Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently, I alerted the House to the unethical treatment by the Department of Agriculture of Serana (WA) Pty Ltd, a burgeoning biotech company in Western Australia's south-west.In December last year, a posse of eastern-states departmental officers headed to Bunbury, stormed the premises of Serana and froze their business with an unlawful search warrant. Notwithstanding all 64 tests clearing the company, they continued to undermine their business for the next six months.

Last week , I went down to Bunbury to t alk to the employees of Serana, who have now been told the company will close down in West ern Australia and m ove its operations to Germany, as the principals have no confidence that they will receive ethical treatment from the department and because their reputation has now been trashed . These employees were devastated by th e destruction of this company which had provided them with grea t jobs. They were proud of being part of creating a new industry.

Not only will 16 West A ustralians have lost their jobs but the company was three- quarters of the way through an expansion that would have seen another 20 people employed as the company continued to develop innovative new products. The CEO of the Bunbury CCI , Ray Philp , told me that Serana had won numerous industry awards and was precisely the type of business that the south-w est w anted to attract— 21 st-c entury sunrise industries providing skilled jobs. E ven better , Serana leveraged off local agriculture.

Serana has reason to believe that a senior employee of GE Healthcare wa s providing information to the d epartment. Indeed , i n the Federal Court proceedings the judgement assumed that it was a competitor supplying the information. GE Healthcare is a multinational company who bought into the Australian market a few years ago and is in direct competition with Serana. I have a statutory declaratio n from another industry player attesting he had a cold call from Brian Hood , of GE Healthc are , at the height of this investigation, falsely claiming that Serana had lost its export license. But it gets worse . J ust yesterday we learnt that once the investigation had pushed Serana on to the ropes it appears GE systematically went about approaching Serana's serum suppliers , and is now entering contracts to capture all of the supply.

People say to me that they do not believe that this could happen in Australia— that the public sector could be used to improperly advance the interests of a rival —but there is at least prima facie evidence that this may have happened . But even without the improper third- party influence, we need to have a full and independent investigation as to how this ' O peration F ides' witch hunt was allowed to get so out of control, where affidavits were sworn with reckless indifference s to the truth, leading to the unlawful issue of a search warrant; where serum was held under quarantine for more than two months without any testing; where every month saw random acts of harassment , including holding up routine imports of supplies for weeks on end; where employees were subject to harassing home visits; where p rincipa ls of the company were subject to extensive personal searches at airports; and where their clients and business associates were warned off dealing with Serana. And all of this occurred when every test of their serum product showed that it originated in Australia and New Zealand.

This company has been audited by W estern A ustralian AQIS officers for the past five years . N o issue has ever emerged. If there were concerns, why was n't another audit simply commissioned? Bios ecurity is incredibly important; so is probity of our g overnment agencies . We need an independent investigation here to restore our faith in them.