Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Could I begin by thanking the people who have found the time for me to speak today on the Quarantine Amendment (Disallowing Permits) Bill 2011. It is said this place is about politics, but I would like to have a little go without too much politics. In an era of modern communication and transport, quarantine becomes seriously complex because of the dangers of the movement of passengers and freight. As Senator Milne pointed out, diseases can come in, such as the virus that is now threatening fertility in cattle in the Riverina, just by simple oversight. All science has vagaries, all human endeavour has some failure, and we must never lose sight of that, but for many years I have been on a committee that have worried about biosecurity and keeping Australia's trade advantage against its freight disadvantage and currency disadvantage. Australia's great advantage is its clean, green and free status and, with that in the back of our minds, for many years we have endeavoured to use science to keep us in that space—clean, green and free.

This bill presents the chamber and the parliament with a dilemma, because there are instances in trade where politics has got in the road of good judgment and maybe we need to think about a last-resort tool to prevent something stupid happening because of political intervention. The danger with this bill is that if we present ourselves to the rest of the world as being prepared to use politics instead of science then we open up the era of game playing—and I think we would easily lose that game. The future looks pretty grim for many democracies now—the United States is technically insolvent, southern Europe is technically insolvent, Japan is insolvent—and China has a non-market currency. This says to me that in Australia we are going to have a currency disadvantage. Even though we have got free trade agreements all round the place and more to come, in those free-trade agreements we got rid of tariffs but we have now imposed upon ourselves currency tariffs.

I do not think anyone knows what to think about this bill other than that it does have dangers, if we endorse it, for our scientific future. It is a fact that for many years—and I have chaired the committee for many years—we kept out New Zealand apples with science. We were always determined to find a way to do that because it is a fact that New Zealand do not have a substantial pear industry because they have fire blight. We have a huge pear industry, and that is the reason they do not have one. You cannot buy a New Zealand pear, because fire blight is now endemic.

There is no protection scheme in Australia. When we started off with the science on this we had a final import risk analysis of the importation of New Zealand apples which said: 'We accept that under this import risk analysis fire blight will enter Australia if we let the apples in.' That is what the analysis said, using the best of science. It went on to say, 'But we don't think it will get out into the orchards.' There was a precautionary principle behind that—and there is no politics in this; it has been difficult for everyone, and I gave my own mob when we were in government as hard a time as anyone—but now we have switched to risk management. With New Zealand apples we have done away with the biosecurity provisions in our trade arrangements and moved to farm management practices.

When the committee that I chair were going to New Zealand—and when I eventually told them what to do—they were told we could not go and have a look at New Zealand farm management practices because there is too much human failure in farm management practices. Every farm has a different practice and there are rorts built into the system now. I am pleased to see that we have knocked off a good few of the apples coming in now under the inspection regime we have implemented—which they are complaining about—but can you imagine the pressure the people who are doing the examining in New Zealand will come under over time if they find one leaf or half a leaf, as they have found, with midge on it or potential contamination in the containers? It will be: 'Mate, that's only half a leaf; let that go through.' That will be the pressure they will come under over time.

We have heard all the talk about the political intervention in New Zealand's parliament and here, which is the political intervention we resisted in our time—and very robustly, behind private doors, I have to say. We then come to needing a trigger to stop something stupid happening in quarantine and to maintain our clean, green and free status. I give the instance in recent times of the political intervention of the United States and Canada in pressuring the present government and Simon Crean to bring in beef from herds that have BSE. We resisted it. I had been to the Canadian parliament and told them that when they were prepared to do an NLIS and a whole range of other things we would think about it. But because of pressures—and I do not think Simon Crean understood this—he was agreeing to it. And the dopey Cattle Council signed up to it, as well as some unmentionable colleagues in this parliament who thought it was a good idea because the Cattle Council thought it was a good idea. Well, it was not a good idea. It was political intervention in a science base, and the danger of this bill is to set that precedent. We resisted that eventually. To Tony Burke's credit, the light went on and he was able to convince the government that we should not do this. I remind the parliament and people listening to this that you cannot sterilise against the prion for the human variant of CJD. If you go to the dentist and you are a risk of CJD because of blood, the dentist has to destroy the instruments; they cannot sterilise them. That is how serious it was.

