purpose of the bill. Let me tell you: industry and chemical retailers—the people who spend millions of dollars registering new products—are far more concerned about the changes to data protection that make the re-registration so expensive.

Changes make the initial registration of chemicals somewhat more economical with the ability of the APVMA to recognise similar international health and safety systems and data, so the APVMA will not have to start from scratch with lengthy, excessive, expensive assessments paid for by industry when they have already been done. There are countries like Canada and the USA, which have damn good systems. They do not actually want to kill their populations with bad chemicals either. This will allow the APVMA to use their work. It does not say they have to or they should. I think that is not the way we should go. We should tell them that, where it is obvious the work has already been done by countries like Canada or the USA, they should use it.

However, the bill is designed to first and foremost implement a re-registration system to raise the cost of chemical registration and make the registration of many chemicals economic. It is to give the green lobby designated time frames to concentrate on campaigns to have chemicals removed. For example, the campaigners will run a campaign on a chemical because of a tenuous link with a disease that is unscientific and force the APVMA to withdraw registration because of political pressure, not because of scientific fact. The re-registration system does not introduce—and this is a big point—any new triggers; it just forces the APVMA to run a costly recheck of existing triggers. In the same way they had the super-trawler ban, they will wear down industry and make it too difficult to continue instead of using science based reviews triggered by genuine issues.

The coalition will not support this bill in its current form and will be moving amendments in the third reading stage. Let us look at the issues. The current system is not efficient—that is a given. These views were widely expressed in submissions to the bill development, in submissions to the Senate and House inquiries and hearings. For example, CropLife stated during the House Standing Committee on Agriculture, Resources, Fisheries and Forestry hearing:

We would agree with the WWF that a greater responsiveness from the regulator in this space would be a very good thing, and something that is supported by our members.

This is further supported by the Australian National Audit Office's inquiry into the APVMA, which demonstrated that it is not as efficient in the way that it conducts its work as it could be. The APVMA is also not meeting its obligation to finalise all applications within statutory time frames and this obviously increases the cost of regulation for both the APVMA and applicants, and impacts on users' access to pesticides and veterinary medicines. It amazes me that you can have statutory time frames and then not meet them. While all stakeholders, both industry and environmental lobby groups, involved in the process agreed that reform was needed to improve efficiency and to speed up the review of high-risk chemicals, this bill does very little to address them. In fact, the bill actually increases regulatory burden on industry and ties up resources which will detract from the authority's ability to process high-risk chemical reviews.

When you talk about safeguards—and certainly they are needed—the ANAO's inquiry into the APVMA confirmed that we have a reliable and scientific regulatory system for effective management of risk. In other words, the ANAO said the current safeguards are adequate and work well. The ANAO report found it was not the triggers for the review that was the issue; it was the time taken for the process of a review once chemicals were identified.

I was perplexed that Minister Ludwig, who has long been campaigning on the need for reforms to increase efficiency on the chemical registration system, has now changed his tune. At the recent ABARES conference the minister proclaimed the reform to ensure the health and safety of the farmer and consumer. It is apparently not about efficiency at all anymore, despite this claim being made endlessly for the last couple of years, almost since the last election.

The truth is that the minister was sold a pup by the former minister—the current Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities—the member for Watson. This is the same minister who put in place the rules to manage the fisheries that invited the supertrawler to Australia, and then backflipped as minister for the environment to undermine the agriculture minister's authority. The major flaw in the argument that the re-registration system is for health and safety is that the retract check of the triggers under the re-registration process will actually reduce resources available to the APVMA, reducing their ability to process the reviews of high-risk chemicals in a timely manner.

The department have acknowledged that there will be at least $2 million in increased costs, while industry have calculated that the cost—and they did not do this on the back of a postage stamp; they paid Deloittes to do an in-depth costing of what this means to industry—will be more likely in the vicinity of $8 million annually, a massive increase of 30 per cent. This is extra red tape—in this case it is probably green tape—of 30 per cent to the system each year. The department acknowledged during Senate estimates that they did not take into account the cost to the chemical companies and others who would have to produce the data for the re-registration. They obviously did pretty much a 'back of a postage stamp' costing on the general costing of having to process some 9,000 products. This is despite Finance and Deregulation minister Penny Wong listing ag and vet chem reform as the second key area where the government would reduce regulatory compliance costs for businesses and improve competitiveness.

