Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Previous speakers have quite adequately covered the technical factors relevant to the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research Amendment Bill 2007. I thought a couple of quotes from the explanatory memorandum and the second reading speech were of relevance also. The bill brings into effect recommendations of the Uhrig report. I spoke at some length this morning on the effect in the agricultural and veterinary chemicals area of these particular matters. I had some concerns with regard to management and the role of the minister. As this is an advisory body to the minister, those comments are not relevant, and it would seem that this particular body can operate quite successfully as a government bureaucracy. In fact, as we are advised in the explanatory memorandum:

The Bill also revokes the Centre’s body corporate status as retention of the Centre as a legal personality separate from the Commonwealth has been assessed as unnecessary given the Centre is budget funded, is a prescribed agency under the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 and does not have any need to own assets in its own right.

We are talking, of course, about an instrument, as described by the parliamentary secretary in his second reading speech. He said:

ACIAR is a statutory authority within the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio, and its activities are part of Australia’s aid program. ACIAR was established in 1982 to assist and encourage agricultural researchers in Australia to use their skills for the benefit of developing countries, while at the same time working to solve Australia’s own agricultural problems.

I wish to take as much time as I am allowed to speak about those particular issues.

It is the responsibility of developed countries, or those countries that are as fortunate as Australia—might I add under the economic management of this government—to try to lift people out of poverty. I do not care where you look in the world, and I believe there is a statistic to prove it, but most wars and uprisings—even world wars I and II—involve a significant statistic of huge numbers of unemployed young males. As such, there is a responsibility on the developed world to relieve poverty wherever possible, and of course that commences with giving people the opportunity to grow adequate quantities of food for their own purposes.

Government aid programs are a great means of achieving that. I am most committed to the argument that it is better to give aid in the form of assistance with agricultural research, where we send researchers to do that work or deliver the benefits of research conducted for that purpose. During the Pakistani earthquakes, I tried to convince my side of politics that we would be better sending those people aid in the form of tunnel shelters that are manufactured and commonplace in my electorate. They are low cost; they are a high-quality, strong, plastic coated form of the Nissen huts of history. They can be easily erected, they pack down to a very small load and I think they would be highly resistant to future earthquakes. They would have created large and durable protection for those people. I might add that the departmental people had no interest in that whatsoever. All they wanted to do was send the cheque. Of course, the problem with sending cheques is that, as we know, in many countries the benefits do not materialise within that country and sometimes they materialise in very fat Swiss bank accounts.

I make those comments but say that this is a good program. It is the properly applicable way to deliver foreign aid. If we provide people with food, it should be grain or whatever that is grown within Australia and delivered in that form—or, as I have said, it could be buildings or other items. We are looking to lift living standards, and a great revolution of 20 or 30 years ago was called the green revolution. This was when technology and the application of fertilisers and things of that nature revolutionised crop production, particularly in the Asian region. It was one of those breakthroughs in technology that lifted many people up from poverty, and no doubt contributed in some way to Asia’s redevelopment and the fact that there is now, for many, a higher standard of living.

One of the interesting things upon which I want to comment, both in terms of the nations we seek to assist overseas and, as the second reading speech says, in terms of our own agricultural problems, is genetically modified organisms. It is a highly contentious issue. I have never been happy with state governments applying blanket bans. I saw them as purely a political exercise. The Australian government has taken the appropriate approach, which is to have a gene technology regulator. We do not approve of the human consumption of products that have not been tested and approved by that authority using the best science available. Furthermore, I have people I admire and support in my own electorate who have grave doubts about GMOs. One of their grave concerns is cross-pollination, where you create a food product that has resistance to certain herbicides and then later it cross-pollinates things like radish and other weeds that we usually deal with in this fashion. Of course, they become resistant. That is a challenge. I believe it is best resolved by practice and testing. But in the international context, the ability to put a vitamin-A gene into rice has had very significant benefits for young people in particular in many overseas countries where rice is the staple diet. As a consequence, a specific benefit that has arisen is the prevention of blindness. One cannot think of a more punishing affliction for anybody than blindness. So this has been the sort of evidence where the research that developed countries have been able to provide, and the use of GMOs, which is greatly and unfortunately restricted in Australia, has been very beneficial. It is also, of course, beneficial for productivity.

I would like to come back to the remarks of the member for Wills about biofuels, which I endorse. He alluded to the fact that it is all right to use this sort of agricultural production for fuel, but the downside, which is occurring now, is that there is a reduction in the availability of food for Third World countries. It appears that some of them—Brazil being a classic case—are now clearing land at a very rapid rate to grow more sugar, which is a good agricultural product for producing biofuel such as ethanol. There are some interesting statistics. The world population presently stands at about six billion people. By 2020 it will be eight billion people—a 30 per cent increase—and that is an awful lot of extra mouths to feed. I was advised by senior executives of the General Motors Corporation in Detroit that, of that six billion people, only about 12 per cent own a motor vehicle. It is predicted by General Motors’ tracking that that will increase to 16 per cent of eight billion by 2020. One can see that there will be a huge demand for additional fuel and, if it were to be provided through hydrocarbons, there will be a very significant increase in emissions and particulates. Therefore, research in the area of biofuels has merit but, as I said, we have to be careful that in producing those biofuels we do not so limit food that its price increases rapidly—although my wheat growers would be very pleased to have a rapid increase in price. Already the utilisation of American corn in ethanol production has caused hardship for Mexicans and others who rely on that staple in tortillas and other foods.