But what it was really all about—and I had a very frank, short-syllable discussion in the Canadian parliament about this—was that we get the advantage because we are clean, green and free of these diseases, thankfully, so far, against the risk of modern communications, transport and freight movements. So far we are clean, green and free. Every time they got a reactor in the United States and Canada, we got their market share in Korea and Japan. That was an advantage that was more valuable to us than the disadvantage we have in currency. These are the things that we have to consider in this parliament for the future.

Going back to a little bit before that, you cannot take it for granted that an organisation such as the OIE has any credibility on a lot of this stuff. I remind people today that we were nearly ambushed by beef from Brazil because Brazil was scheduled by the OIE to have foot-and-mouth-disease-free zones. If SBS ever did Australia a favour, it was when we talked them into taking a camera over there to show the absurdity of the desktop study done by the OIE under trade pressures and a glass of wine or two in Europe somewhere to allow them to bring beef into Australia—which actually happened. It came into Wagga. It ended up on the Wagga tip. We were able to demonstrate that in Brazil there is no such thing as a foot-and-mouth-disease-free zone because of what the cameras caught on the border, which was a road. You have to have a border on a foot-and-mouth-disease-free zone. There was the road. On one side of the road, on the right, it was foot-and-mouth disease free, and it was foot-and-mouth disease positive on the other side—and there was a mob of cattle walking up the road on both sides of the road. That was the end of it. I am pleased to say that someone in the decision-making processes of that got the bullet—not physically but figuratively. It was a dreadful thing.

With the cattle and the BSE episode, which is pretty recent, our guys—and I will not name them to embarrass them, but it falls onto both sides of politics—did not realise that, over there, the US Cattlemen's Association did not want to have traceability because they wanted to be able to do all the things that likeable rogues do with cattle herds. It was the same as we have had now: it took a serious crisis in Australia to convince the Northern Territory cattlemen that they ought to participate in the NLI System in Australia, which will probably cut down on some of the poddy dodging up there. What our guys did not know and certainly Simon Crean did not know—and you cannot expect people to know everything—is that there is an open border between Canada and America and an open border between the United States and Mexico. Eventually, sense won the argument, and we said as a government, 'Well, we'll do an import risk analysis with Canada and the United States,' and Japan was the other appellant. Canada wrote back and said, 'We don't have the resources'—which is absurd—'to carry out this import risk analysis; therefore we'll withdraw.' The United States said, 'We're not interested.' And that was due to political pressure from the US Cattlemen's Association.

We really do have to make sure that we have good science and that we are well equipped and financed to carry out that science. I remind you of the citrus canker outbreak in Emerald. That was a failure of border protection. Several other things have been nominated here this morning, such as myrtle rust and Asian honey bees. These are all things that we endeavour to keep out, but there is human failure.

On the Quarantine Amendment (Disallowing Permits) Bill 2011, while everyone is saying, 'We understand what's behind it,' the risk is triggering an event which will set a global precedent for political intervention in these processes. I have heard a lot of discussion that seemed to be well off the quarantine bill this morning. The real referee of what is happening to the globe is not a parliament anywhere; it is Mother Earth. She is the referee, so politicians can play around as much as they like.

I am disappointed that we have ignored the import risk analysis advice on apples and gone to farm management practices so that we can avoid, politically, the import risk analysis advice. The advice was that, if we bring in New Zealand apples, because of the calyx of the apple we will actually import fire blight, but allegedly it will not get out into the orchards. But—and there was no explanation of what that botanic gardens episode was in Melbourne—if that does happen, you can bet that no-one in the decision-making line in the bureaucracy or in the government will get the sack, but the apple and pear growers will wear the consequences. So this is serious stuff, and we should not be playing politics with it.