Internationally, our registration process is already struggling to compete, and that is one of the key reasons the industry and the coalition supported reform to make it more efficient. Increasing the cost will further reduce our competitiveness and force international companies to evaluate whether costs and returns will justify the expense. In the last 30 or 40 years Australia has gone from being the place where every company around the world wanted to come and test their chemicals and go through an initial registration process to the last place they want to do it. Now the Greens support the re-registration process as they claim it will help new products, as getting rid of the old products will encourage new products onto the market. Let's just have a look at that for a second. The government has deregistered dimethoate and is trying to get rid of the last fruit fly control chemical on the market. Is there any sign of a new product? Deputy Speaker Adams, as a member representing agriculture, you would know there is not.

There is the time and the cost. There is a sheep drench that was developed in Australia for Australian conditions which is still not available for Australian farmers, despite New Zealand having registered and having access to that same chemical for over two years. It was developed here, has been used in New Zealand for two years, but has still not got through the registration process here in Australia. Does this new efficiency, this new compliance the government wants to bring upon agriculture do anything to help this drench get registered? No, it does not.

There is a third example I have as to how it does not help the process, and that is the new sheep dip based on tea tree oil. Last week we went with some tea tree growers in Tweed Heads at the invitation of the Nationals candidate, and what a candidate Matthew Frazer is. You can never have enough successful small business people in this parliament, and he is certainly one of those and will add to the skills if he is successful, as I am sure we all hope he is. Getting back to the tea tree grower, he has been using his initiative and has come up with an innovative way to use natural tea tree oil as a basis for a sheep drench. However, it is going to cost about $3 million to generate the data, such as toxicity tests. But, with very limited data protection for such a product, there would be no way that the company could get a return on investment in a small market such as Australia. Will the legislation make it more attractive to get this registered? No, it will not.

This legislation does nothing to improve the ability for these products to be transitioned to market more cost effectively, and if they are brought to market they will now have expensive seven to 15 year reviews on their products, adding to the costs and making them even less viable. It is clear that the re-registration system is being used to force products off the market by making them too costly. The agricultural department has acknowledged that the European re-registration system has led to products being lost because it is not viable for companies to re-register—not because the products are dangerous; simply because the costs of re-registration to a competent, safe product are too high. Well, here we go in Australia.

The department claim that our system is less expensive than the European system. However, they have admitted that it does add costs—and, as industry has pointed out, there are already products in Australia that are uneconomic to register and the increase in costs can only further exacerbate that situation. The department have played down the extra costs and, in the House committee hearing, pushed the WWF line that the maximum was $100 a year. That is so far from what the actual cost is, and does not even begin to account for the fact that the chemical companies—those who are responsible for the chemicals—will have to come up with the data. It has been estimated by Deloittes that each one could be as much as $300,000. However, as the industry explained in the same hearing, there are many more costs than that on industry from this re-registration process.

The APVMA's own documentation indicates that we are looking at an increase in the cost of the system for the proposed legislation. In fact, the 30 per cent number is the interim. Equally, the costs that DAFF were referring to are the straight-up application fees, and that does not even approach the issue of the cost to the industry to provide the regulator with the data they will require.

Aside from that, the administrative processes, while simple, come at a cost. If you have the regulator about to have hundreds upon hundreds of re-registrations—that is what it is, and I will come to that shortly—just to manage, file and respond to those re-registrations costs money and it takes resources and time away from the core inputs. The bill in its current form will, however, deliver a net loss in efficiency and cannot be said in any way to address the system's failure to function within statutory time frames. It will exacerbate the situation.

Surprisingly the department also conceded that the regulatory impact statement failed to quantify the financial costs and financial impacts on industry. Instead it based its decision on:

… benefits outweighed the costs of the system. But it was done in a qualitative sense and not a financial sense.

So surprise, surprise: no cost-benefit analysis was done on the system.

Just like the carbon tax, like the mining tax, like the ban on live exports and like the super-trawler ban, this government has shown their disregard for the primary industry sector on which this nation was built. The coalition will stand up and be counted for agriculture and will stop the burdensome regulation designed to drive our industries out of business. We will move amendments to the bill to remove the mandatory registration system, to ensure this bill has a net increase in efficiency as initially outlined by the government itself. We will do the job of government and not allow them just to change the spin to suit their agenda to remove large numbers of chemicals from the market irrespective of whether they can be used safely. The re-registration system adds no triggers but just another expensive recheck of the triggers funded by industry.

