Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the remarks made by my colleagues from the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee. I concur that it is a good report and that this committee worked extremely hard to try to get to the bottom of what occurred leading up to the citrus canker outbreak in Queensland and also what occurred subsequent to that. I feel, as my colleagues on the committee feel, that it is extremely disappointing that we were not able to bring recommendations to the DPP that action be taken because, as Senator Ferris and others have said, it is quite clear that there was a calculated breach of quarantine. But saying it and proving it are two different things, and this committee was unable to prove it. As Senator O’Brien, and no doubt Senator Heffernan before him, indicated, the problems go back to 2001, and by the time the committee got to investigating this it was too late. People had forgotten details and, in some cases, were not absolutely sure about what had happened.

Given the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry say that even the most stringent quarantine and biosecurity measures will not prevent calculated, deliberate smugglers from breaching quarantine—and that might be the case—I think AQIS needs to double its efforts and get a lot stronger in recognising that there are unscrupulous people who will try this on and will try it on in a calculated manner, because the penalty for doing so is merely a fine, and the advantages of doing so, in terms of avoiding all of the procedures to get plant stock, animals et cetera approved, are such that they are prepared to run the risk. I do not think it is good enough, so I thoroughly endorse the recommendations of this report.

Going to specific details, one of the things I was concerned about throughout this committee inquiry, and I remain concerned about, is the ability or willingness of AQIS to quarantine a property. One of the issues was whether the disease they think is there is on one of the schedules to the act. So I would have liked to have seen in this report a recommendation that AQIS can quarantine a property if they have reasonable doubt about whether whatever disease they see there is present or has been previously present in Australia.

AQIS are saying that they have adequate powers to do that. I hope that is the case. I will expect in future that, if that is the case, they will act on those powers. The reason I say that is that, with climate change, we are finding that habitat ranges for disease are significantly changing. Whereas before you might not expect to find a particular overseas disease in certain parts of Australia, you will now find it because of a significant shift in habitat. If we do not have it on the schedule of prohibited diseases, I want to make sure that AQIS can still quarantine the property. That is a really important issue to me. I think climate change is going to significantly shift the ground and make a whole lot of things a threat to Australia that previously we may not have recognised as such.

The other thing is the changes in and the mobility of populations. One of the allegations that came up in this report was that the owner of a property had brought in workers from another property that he owned in the Philippines. The workers came into Australia on a tourist visa. So they came straight off a farm in the Philippines, landed in Australia and went straight onto a farm in Queensland. That poses huge quarantine threats, unless people admit on the customs form that they have been on a farm in the previous few days and that their shoes et cetera are looked at for soil and all of the associated identification that AQIS would take if they knew that.

That is why this report says clearly that there should be a closer relationship between AQIS and the Customs Service. I think we should have on the customs form not only ‘Have you been on a farm in the last month or six weeks or whatever?’ but also ‘Do you intend to work in the rural community or on a farm in Australia within a month of your arrival?’ That way, you could have a cross-check between AQIS and the Customs Service in relation to these itinerant workers. I do think that is going to be an increasing problem in Australia with regard to this particular matter.

One of the issues that concerns me around this whole investigation was the failure to have proper police procedures in place. I could not believe the fact that when the whistleblower’s house was broken into the police were not called. Even though the whistleblower rang AQIS and said, ‘The house has been broken into and taken from my computer was material that pertains to where we believe this illegal stock is,’ the police were not called to investigate and there was no fingerprinting done. It beggars belief that that did not occur. Also, when one of the critical witnesses—again the whistleblower—was interviewed again by the AQIS investigator, the whole issue of proof of evidence was not done properly. I cannot believe that. That is why I am strongly supporting the view that officers of the Australian Federal Police be involved in training a special compliance and investigations unit of AQIS so that AQIS do have proper investigative powers and so they know how to conduct these investigations in a way that will stand up in court. It is essential that that occurs.

I think we are being naive as a nation if we do not realise that there are going to be unscrupulous people coming into Australia who either own or work on properties, who want to circumvent increasingly stringent quarantine laws. If they do that, there needs to be an adequate punishment regime, an adequate investigation capacity and a legal framework that gives AQIS the powers they need to deal with these circumstances.

I regret, for the sake of the people in Emerald, that this committee was not able to get to the bottom of this whole issue about not only the citrus canker but also the citrus tristeza virus. Had AQIS quarantined the property because of suspected citrus tristeza virus, we might have found out then the provenance of that virus and whether indeed it came from China. If we had been able to establish that, we would have been a lot further down the track in 2001. I do regret our inability to bring anybody to justice as a result of a recommendation to the DPP, and I want to reassure all of the people in Emerald affected by this that this committee tried as hard as it could to get to the bottom of it and we had as many hearings as were necessary. I am pleased with the report and I hope that the government will implement the findings of this inquiry. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.