Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As an Independent senator, matters of public interest speeches are a rare treat indeed. For me they happen only twice a year, and so I intend to speak on not one, not two but three issues of public interest, indeed public importance, within my allocated 15 minutes—on food labelling laws, on water and on poker machines.

The first is an issue of national importance and relates to the erosion of Australia’s food security. As many of you know, along with Senator Barnaby Joyce and Senator Bob Brown I have co-sponsored two private senators’ bills that relate to food labelling. This is an issue that goes beyond politics and beyond ideology in dealing with food labelling. Our current food labelling laws are a disgrace. They fail consumers; they fail food producers. The only people our current laws seem to help are food manufacturers who want to pass off foreign foods as Australian foods. That is not acceptable.

Under the current regime, the term ‘made in Australia’ is inherently deceptive. It means merely that 50 per cent of a product has been ‘substantially transformed’ in Australia. So, under current laws, orange juice which is made entirely of Brazilian concentrate but has had Australian water added to it and been packaged here can be called ‘Australian made’. I do not know about you, Mr Acting Deputy President, but I do not eat the waxy cardboard container of orange juice which is labelled ‘made in Australia’ when in fact it is something that is far from it. As the Riverland fruit growers in my home state of South Australia know from bitter experience, when foreign foods are passed off as Aussie foods, as they are in that orange juice example, Aussie farmers lose their jobs.

I noted that during the public debate on the truth in labelling bill some of the most vocal opposition came from the Australian Food and Grocery Council. This is a group that represents so-called Australian companies such as the Philip Morris-owned Kraft, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle and Coca-Cola. These companies are as dinky-di as baseball and hot dogs, and yet these are the companies that are fighting change. Their spokesperson, Kate Carnell—I note she is a former Chief Minister of the ACT—puts up examples like Bickford’s cordial, arguing that they could not call their product ‘Australian made’ under the proposed private senators’ bill because they have to buy vanilla from overseas. Vanilla could easily be grown in Queensland, for example, but currently it is not, because there is not a sufficient market for it. I will tell you why: because right now you can pass off foreign vanilla as Australian, so we do not need to grow our own.

That said, I acknowledge that there may be some products which may require the smallest of ingredients from overseas. I understand some cheeses, for example, require an enzyme which is currently available only overseas. The private senators’ bill I introduced, with both Senator Barnaby Joyce and Senator Bob Brown, in its current form says a product has to be 100 per cent Australian made to be called ‘made in Australia’. Perhaps it could be 99 per cent or 95 per cent. Let us have that debate—but it should not be 50 per cent.

There are other labelling issues that affect Australia producers and consumers. With olive oil, for example, there are no restrictions on what exactly constitutes ‘extra virgin’ olive oil. This means imported blends can be sold as ‘extra virgin’ when they are blends of all sorts of things. This puts genuine Australian producers at a significant disadvantage. There is a similar issue with honey. Imported honeys are currently being blended with Australian honey and then sold as Australian produce overseas and in our marketplace. That is wrong. Surely it is misleading, and yet under current laws it is allowed. I acknowledge there is currently a government review into food labelling being conducted by the former federal health minister, Dr Neal Blewett, and I look forward to its findings. That is at least a step forward. But we do not need a review to know consumers are confused. They need and deserve honest labelling and so do our farmers.

The second food labelling bill relates to the need for palm oil to be clearly labelled on foods as palm oil. Currently palm oil can be legally labelled as vegetable oil, and this is having all sorts of consequences for our planet. Palm oil is currently found in around 40 per cent of the foods on our supermarket shelves, and the cultivation of palm oil is having a devastating effect on many regions around the world. Eighty-five per cent of the world’s palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and palm oil production is the No. 1 cause of deforestation in Indonesia, for example. In South-East Asia alone, the equivalent of 300 soccer fields of forest is cleared every day because of palm oil production, and palm oil production costs the lives of around 50 orangutans each week. At this rate, orangutans will be extinct by 2013.

I believe Australian consumers would make the right choice if they were given a choice, but right now you cannot avoid palm oil because, thanks to our weak labelling laws, you usually do not know you are buying it or eating it—and, being saturated fat, palm oil is not good for our health either. This needs to change, and I call on the Senate to support the two private senators’ bills relating to food labelling. I note that Senator Boswell, the father of the Senate, is in the chamber right now. I think Senator Boswell would acknowledge that it is a rare thing indeed to have both Senator Joyce and Senator Bob Brown co-sponsoring a bill. I think it shows that this is something that goes well beyond ideology. It is not about party politics; it is about a common-sense approach, and a fair approach, to food labelling for our consumers and for our farmers.