These are the facts: the seven to 15 year timeframe is unrealistic for re-registration of the 1,900 active constituents—of which 780 are unique and each one would have to be treated totally separately—of the 9,900 currently registered agvet chemicals. This process will tie up staff and resources in APVMA and cause an economic burden on registrants, and parent companies, of active constituents. Will these costs be taken up by the government? Will they be passed on to end users, such as land managers and producers? Yes, of course they will—once again, 'Ah, they'll be right.'

Contrary to the government's claims that the re-registration process will increase the scrutiny on suspect chemistries, the increase in the administrative workload of the APVMA staff will reduce regulatory body resources available to deal with critical registrations and permits.

We will move amendments that delay commencement by 12 months. Commencement of the bill is 1 July 2013. There are only 17 evaluators and some 9,000 products that may be up for the re-registration process; a CEO who has only just come on board; and nothing from the APVMA on how it will manage the changes and the increased workload. The APVMA needs time to establish its processes and time to consult with industry on how they will manage the new legislative requirements. Currently it takes up to 15 years to review some chemicals, so it is important that we give them time to adjust or the whole organisation will just go into meltdown.

The delay in commencement will allow time to develop a risk-management framework clearly detailing the application requirements, which is essential to support other efficiency measures such as 'shut the gate' and 'elapsed time frame' reforms. Registrants agreed to work with the APVMA to road test the risk framework to ensure that it operated as intended. This has not occurred to date. No consultation on the risk framework has occurred. The current manual of requirements and guidelines is insufficient, with significant gaps that need to be addressed. Without a comprehensive risk framework to deliver high-quality applications to the APVMA, it may struggle with applications that do not have all the information required, resulting in more applications being denied, longer time frames for decisions and a higher refusal rate.

The consequence of a poorly handled transition will be to amplify the problems identified by farmers and industry—that is, that fewer safe products will remain on the market, diminishing the competitiveness of the Australian industry. This will increase costs for farmers as the price of pesticides increases. Some generic products will be lost from the market. Products are also less likely to be introduced as regulatory risks and regulatory costs increases.

We need to be leaders in sustainable health, environmental and animal welfare standards, and not absent from the field because of the overreach of lobby groups. Our support for this bill will be contingent on the government supporting our amendments. This will show whether the government is genuine in wanting to introduce reforms that do improve efficiency and reduce costs to industry or is just trying to spin their way through another promise to the Greens and the green lobby.

I urge the government to support these sensible amendments to show that they understand the industry and to show that the split with the Greens, which most government members seem to be happy with, is real and not just talk. But we know that these alleged jilted lovers will be back together to sacrifice agriculture once again.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill 2013. The electorate of Moreton does not have a lot of agriculture, but I do have the Brisbane markets in my electorate, so a lot of produce, especially from Queensland, comes through my electorate. Having grown up in a rural area and having been a member of the committee you chaired in the 42nd Parliament, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, I have a particular interest in this area. Our approach to chemicals is certainly a topic that people in my electorate have spoken to me about, raising concerns around the possible effects on the health of their children.

The proposed regulations include amendments to refine the scope of agricultural chemical products and veterinary chemical products regulated by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, or the APVMA, and to implement Council of Australian Governments reforms; to amend the manufacturers license conditions to align with conditions that are currently and routinely applied to licenses; and to address other minor issues that have been identified with the regulations, including removing redundant or unnecessary provisions and addressing a few errors. The Gillard Labor government is committed to reform of agriculture and veterinary chemical products so that the efficiency and effectiveness of current measures can be improved and, in turn, better protection can be provided to human health and the environment.

It was the foresight of the Hawke and Keating governments, working in partnership with their state and territory counterparts, that put in place Australia's first national regulator for ag-vet chemicals. It is now almost 20 years since this system began and it has served the Australian community well over this period. But all legislated systems can fall behind best practice. The amendments in the bill enhance the consistency and transparency of assessments of agricultural chemicals and veterinary medicines. Legislative amendments enable the APVMA to align regulatory effort with chemical risk to farmers—very, very important. The reforms implemented by this bill will result in a more straightforward assessment process that is easier to understand and more cost-effective to administer and provide greater certainty to the community that agricultural and veterinary chemicals used in Australia are safe—and, more importantly, that the dangers associated with such chemicals are understood.

