Jeannie Ferris (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Heffernan and Senator O’Brien have quite eloquently gone through the detail of the report, and I do not propose to do so again. Suffice it to say that we have many debates in this chamber about terrorism and, to me, the canker outbreak was a form of bioterrorism. The citrus canker disease was deliberately brought into a particular region of Queensland. It had the effect of destroying an industry, hundreds of people’s livelihoods and families. It even took out people’s citrus trees in the backyards of their suburban homes. If this was not bioterrorism by an individual or a group of individuals then I do not know what it was.

I have to say—and I am very sad to say it—that this citrus canker issue was very poorly handled by AQIS. It is inconceivable to me—and it will come as no surprise when I say it in this chamber, because I said it to AQIS on several occasions—that when AQIS got a call from a very courageous person on their hotline it was six weeks before anything was done to investigate it and, curiously, when the investigation did take place, there were people who already knew that it was going to occur. It was a complete failure of process. It was a failure right from the very start. It was a failure when the man rang the hotline. It was taped, but nothing was done to check it out for six weeks.

We have recommended in our report today that it be three days—and three days is the absolute maximum. If we are going to have an incursion into this country, either of a plant or an animal, it should be a matter of hours, not days, after a hotline call comes before action is taken. We have had discussions about this in this place and in our committee before. This is not the first time. Senator Heffernan has outlined the potential difficulty we had with a possible incursion of foot and mouth when we had some beef come in from Brazil. So this is not the first time that AQIS has miserably failed the Australian community on incursions and on a very expensive structure that is in place to make sure that this country stays clean and green.

AQIS failed the people of Emerald, they failed the families and, most of all, they failed the citrus industry. It will be years before this industry recovers, and many of the significant growers in that region of Emerald will never recover. They will never re-enter the industry. It is a great tragedy to me that through AQIS’s laziness and failure to take adequate action, the incursion got away and, unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried, we were not able to bring any person to justice over this. I think that upsets me more than anything else—that, when all was said and done, we had no opportunity to effectively recommend action through the DPP. That was because a number of witnesses, having given evidence, were then, in some curious way, prevailed upon to change their evidence. We had a situation where conflicting evidence was given by crucial witnesses, to an extent that we were not able to make recommendations to the DPP.

However, we have made five recommendations here. They are very significant recommendations which have been covered by both Senator O’Brien and Senator Heffernan. I will not go over them again now, because I know that Senator Milne wants to make a contribution. However, on this issue we want to stop AQIS from having all the power, because they have shown on this particular occasion—and on several other occasions, I am sorry to say—that the power should not rest only with them. Recommendation 4, which suggests ‘that twice a year, the Commonwealth Ombudsman review all investigations carried out by AQIS to assess whether they have been conducted by appropriately trained staff, in a timely manner, in accordance with all the relevant legislation and according to the rules’, has been undertaken. I for one will be pushing very hard to make sure that the minister accepts that recommendation.

We also want to make sure that in the future, when properties are visited with a warrant, the search warrant is properly executed and locked doors do not remain locked with material perhaps behind them. We have suggested that on those particular occasions when we do require a full inspection of a property there should be outsiders from the state where the incursion may have occurred involved in the execution of that warrant. This is a very important issue. This is bioterrorism in its most basic form. It destroyed an industry, it took out millions of dollars worth of product and it destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Queenslanders.