The second topic I wish to address relates to water. In my home state of South Australia there is no bigger issue than the issue of water and, more specifically, the future of the Murray-Darling Basin. Just a few days ago, Deputy Premier Kevin Foley revealed just how dysfunctional the federal government’s much-touted intergovernmental agreement on the Murray-Darling Basin is. You will remember, Mr Acting Deputy President, that this is the scheme that was meant to sort out the squabbling of water in the Murray-Darling Basin once and for all. I think the Prime Minister described it as a historic agreement that would lead to a fair national plan for the Murray-Darling Basin. Certainly the South Australian Premier, the Hon. Mike Rann, said very much the same thing. That was on 3 July 2008 and, despite what the South Australian Premier said about this being such a historic agreement, we now find that the South Australian government has had to take the Victorian government to court over the whole issue of caps and water allocation. That agreement took place almost two years ago.

But just a few days ago we had the Deputy Premier, in his capacity as Acting Premier, saying that if any agreement did not suit South Australia they would ignore it. The agreement relates to the Murray-Darling Basin being looked at by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority in terms of sustainable diversion limits. The Hon. Mr Foley said, ‘We will not automatically agree to anything that is in the plan that we think is unfair and damaging to our state’s interest.’ In other words, this agreement is no agreement at all. I can understand why Mr Foley, as Acting Premier, said that but it contradicts what the Premier has previously said—that this was a historic agreement.

It is easy to make the Murray-Darling Basin issue seem dauntingly complex. It is easy to get bogged down in claims and counterclaims and a detritus of bureaucratic negotiations whereby we fail to see the more obvious truth and the more obvious solution. For more than a century individual states have put their self-interest and their parochial interests ahead of the national interest; I am willing to say that, given the chance, they will continue along this ruinous path for another century. For one river system we need one set of rules. And that is why I believe the only thing that will save the rivers and will save South Australia is a full and immediate national takeover of the Murray-Darling Basin so that, for the first time in this nation’s history, the Murray-Darling can be run in the national interest. The federal government has trusted the states with the chance to reach agreement and, sadly, the states have proven they cannot be trusted. We need a national takeover and delays are destructive.

Finally, I want to finish up by talking about the release today of the Productivity Commission’s final report into gambling. Firstly, I should point out that the government’s response has been nothing short of abysmal. It has been pathetic. The government have had this report for almost four months and what is their plan? Their plan is to stage yet another meaningless talkfest with the states, no less. How can you trust the states on gambling when state governments rake in over $4 billion a year in state taxes from poker machines alone? It is not as though the states want to do anything about problem gambling, because they are so hopelessly compromised by their reliance on gambling revenue. And when you consider that 50 per cent of gambling taxes come off the backs of problem gamblers they are completely and hopelessly compromised on this.

The federal government stated today that they support the precommitment of smart card technologies. Can I suggest that precommitment is the most far-off recommendation put up by the Productivity Commission because the fact is that, with precommitment, it will take time and so much negotiation with the states. It can be incredibly complex. It could be effective but it is not a solution that we can deal with here and now. If the government were serious they would start with a recommendation to cap the maximum bet at $1, although I want to quickly add that while I welcome the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to cap maximum bets at $1 a spin I would argue that that is not enough to protect problem gamblers. The fact is that, even with $1 bets, because of the volatility of the machines, a player will still be able to lose up to $1,200 an hour in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland and around $1,000 an hour in my home state of South Australia. That is completely unacceptable. We need to cap the losses as well as the bets.

In its draft report, the Productivity Commission suggested aiming for an hourly loss rate of around $120. This could be achieved simply by reprogramming the machines to adjust volatility. The industry claims that they return something in the order of 90c in the dollar to players, but this is incredibly misleading. The fact is that, in many cases, that rate of return is over the life of the machine—over millions of spins and over millions of dollars poured into the machine. It is estimated that to achieve anything approaching that level of return you would need to play a machine nonstop for almost a year. So if we are serious about protecting problem gamblers, we need to reprogram the machines to reduce the volatility. There should be a 90c in the dollar return to every player, even if they gamble as little as $20 or $50.

The federal government need to take over the regulation of poker machine gambling and they can do it. It is clear that they have the constitutional power to do so. When it comes to regulating poker machine gambling the Commonwealth have corporations power, taxations power, and telecommunications and banking powers to intervene and take over from the states, because the states have failed. The government need to make these first two simple changes: cap the bets to $1 and cut the volatility to guarantee a 90c in the $1 return to every player. They need to cap the bets and cap the rate of loss. And if they do that they would actually make a significant inroad overnight into the rates of problem gambling.

I entered politics because of this issue. When I ran for state parliament all those years ago in South Australia, politicians and the public were not really aware of the damage that is done by these dangerous machines—this is a dangerous product—but none of us has that excuse anymore. The evidence is there and it is clear. According to the Productivity Commission, there are upwards of 510,000 Australians with a gambling problem in this country, and we know from previous Productivity Commission work that each of those affects the lives of seven others, on average. The government must move immediately to protect the hundreds of thousands of Australians, and their families, who are suffering now because of poker machine addiction.