Unfortunately, those on the opposite side of the House—and I note the contribution by the member for Calare, the opposition spokesperson in this area—are making false claims about Australian farmers, claiming that they are all against this legislation. This is patently a false claim. Cotton Australia's submission to the committee inquiry into this bill is worth noting. I come from St George and my sister was a cotton farmer. Debbie and Phillip Boland had a cotton farm there for years. My first big job in the school holidays was working on that cotton farm. For years and years, in grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 and beyond, I spent all my summer holidays out on the cotton farm. I do not know how many times I was sprayed in that job or when working with sheep, which was another holiday job I had. But I return to Cotton Australia's submission:

Cotton Australia supports the Bill to amend the current Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals (Administration) Act 1992; the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Code Act 1994; and the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemical Products (Collection of Levy) Act 1994.

I repeat: Cotton Australia supports the bill. The submission continues:

Cotton Australia continues to work with the Department of Forestry and Fisheries and the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to address the challenges associated with implementing the reforms and welcomes further opportunities for ongoing consultation and involvement.

The Gillard Labor government is determined to ensure that effective chemicals which are safe for health and the environment are available for Australian farmers while minimising the cost of regulation. The safety of these pesticides is a significant factor when negotiating the terms of the bill. Parkinson's Australia released information about the concern over the relationship between the occupation of farming and the risk of Parkinson's disease due to exposure to pesticides. Repeated low-level chemical exposure over a long period of time in susceptible people is difficult to argue on as Parkinson's is hard to measure in people. Animal models give a clearer picture of the relationship between paraquat and specific neurological damage as occurs in Parkinson's disease. Recent papers have shown that dosages similar to the current no-adverse-effect level are actually resulting in specific damage. At four days after the administration, the concentration of radioactivity was still high in pigmented nerve cells.

This is scary information. How can the member for Calare and his colleagues on the opposite side oppose a bill that aims to resolve the damaging effects of pesticides? It is sad when the National Party is forgetting about the farmers. Chemicals are a necessary requirement for modern intensive farming. We accept that and we know that Australia will play an important role in providing food for the rest of Asia, but there is enough evidence in the literature to implicate specific chemicals in the development of Parkinson's disease and probably many other conditions. More research is needed.

My home state of Queensland has the largest area of agricultural land of any Australian state and the highest proportion of land area of the Australian states dedicated to agriculture. About 30,500 businesses carry out agricultural activity in Queensland. Agricultural industries are important. They contribute more than $10 billion to the state's economy each year and, as I said in my introductory comments, much of their produce goes through the Brisbane markets in Moreton. The practices and regulation affecting these 30,500 businesses are important to me. I am sick and tired of seeing the state Liberal Premier, Campbell Newman, make cuts to the services that are actually helping these Queensland farmers.

To mention just a few cuts he has made: he cancelled the plan to build a biosecurity facility worth $17 million in Townsville and instead moved it to that heart of agriculture, Brisbane. So there will be no access for North Queenslanders to a local biosecurity facility, despite all the risks associated with sugarcane smut and some of the banana diseases and the like. They have cut funding to the fire-ant task force, a Brisbane enterprise, and the crazy-ant task force from Cairns. Premier Newman has cancelled funding for the farm financial counsellors, the very counsellors who assist farmers with business and help them on the road back to profitability after disasters such as floods and cyclones, which we have more than enough of in Queensland.

Overall, the bill before the chamber will increase community confidence in the regulation of chemicals used in Australian agricultural practices, while reducing the unnecessary impost on business, and it will boost confidence at the checkout.

I was playing a bit of word bingo with the member for Calare's presentation, waiting for him to talk about green tape, and it did not take very long. Whilst he recognised that the current arrangements are not efficient, he then went on to talk about green tape. In Queensland we are very familiar with green tape. The day after the state election last year, the Deputy Premier stood up and said that there was too much green tape and that effectively we should make the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park smaller. That was the first announcement from the new Deputy Premier. Obviously we are yet to see the rollout of the agenda in terms of shooting in national parks—as can occur in New South Wales—and other dangerous activities associated with national parks. The Liberal and National parties have demonstrated a completely lackadaisical approach to national parks.

