Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Human Services (Senator Ludwig) to a question without notice asked by Senator Siewert today relating to food contamination.

I was very surprised that the government was not able to give us more detailed information around this issue. This issue has been ongoing for some time, and it is highly likely that we have in Australia products that are contaminated. The problem is we do not know because these products have not been tested yet. As I understand it, they have been waiting for two days—as was reported yesterday; it is now probably three days—in Western Australia for these products to be tested.

I am really deeply concerned about the role that FSANZ—Food Standards Australia New Zealand—have been playing in this. They have issued a media advisory for people not to eat this product. They have not acted like Singapore and other countries have—that is, by requiring these products to be removed from the shelves—and they are saying that a recall is not needed because no contamination has been found to date. Of course it has not been found to date because the products have not been tested! We need a comprehensive testing process of all foods that come in from China in particular because we know that the food standards over there are very lax, and because it cannot be guaranteed that the products are getting adequately tested in China then we need to make sure these products are not coming into Australia.

The National Association of Retail Grocers of Australia claimed yesterday:

… that every major supermarket in Australia potentially carried products with contaminated Chinese milk powder as a result of the poor regulation of imported food products.

That is why I am so disappointed that the minister could not answer my question about what special testing of food and other ingestible products from China is to take place. We do not know if these products are safe. The government could not answer. They obviously have no plans to start testing these foods when they come into Australia, so we still will not know. But the key point here is that these products are highly likely—we know, for a start, that White Rabbit Creamy Candies are on the shelves; we know that there is the potential for them to be contaminated. The minister did say that New Zealand has found that these products are contaminated, but all FSANZ has done in Australia is issue a media advisory. For a start, not everybody reads media advisories. Why aren’t we just taking the precautionary principle and getting this stuff off the shelves? Why aren’t we starting to implement a process that tests these products as they come into Australia?

But it is not just these products; it also raises the spectre of other products that have been coming into Australia. For example, we know that much of Australia’s agricultural production is being undermined by cheap Chinese imports. Of course those cheap Chinese imports are being subsidised by inappropriate and unsustainable agricultural production processes that lead to environmental degradation. So they are cheap because the cost of environmental degradation is not being factored into their costs. Also, we do not know whether these products are contaminated. Unfortunately, there is a very strong potential that these products are contaminated by the overuse of pesticides and herbicides. But the most immediate problem has to be action on these products that are potentially contaminated with contaminated milk products. If the National Association of Retail Grocers is flagging the alarm, I would say that is a reason to be very strongly concerned. Why haven’t these products been tested? Why are they sitting waiting to be tested? And if we have to wait so long, we need to be putting in place the precautionary principle where we get this stuff off the shelves because we cannot be certain that it is not contaminated.

In fact, I think there is a high degree of certainty that some of these products are contaminated, judging by what is happening in New Zealand; New Zealand has found that they are contaminated. And to say, ‘Oh no, it’s okay anyway because it’s a low dose’—what a lot of nonsense! I certainly would not be taking any risks with my child and feeding my child these products if there was even a skerrick of a chance of this contamination being in that product. To say, ‘It’s okay because it’s a low dose,’ is not a satisfactory answer either. The government needs to take a very close look at the way FSANZ is handling this as well as the way it handles other contamination issues, how it handles labelling and how it handles testing safety—for example, of products that contain genetically modified organism content, because it is not adequately testing for that either. We need to be taking a very close look at the way FSANZ is carrying out its responsibilities. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.