There is a round-robin in all of these things. As I frequently say, there is no such thing as a free lunch. I myself do not see a benefit from research to make biofuels in Australia unless we can, by some miracle, substantially increase our crop. The Labor representative at the table is quite astounded by that remark. As we are currently in drought, one might wonder where we would get the corn or grain to produce ethanol and keep open a very capital intensive factory. As reported in the media, the ethanol plant at Swan Hill will consume four megalitres of water per day. They propose that three-quarters—750,000 tonnes—of their input grain be raised by irrigation. I make the point that there are better solutions for Australian agriculture than growing our own biofuels. It is not that we should not have biofuels; it is that it is not the best outcome for the very limited amount of grain that is produced in Australia. We stick our chest out and argue about AWB, but Australia grows less wheat than the United Kingdom. We are not a big wheat producer. We have been a significant exporter, but that is declining very rapidly as our domestic consumption—deregulated and, I might add, highly profitable for those who have access to the market—continues to grow at a very rapid rate. This is not only in human consumption but in lot feeding to produce the type of beef that people in our society demand.

Research has to take a lot of things into account, and the member for Wills and I have some consistent views on those matters. In domestic research we must proceed with all sorts of things that will do great things for us. I come back to GMOs, which will provide the opportunity to produce both salt-tolerant and drought-tolerant plants. I am amazed at the opportunities that already exist in the crops themselves. I recently had the pleasure of writing a letter of congratulations to Mr Ian Broad, who resides in the Mingenew area and is a very progressive farmer. He also relies on large equipment. What delighted me, as much as it was a good-news bad-news story, was that he was reported as having grown a harvestable crop—it was not a star turn; it was not a magnificent crop—on 2½ old-fashioned inches of rainfall. He was able to achieve that because, for a start, he is a good farmer and, secondly, because he is using large equipment. The other letter of congratulations I wrote was to a father and son, Paul and Blake Smith of Mukinbudin, who have purchased a new tractor. It is 600 horsepower. They are dragging a machine—a bar, as they call it—behind it which is, firstly, tillage equipment and, secondly, seeding equipment. They are able to put in 760 acres of crop in a 15-hour working day. That is more than an acre a minute. The benefit of that—other than that you get to knock off early—is that you can take advantage of every drop of rain.

There has been magnificent research, for which I must congratulate the Scott brothers and people at Murdoch University. There is an inoculant required when one plant’s legume seeds—that is the little bud, if we can call it that, which connects the nodulation on the roots of legumes such as lupins and clovers. Lupins are a very significant transitional crop in my electorate, and a very healthy food. By the way, Mr Broad is now producing a new variety of lupins that has an even higher protein rate than previously, and he is marketing that in a very progressive way. But the interesting thing is that, when we look at lupins and nodulation, the practice has been to buy an inoculate, which is a black-looking powder, and, if you were seeding it, you sort of applied it in whatever fashion—usually by putting the grain and the inoculant through one of the loaders on the property—and some of the inoculant would stick to the seed. Then you would put the seed in the ground and, if the ground was damp and it germinated immediately, the inoculant worked. But so much cropping is done today with this large machinery, by which you dry-seed—you seed and wait for the rain. But you get the benefit of the first millimetre of rain, where previously you waited for the rain before you ploughed the paddock and so on. If you only got four inches of rain for the year, you did not get the benefit of the first two.

Some progressive farmers in my electorate, the Scott brothers, found that they had a bentonite deposit on their property. That is ‘drilling mud’. It is a very heavy and sticky clay that is pumped down oilwells to keep the oil at the bottom, because it has such a heavy weight. That is a well-established principle called drilling mud. But they did not have anyone who wanted to buy drilling mud. In conjunction with Murdoch University they found that, if they could incorporate the inoculant we speak of into a soup of this mud, and then dry it out and sort of pelletise it, the inoculant stayed happily in that state and did not die. So you could seed these pellets along with your seeds of lupins, or whatever else you wanted to benefit from nitrogen nodulation, and it would stay there until the rain came. I think they have called it Alosca. I am very proud to say that the Regional Partnerships Program gave them $300,000 for the development of this program, which can have a huge effect as a research product. These people now have a patent. They are to be congratulated. So there are all these opportunities there. And no doubt there will be a time when that inoculant is exported from Australia in that format, because it can be put into the ground and deliver these sorts of outcomes.

Research occurs in many ways. The member for Wills talked about carbon sequestration. Unfortunately, I have run out of time, but I did want to remind everybody that old-growth forests are a net emitter of carbon and it is young forests we might be growing. Also, Mayor Blumberg announced that all the taxis in New York within a few years have to run on biofuels or hydrogen, which I would think is the better choice. (Time expired)

See this speech in context