This legislation before the chamber is sensible reform. It will improve the health and safety of farm workers and farmers, people who already have particular dangers associated with their livelihood. The reforms to the chemicals legislation in this bill will ensure that agricultural productivity can continue to improve and keep Australia at the forefront of innovative food and fibre production. I commend the bill to the House.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill 2012. As my colleague the shadow minister for agriculture and food security has indicated, the coalition will move amendments to this bill: firstly, to remove the re-registration processes to ensure there is a net gain in efficiency; and, secondly, to delay commencement for 12 months to allow proper consultation processes and to minimise the disruption and cost to industry. A key point is that the coalition will engage and consult with industry to better understand the needs of industry, as opposed to those who sit behind a desk and just deliver ultimatums to the government. I remind this government that consultation means working with the industry, not against the industry.

One of the reasons we will be moving our amendments is that this is absolutely in line with the coalition's commitment to cut unnecessary red tape, something this Labor government promised to do prior to the election; instead, it has thrived on delivering more regulation rather than cutting regulation. Businesses are drowning in it.

The bill before the House today was supposed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the current regulatory arrangements and provide for greater certainty for the wider community that chemicals approved for use in Australia are safe. But from the outset let me say it has failed in most of its measures. This bill was designed to enhance the consistency, efficiency and transparency of agvet chemical approvals, registrations and reconsiderations through development, publication and implementation of a risk framework the APVMA must have regard to, and to introduce legislative amendments to align regulatory effort with chemical risk. It was designed to ensure the ongoing safety of agvet chemicals and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of current agvet chemical reconsideration arrangements by implementing a mandatory re-approval and re-registration regime designed to identify any potentially problematic chemicals while minimising negative impacts on affected businesses. It was supposed to have been designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the assessment process for agvet chemical applications for approval, registration and variation and improve the timeliness of agvet chemical approvals, registration and reconsiderations. It was supposed to be designed to improve the ability of APVMA to enforce compliance with its regulatory decisions by providing the APVMA with a graduated range of compliance enforcement powers and introducing a power to apply statutory conditions to registrations and approval. This bill was supposed to be designed to improve consistency in data protection provisions and remove disincentives for industry to provide data in support of ongoing registrations of agricultural and veterinary chemicals. It was supposed to have addressed perceptions of a conflict of interest by providing for an agency other than APVMA to collect the chemical products levy should it be cost effective to do so. The bill also includes other amendments to remove redundant provisions and amend out-of-date provisions.

It is clear to me, clear to the coalition and clear to the industry that this bill in its current form will not deliver the efficiencies that are needed for industry. I have real dialogue with the industry—as well as representing an agricultural base I have people who are in the business of producing veterinary products and chemicals. In making a contribution to this debate, I reflect on the experiences of my constituents John and Gwen O'Brien, whose business premises are currently in the electorate of the member for Hunter at Rutherford but when the business was first established it was in the electorate of Paterson.

I want to reflect on the risks taken and the investment made by people like John and Gwen O'Brien. They purchased the little business Jurox, which was a small business at Riverstone employing two people with an annualised turnover of around half a million dollars. That was back in 1992. This family-owned business has developed great product, spent money on research and development—it has made the investment—and, today, it is a company that has sales of $36 million per annum and employs 120 people in Australia. John and Gwen are what you call people with skin in the game. They have to live by the regulations and the anticompetitive nature of those regulations in an international market.

I said that this company has grown from two to 120 employees. Originally when they came to the seat of Paterson, when Rutherford was in Paterson, they invested $3 million in a new complex. Currently they are spending another $12 million to grow the business even further. This is a state-of-the-art, world-class facility that focuses on research and development as much as it does on marketing. These are people who understand that they need to spend about 13 per cent of their sales on research to make sure their products are first and foremost in the market.

Three-quarters of their product range of over 70 products are sold to the veterinary profession. Their No. 1 product, Alfaxan, is a cat and dog anaesthetic. Their No. 2 product is Q-drench, a worming product for sheep. These are leading products in the industry—products which they are working to get approval for overseas so they can move into US markets, for example, dealing with all the regulations required. These are people who understand how red tape reduces business efficiency and the competitive nature of businesses. In the bill being proposed by the government we see an increase in red tape and bureaucratic burden.