In an era of modern transport and communication, we do have some advantages. The best advantage Australia has is that, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population is going to live in Asia, our nearest neighbours. It is estimated by the science that they are going to lose 30 per cent of their productive land in that time and the food task is going to double. Sadly, according to the science, unless there is some sort of human catastrophe, there will be nine billion people on the planet and 1.6 billion of those people could be displaced, looking for somewhere else to live. But this is the scary part. This is why we have to use science and—just getting off the page a fraction—protect our means of production and sell our surplus production rather than our means of production, especially to other sovereign entities. By 2070 China is going to have 1.8 billion people and the planet, barring a catastrophe, is going to have 12 billion people. Just to take China as an example, it is going to have to feed 900 million of those people from someone else's agricultural resource. What we really need to do in Australia is focus on the task ahead: the global food task. Part of us getting an advantage because of our fortunate geography—we are an island continent—is to protect our borders. Obviously quarantine provisions have a big part to play in that. I can remember some years ago when we allowed in Romney sheep from New Zealand. They went to Bathurst. The department of agriculture blokes who let those sheep in knew that Johne's disease was endemic in New Zealand. For whatever reason, those sheep were let in. Guess what? We now have endemic Johne's disease. I declare an interest here: we inoculate our sheep for Johne's disease. Senator Milne referred to the fertility issue with beef which is the result of semen straws that were brought into Australia. These are serious situations. Most people do not even think about them. We have heard all this political garbage, but most people take their food for granted. More people live in the western suburbs of Sydney than all of rural Australia. They just down to Coles or Woolies to get their tucker. It is not as simple as that.

We really need to carefully consider, without staking out a political position to advantage one side against the other, what we do to protect our greatest feature in global trading in food which is: 'You can eat our tucker knowing it is safe.' It is clean and green. In maintaining our trade advantage, we have to put up with the likes of the US who provide a $200 per head subsidy on cattle going through their feedlot system. We have to put up with Europe giving huge subsidies to their farmers.

The greatest risk to Australian farmers at the moment, as long as we can maintain our biosecurity status, is the distortion in the land market by foreign entities, especially sovereign entities. I can give you the names of people, but I will not—and some are in Western Australia, Senator Adams—who have sold their properties at a huge price and agreed to lease them back from the super fund et cetera who bought them. But they cannot pay the rent because the capital appreciation to get a return on the money for the super fund investor has set the rent too high against the risks from the vagaries of weather and from one or two crop failures et cetera.

We really need to take the political gusto out of this debate and give serious consideration to where Australia is going to be in 50 years time against the complications of modern transport and communications. Why? This one is unbelievable: how could Australia's quarantine and biosecurity people allow 34 containers through Botany wharf, allegedly holding fertiliser from China, that turned out to contain dirt? It turned out to be Chinese dirt not Chinese fertiliser. How could we have allowed that to happen? Those are the sort of risks we have. This poor guy in Condobolin thought he had saved $150 a tonne on his MOP fertiliser, but when it got there and he opened the container and one of the bags, he said, 'Gee that doesn't look like fertiliser.' It certainly did not. It was dirt, full of seeds and all sorts of quarantine risk materials, which is still in storage in Botany. I thank AQIS for the way they have gone about negotiating with the Chinese government—because it was bought through an accredited Chinese website—to try to get them to take the dirt back to China. We do not want it here. I think it has accumulated something like $300,000 in storage fees so far.

These are the sorts of risks that we take that ordinary Australians are not aware of. They are not aware of the good work that we do and the good work that the quarantine people do against the potential interference from politicians looking for a political advantage. We must not take things for granted and think, 'She'll be right,' because she will not be right. We have had umpteen instances. We have had Brazilian beef dumped at the Wagga tip on Christmas Eve. Brazil has endemic foot-and-mouth disease. Yet the OIE, the global organisation that is supposed to be the referee, said that it was okay to do it. This area is full of risk and it should be full of serious consideration. We must find a way scientifically to protect ourselves. That is what we have been able to do and I plead with the present government. They have made a serious error here. Political weight is put on here and the world trade people do put pressure on. When this came up when we were in government, I said, 'Let them go to the WTO.' But after enough glasses of wine in Geneva and after familiarisation with the officials, you come to an arrangement which says, 'We're going to set aside the import risk and the biosecurity provisions, and rely on farm management provisions.' I have to say that is fraught with danger.