Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (Senator Carr) to questions without notice asked by senators today, relating to quarantine and education.

I will start by talking about the absolutely abysmal performance that Senator Carr gave in response to my question on the now censored submission to the Senate inquiry into AQIS export certification fees. The government’s performance on this matter, I have to say, is symptomatic of their performance on a range of other things. We have seen the debacle of the pink batts scheme. Senator Mason asked questions on Building the Education Revolution. We have also seen issues with respect to Indigenous housing.

This particular issue, the government’s management of the removal of the 40 per cent rebate for AQIS export certification charges, has quite a sorry history. The government commissioned and accepted the recommendations of the Beale report, but they have not resourced it properly. They were prepared just to remove the 40 per cent rebate without any process. They were happy to say, ‘Righto, we’ll rip this $43 million out of industry.’ Once the objections started to be raised, the minister had to take action to put in place a process to try and mitigate the problems. The unfortunate part of it is that he has not actually gone about his job properly. He has not listened to the industry. He has created a number of industry consultative groups that are bound by confidentiality agreements, so they cannot really talk to their industry sectors. Then, when it came to the time for the fees to be exposed, people found out what the impact was going to be.

The government keep trotting out the line that industry supports this. But when you look at the submissions to the inquiry, there are nine that support it—one of those being the government’s own submission. Four of those, including the government’s own submission, express strong support. Five of those nine express qualified support. But there are 19 submissions to the inquiry that oppose it and 12 of them strongly oppose it.