If the government gets the regulation of this industry wrong, all businesses will be directly impacted. I want to see businesses—particularly small, home-grown businesses like Jurox—grow and succeed, not just in the Australian market but on an international basis. This is a family business that could easily have sold out to a multinational but has made the decision to keep things in-house, in-family, and invest their own money and grow the business not only for their benefit but for the benefit of all Australians.

Local enterprises do not have the massive internal departments that multinationals do—they cannot afford the burden of Labor's red tape and massive bureaucracies. Nor should they have to. If it comes to me as a member of this House to stand up and fight against bad regulation to ensure the jobs at thriving enterprises such as Jurox are protected, I am prepared to do so. The government should be focused on supporting and driving industry forward—not drowning them in red tape.

I have been advised that throughout the industry there is a view that the APVMA should be split: animal health should be separate from pesticides and herbicides, as the Veterinary Medicines Directorate or VMD does in the UK, or as it is done in the US and Canada, where animal health products are monitored by the human health regulator. This is seen in the cooperative relationship between the Food and Drug Administration and the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Veterinary products have more in common with human medical products than they do with pesticides. It is my understanding that no other major regulator, except New Zealand, tries to manage pesticides and veterinary products under the same model.

Australian-owned companies like Jurox, who are looking to export to markets in North America and Europe, face regulatory disjoins between those countries' regulators and the APVMA, which creates inefficiencies, delays and multiple assessment and accreditation. Even though compliance is granted in Australia by the APVMA, Europe and Canada do not accept inspections by non-government inspectors such as the APVMA, so products have to be tested yet again by the TGA and by the FDA in the United States.

Similar legislation was enacted in Europe in the 1990s requiring re-registration. Many agricultural chemicals were never re-registered because their market share was too small and the cost burden too high. As a result, those markets lost the efficiencies and effectiveness of certain chemicals for their agricultural pursuits. The effect on agricultural production was enormous, with fewer options available to growers, which led to resistance issues with pests and products not reaching market.

Australia's agricultural sectors are largely concerned about the re-registration and re-approval process surrounding different treatments. If treatments are not registered, farmers cannot use them. The legislation will create higher levels of uncertainty in a sector that has already suffered at the hands of this government, with unwarranted over-regulation and short-sighted reactionary policy. At every corner this government demonstrates its ineptitude and lack of understanding of what the agricultural industries need. There is a distinct difference in dealing with those who have skin in the game and those who simply sit behind a desk and drive bureaucracy.

The agricultural industry has suffered enough from this government, including, most spectacularly—and I remind the House—from Labor's handling of the live cattle trade debacle. Safe and effective chemicals, which are not widely used in industry, are under threat of being withdrawn from the market due to the net loss they will face directly under this bill because of the volumes. In fact, the Deloitte Access Economics report commissioned by CropLife stated that there would be an increase of some $8 million per year to product registrants that will be passed on to users. According to industry peak bodies like Ausveg, a similar expectation is expected here in Australia, particularly to the horticultural industry. Under the new legislation, agricultural chemicals will be required to be re-registered every seven to 15 years. The mandatory registration of 1,900 active constituents from the 9,900 currently registered agvet chemicals is simply unrealistic. The financial and resource impost for both regulatory bodies, manufacturers and end-users will be damaging.

The increases in administrative workload on APVMA staff will reduce their ability to deal with priority registrations and permits. This bill will simply lead to a net loss in the efficiency of the regulator and, contrary to the stated aims, it will reduce its ability to identify and review suspect chemistries. This is despite Finance and Deregulation Minister Penny Wong listing agvet chemical reform as the second key example of where the government would reduce regulatory compliance costs for businesses and improve competitiveness.

In evidence to the parliamentary inquiry, Mathew Cossey, the CEO of CropLife Australia, said:

In its current form, this bill will only serve to hinder agricultural productivity.

According to the coalition senators' dissenting report there has not been adequate cost-benefit analysis of mandatory re-registration processes and there are big jumps in the expected cost of the re-registration process from between $2 million and $8 million that could turn into $20 million. Those costs will, of course, come back to the farming and agribusiness community and ultimately to the consumer.

