Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President Sterle, I know that I probably don't do your promotional prospects much good as I continue to remark on the great work that you have done in chairing our beloved Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee inquiry into white spot. I want to put some things on the record about the committee's inquiry and its report, Biosecurity risks associated with the importation of seafood and seafood products (including uncooked prawns and uncooked prawn meat) into Australia. Firstly, I mention the aquaculture community, particularly in my home state of Queensland, which was so affected by this. From memory, there were nine growers or nine farms affected. There is simply no question that the negative economic impacts and the stress visited on their lives as a result of this outbreak of the white spot disease or virus will take many years for them to work through. They are a very resilient community and they worked diligently and patiently with government, both at a state and a federal level, until we were able to bring about something of a compensation package to support them financially, not only to deal with the impacts of the outbreak but also to ensure, to the best of our ability, that their businesses remained viable until they were able go back into production.

Just for the record, briefly what happened was that there was an outbreak of a virus that got into the wild. There were any number of pathways, but, unfortunately, and I might say embarrassingly for our government, one of the potential pathways resulted from failures in our biosecurity system. I need to be careful because at least in one case there are people before the courts and I think there are another four briefs pending with the Director of Public Prosecutions. I'll be very careful in my language, but the assertion is that there was behaviour on the part of some import traders, which, coupled with a failure on the part of some of our biosecurity people at the coalface, created an environment where, over a long period of time, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of infected prawn—and I doubt the volume will ever be well known—made their way into the retail chains around our country. The prawns were being sold in retail outlets for human consumption and, it was clear from the evidence that the inquiry took, there were recreational fishermen—and I don't blame them for this—who bought the prawns and used them as bait. Whilst we'll probably never know what the established pathway of the infection in the Logan River was, it was felt, certainly by the people affected, that recreational fishermen using retail prawns was probably the pathway.

There is some good news around the story, and I would like to say, without trying to embarrass him, that Senator Sterle drove a very probative inquiry, supported by colleagues from this side and indeed others, as we went in search of the truth around these biosecurity vulnerabilities that I've identified. Consequently, I think it is fair to say that, by the time the report was published, the department of agriculture had well and truly gone down the pathway of reviewing their practices and procedures and putting in place new architecture, you might say, that would minimise this happening in the future.

So it disrupted the supply chain. It disrupted trade. There were implications for imports of prawns that are still playing out. I think we're in strained relations with a couple of nations who haven't been happy about the increase in the testing regime that's been implemented. The test is now a more sensitive test than in the international standards—it is world's best practice—and I think it's fair to say that, as long as everybody does their job, and as long as importers act in good faith, we may well have at least mitigated the risk that might come from imports.

I don't intend to take all of my time. I want to congratulate the chair of the references committee, Senator Sterle, and his colleagues and my own colleagues. It was a very collegial inquiry. We were very well received and there was a high level of confidence that this wasn't going to be just some sort of a brush-over on the part of a federal government references committee. We really did establish good faith, I think, with most people in the industry. So congratulations, Senator Sterle and others. I just wanted to have the opportunity to speak on this, given all the work and effort that had been put into it.