Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—This has been a wonderful report to be a part of and, as the previous speaker said, one can learn a lot from one’s work in these committees. In the More than honey report, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industry and Resources has certainly covered a lot of ground. This report really came out of a report that the committee did some time ago, with the then member for Hume as the chair and me as the deputy chair, dealing with rural skills in Australia and trying to find avenues through which to halt the demise of skills out there in rural Australia. The honey bee industry was one of those that came to us and told us of the difficulties that they were having, and we came to the conclusion that there was certainly a need to do a major report into the honey bee industry.

I am pleased that we did, and I am really pleased to have been able to work so well with the honourable member for Hume, Alby Schultz. We have been able to do this in a very, very good bipartisan manner to achieve some great results. I thank the new members—the member for Dawson who just spoke, for his input in getting the report together, and the other new members that have come on. They have made an excellent contribution in getting our report through. Of course, I also thank the old stager, the member for New England, Tony Windsor, for his contribution, which is always worthwhile. I thank the staff very much for all their dedication. I thank Janet Holmes, who is on a year’s leave at the moment; I wish her well and look forward to seeing her back here after that period. And I thank Dr Bill Pender for his work in getting it together.

The work now goes on from the report in promotion and finding ways through to make sure that we get it implemented. I have already spoken to the federal minister’s staff. I certainly hope to have a launch of this report in Tasmania in the near future, and I have spoken with the Tasmanian minister for agriculture about the recommendations and moving it forward there as well. We have a very successful honey bee industry. It has all the same problems that are everywhere else in Australia but is looking forward to a new direction into the future.

One of the great things about our great country is that one can have friends all over it, and my dear friends Des and Karen Hanlon in Western Australia were able to send me a note—which they do periodically, telling me that my beard is too long after they have seen me on a television interview or that my speech was no good or very good—which was to do with the honey bee industry. It was a story by Alison Benjamin that appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, 31 May 2008. It is a really good and interesting piece, which I would like to mention here. It deals with bees in California and the almond orchards of California’s Central Valley. They move bees over there in the US on an enormous 2,600-mile journey from Florida over to California, with each truck having about 500 hives on it. I would just like to quote from this article:

In the cool hours after sunset and before sunrise, more than one million hives are unloaded at regular intervals between the trees by commercial beekeepers such as Dave Hackenberg, who have travelled from the far corners of the US to take part in the world’s largest managed pollination event. The mammoth orchards of Central Valley stretch the distance from London to Aberdeen, and the 60 million almond trees planted with monotonous uniformity along the 400-mile route require half of all the honeybees in the US to pollinate them—a staggering 40 billion.

That is an enormous number of bees and an enormous effort, but it makes the point of pollination being significant. The Guardian article continues:

By February 16, National Almond Day in the US, the trees are usually covered in flowers and humming with the sound of busy bees. Attracted by the sweet nectar that each flower offers, the bees crawl around on the petals to find the perfect sucking position. As they do so, their furry bodies are dusted with beads of pollen. As they fly from blossom to blossom in search of more of the sweet energy drink, they transfer pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part, and so fertilise it. Not long afterwards, the plant’s ovaries swell into fruit, which by late August turn into precious, oval-shaped nuts.

That is how it works. Pollination begins life and the bees play an enormous part in that. Without bees that does not happen. The Guardian article starts with a little quote from Einstein. It reads:

A bee-less world wouldn’t just mean the end of honey—Einstein said that if the honeybee became extinct, then so would mankind.

We often say that, if there were no bees, there would be no food. That is a little extreme but it is getting close to the point. Our report makes some very good recommendations. It asks the government to help this industry, especially with new directions through funding Pollination Australia. That will give it a leg up, get it onto the right settings and provide opportunities to move the honey bee industry down the road to becoming Pollination Australia. Then we will be able to do more pollination and the industry will change enormously.

This is very interesting. This morning I met with representatives of the agriculture sector, which is one of the sectors in my electorate and the Braddon electorate in Tasmania. In the meeting with one of the poppy-growing companies in Tasmania, I mentioned the honey bee report and gave them a copy. The chap who looks after the farming side of the company said to me that only last week he had a meeting with a honey bee producer in Tasmania and that they were actually talking about it. Work done some time ago showed something like a 10 or 12 per cent increase in productivity from having more bees in their poppy fields. It grows and expands. The importance of pollination in Australia is being seen more and more. The industry is starting to grow. Some beekeepers now have half honey and half pollination services, and this will continue to change and grow as more markets become available.

I would like to touch on the really important subject of labelling agricultural chemicals to reflect their potential impact on honey bees and other pollinating insects. We need to make sure that that is done so that bees that are out there doing a good job are not killed if some farmers down the road are not quite aware of the impact of their sprays on the honey bee population or the pollination industry. Of course, bees act as a very good environmental indicator—just as frogs do, and we talk about that quite often. Honey bees are quite important and can be used that way as well, and there is a debate going on in the US about that.

We had good evidence from the industry about products whose labels contain the word ‘honey’. Often you will see ‘honey’ on a product, and the industry feel that that is taking their name—the word ‘honey’—and using it without any regulations. They feel that at times something that says it has a certain amount of honey in it or has honey in it or even that has ‘honey’ on the label might have 0.000001 per cent in it. In other parts of the world, they have regulated to make sure that, if you use the word ‘honey’, you have a standard and an amount that meets that standard within the product. There is a need to make sure that we develop standards for honey and maybe identify honeys from different regions and give them recognition and identify the differences between different areas and the different sorts of honeys that exist, just like the wine industry and just like good olive oil. As any of us who know about good olive oil know, there are different sorts of olive oil and different years when they are produced.

We also received evidence in relation to making sure that food and honey that come into Australia are tested against a standard that gives recognition that the product meets the same standard as we expect from our own honey. There was some feeling that that has not always been the result. Honey has even come into Australia in imports that have had chemical contamination, and that has been mixed with our honey, and that has had some reflection back, even on the market for honey in Australia.

There are recommendations that the state and federal governments look at guidelines for beekeepers’ access to public lands and there is the issue of national parks in Queensland. A lot of the old state forests in Queensland are now called national parks. That has some implications for access for beekeepers. I understand there have been some issues up there in relation to horse riding and other activities that used to take place in the old forests. We have recommended that we have good guidelines so that beekeepers do have access to these flowering resources—so that they have access to enable them to put their bees down and get them back.

We also recommended that in the climate change debate and carbon credit systems, if we are going to plant trees, there be some consideration given to the honey bee industry when we plant trees so that the flowering plants can be a benefit to that industry as well. Of course, there is fire management and the issue of making sure that the honey bee producers are well aware if there is fire in the regions where their bees are. Wildfire can devastate hives and bees.

Biosecurity issues are of great importance to the honey bee industry. The sentinel hives, the guarding hives that we have at our ports, are to be maintained and enhanced. If a swarm of bees comes in on a foreign ship or on a ship trading into our ports, those bees may have the incredible mite called the Varroa destructor, which is a very deadly little devil to honey bees and also to ordinary bees and wild bees in Australia. In other parts of the world the experience is that they wipe out the whole of the wild bee populations and possibly up to 40 per cent of the managed bees in the hives. This has been the experience of our colleagues in New Zealand, who were devastated. This of course then has an ongoing effect on food production and the pollinating needs of the rest of our industry. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Ms George) adjourned.

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