What this government does not understand is that a lot of people in the agriculture business are not price setters; they are price takers. That cost will end up being absorbed by those businesses because of international competition coming into this marketplace. Understand that some people are not price setters; they are price takers.

Low-risk agvet chemicals with multiple uses have had no consideration under this bill. I say to the government: go back, rethink and re-engage with the industry. You need to deliver an outcome that is for the benefit of the industry and the community alike. Clearly, you have failed in that. Your government is addicted to over-regulation, and that over-regulation will be to the detriment of our agricultural community, not just to the individual businesses like Jurox but all the way through, as the processes continue.

How can the industry cope? One stakeholder told me there are only 17 evaluators and some 9,000 products that will need to be re-registered, if this bill is passed, by 1 July 2013. That sort of workload is simply unrealistic. Not enough thought has been given to the process, so it will deliver negative outcomes for all of Australia.

I cannot support the bill in its current form. I look forward to the amendments that will be moved by my colleague John Cobb. We need to make sure that we put industry, outcomes and people before the bureaucratic madness of this government.

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

One of the problems that rural Australia have is that when somebody says that there has to be some reform which might cost farmers something, ag corporations wind up someone on the other side and all of a sudden you have a great body of argument that says: 'Don't make any change. Keep putting things at risk. Don't modernise. Keep falling behind.' The main thrust of the previous speaker was, basically: don't do anything that would cost anybody anything; don't modernise; don't bring things into today's world.

As I noted in my tabling speech for the report of the inquiry into this bill, the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill 2012 was referred to the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Resources, Fisheries and Forestry by the Selection Committee of the House of Representatives because it was thought that stakeholder concerns had been ignored in the formulation of the amendments, as it was believed that it added costs and another layer of red tape. This was despite the listing of chemical reform by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation in the 2012 update on the Australian government deregulation agenda as a way of reducing compliance costs and improving competitiveness for businesses as well as providing industry with timely access to the best and safest crop and animal protectants and speeding up the review of chemicals identified as having potential environmental and safety hazards. I thought these were pretty good aims and were what we should be doing. They are what the bill does. I would not think there was anything wrong with going down that track.

The bill seeks to make reforms to the approval, registration and reconsideration of agricultural and veterinary chemicals, while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the national registration scheme for agvet chemicals and products overseen by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. From the inquiry, I believe that most stakeholders support the need to modernise the regulation of the sector and provide regulatory efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed preliminary assessment process has been designed to increase the quality of applications provided to the APVMA. There will probably be a cost to companies that have to do that, because the old system is well out of date.

Australia must maintain an internationally competitive agricultural export sector, and this must be balanced against Australia's obligations to its international trading partners and their respective regulatory systems as well as ensuring our agribusinesses and communities are safeguarded. For example, a country receiving a shipment of Australian agricultural products may reject it on the basis that a chemical banned by regulators in that country has been used during production.

During the inquiry, it was found that some agvet chemicals and products had been in use in the Australia for well over 40 years; many of these chemicals and products had not been tested against contemporary standards for human, animal and plant health and safety. By the same token, within these known chemicals there would be some that are banned in Australia but used overseas because they have now been found to be benign and may well be useful for a different purpose than was originally designed. Australia needs to have a robust, systematic and effective system, but it also needs to be affordable and able to get the new scientific findings into the marketplace as soon as practicable. I believe this bill seeks to do this.

Some of my colleagues have raised some concerns during the inquiry into this bill that it will add expense and time to the re-registration of some chemicals. But making the regulation clearer and simpler, and ensuring all the information about a product is carefully described, should eliminate the time factor. While it might at times prove to add some costs, surely this would be worth it if we were to remain competitive in a world market sense? Overall the process would allow the APVMA to concentrate its resources on providing more timely assessment of applications and reducing delays in evaluating deficient applications.

There can be several thousand applications being processed at any one time and there is a register of nearly 10,000 chemical products, so it is important that there are transitional measures to allow processing to continue for those in the system. However, by streamlining this system and making it more transparent, the speed at which these products can become available to farmers should improve considerably.

Obviously the APVMA must have a transition time to undertake the changes required to assess the backlog under the previous arrangements, but I hope it will be no more than 12 months. Australian agriculture needs to tackle the harder issues and not buckle to agribusiness because it might increase costs slightly to farmers. Not acting could have a major impact on Australian trade if we do not have world's best practice in place.

