Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

We hear from the minister in the chamber that it is a disgraceful campaign. The Treasurer himself strongly criticised one of the organisations PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling their campaign ‘ignorant’ and saying that farmers should have the right to pursue compensation for any losses. Australian Wool Innovation, AWI, has not only been pursuing PETA, which is the organisation that everybody focuses on because it is easy to attack them—it is an American organisation, and in this case the government and industry are happy to attack American organisations—but attacking Australians as well. It is dragging ordinary Australian activists through the courts, using the legal process to try to intimidate and silence them from expressing their view.

It is concerning enough that an industry body should seek to attack and silence Australians who simply seek to express their own personal view about opposition to a particular practice. Some people may want to keep pursuing and promoting that practice; other people believe it is unnecessary and it is cruel. I think they are entitled to express their opinion. But apparently not in Mr Costello’s brave new world. Not only is it okay for the industry to use its taxpayer supplied so-called research funds to try to silence people but also the Treasurer now wants to use—or misuse, I would say—the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to have fully taxpayer funded legal action to try to silence anybody that seeks that put forward their view about a practice that they believe is unnecessarily cruel.

Mr Costello, in what is becoming a fairly common practice for this government, engages in the completely misleading sophistry of saying, ‘This is not an attack on freedom of speech. People can still say what they like.’ They can be as so-called ignorant as they like. But, of course, after having said what they like, they run the risk of the taxpayer funded Australian Competition and Consumer Commission being sooled on to them to try to silence them and to try to have the industry hitting them up for economic damages. This might be understandable if people were going in and stealing product, breaking machinery or anything like that—there may then be grounds for court action—but when consumers simply say, ‘I don’t support this particular practice; I think it is unethical and, if you agree with me, don’t buy the product of that practice,’ they run the risk of having a body that is supposedly set up to protect consumers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, attempt to silence them. The Treasurer wants to use that body that is meant to protect consumers against unethical conduct by businesses to silence those people. That is what the Treasurer wants to do.

The simple fact is that mulesing is cruel and there is any amount of evidence that demonstrates that. I know some argue that it is necessary, but it is clearly cruel. There are alternatives to mulesing that exist already, but they are more expensive. So, understandably, from purely an economic point of view, some in the industry do not wish to use them. The irony is that the industry is still committed to phasing out mulesing by 2010—a clear indication that they acknowledge that it is a practice we would be better off without. The only reason that they adopted that commitment to phase out mulesing by 2010 is the very campaign that people like Senator Abetz want to say is disgraceful. If these people had not spoken out and said, ‘We think this is unacceptable,’ the industry would not have acted at all. Yet somehow or other, because they have done so, Australians are being dragged through the courts and now the Treasurer wants to come in and display this grotesque abuse of power by trying to use a consumer protection organisation that is taxpayer funded to drag them through the courts. There is no difference between this campaign and campaigns from the past.