It is important to find a balance, and the process of reform is one of continuous improvement. Science is continually updating its knowledge and processes and we should be aware of the changes. The community expects rigorous assessment, but it also expects that these assessments will be reviewed on a regular basis so that they can be updated. The bill includes a requirement for a review to be conducted of its measures in five years and for all Commonwealth legislation for agricultural chemicals and veterinary medicines every 10 years. I believe that these amendments will improve efficiency and modernise the processes.

When this package of bills was developed in the early nineties—so it has been around a while and people have failed to take it up and get on with it—it was for the whole of the nation to be covered by a single code and a single standard for agricultural and veterinary chemicals. It showed a deep understanding of the need of the Commonwealth government to legislate in this way. This is legislation of integrity which has enormous potential for the future. It brought together piecemeal sets of legislation across the states and united them under one regulatory body so all chemical use could be monitored.

The world sees Australia as a provider of agricultural products that are different from those of the rest of the world because of their clean nature. The preservation and enhancement of that observation by other countries is extremely important. If we can produce agricultural products that are known throughout Asia and the rest of the world as cleaner and better, and if we can show them to be that way through testing procedures, national agreements and national standards such as these, other countries will not only demand our products but also pay a premium for them.

But, like all legislation, it needs to be reviewed and refined. This legislation was originally proposed to speed up the release of products which would have benefited many of our important primary industries. But over time there have been some shortfalls and pressures not foreseen by our predecessors. Thus this bill will increase the community's confidence while reducing the imposts on the chemical users and will ensure that agricultural productivity will improve at a time when Australia is at the forefront of innovative food and fibre production.

Tasmania, including my own electorate of Lyons, is working on becoming a new food bowl of Australia, and by harnessing our natural asset of water—Tasmania has 10 per cent of the water that falls on Australia but only 1.5 per cent of the land mass—with a renewed regime of registering chemicals I believe there will be huge advantages for our farmers. I commend this bill and the findings of the majority report to the House.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment Bill 2012 is of critical importance if we are to remain at least somewhat competitive in this era, when the value of the dollar makes it so difficult to export and when we have, as an impost on our agricultural industry, the carbon tax, inflexible labour relations and a whole raft of other government-imposed policy failures.

The amendments in this bill claim to enhance the consistency, efficiency and transparency of agriculture and veterinary chemical approvals, registrations and reconsiderations. They aim to do this through the development of a risk framework which the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority must have regard to. These amendments are supposed to ensure the ongoing safety of agvet chemicals and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of current agvet chemical considerations by implementing a mandatory re-approval and re-registration regime. This is designed to identify any potentially problematic chemicals while minimising any negative impacts on affected businesses.

This all sounds wonderful. We all need to be quite sure that the chemicals we use in agribusiness, especially in food production in Australia, whether for domestic or export consumption, are used consistent with world's best practice. The problem with this legislation, as in so many other cases of legislation brought forward by the Gillard government and, before that, the Rudd government, is that it has been poorly consulted on. It in fact adds to the compliance burden of the sector without any benefits being identifiable in the short term, or even in the longer term. There is a serious problem with costs to the industry. Of course, as we all know when you are talking about agribusiness, these costs are passed on ultimately to the farm producer. Those costs cannot be passed along the chain to the retail sector or to those who buy our exported product.

So we have a serious problem with this bill. The coalition is aiming to amend it to bring about a better agvet chemicals regime, one which actually supports the industry, helps it grow and, indeed, keeps us at the forefront in international reputation. This bill would do quite the opposite. There was in fact an Australian National Audit Office inquiry into the APVMA recently and it confirmed that there is already a reliable technical and scientific regulatory system for effective management of risk. You would think the ANAO's inquiry would have been taken into consideration. But, no, we have this bill, which we can only suspect has been generated by the once happy marriage between the Greens and the Labor government. The Greens perhaps said, 'Let's get nasty about farm chemicals. They do not sound good in the consumer's mind. Let's try to make it harder for chemicals to be accessed and used in Australia.' The problem is that farm and agricultural chemicals are used in Australia in one of the internationally regarded tightest regimes. We can argue that our compliance with—(Time expired)

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

Order. The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour. The member for Murray will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.

Debate interrupted.