John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Food Security, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Actually, I think what the Minister for Trade is trying to do is to make us the 51st state. Madam Deputy Speaker, in Australia we have to trace every movement in an animal’s life—from one property to another, whether it goes to slaughter or simply interstate; wherever it goes to the day it dies—so that we know where the meat is going and we have a total record for that animal. In the United States, not only will this not be a national scheme but in the 50 states—and obviously not every state is entirely involved in the beef industry—there will be 50 different systems and even different systems within those states. Tribal nations have federal country, not state country, and they are going to be allowed to have their own systems as well—that is, if they choose to put them in place.

Even though the Minister for Trade says that we are going to require something like our system, we want a system as onerous and exacting—not a herd scheme, not a scheme in which you fill-in blanks on a piece of paper. We want a scheme that requires the tracing of every animal in a particular country in the same onerous way in a physical sense—not where the herd goes, not only if it goes interstate. If a scheme only traces an animal after it goes interstate, the animal could have moved around 10 different properties in the course of its life before it went interstate. We are not going to have the faintest idea where that animal comes from. Given that BSE is a slow-developing disease in an animal, an animal could be 10 years old by the time it leaves the state and it could have been around 20 properties in that time.

I cannot understand, given that the minister believes he is going to insist upon the same exacting standards that we have, why he might not consider accepting our bill. We are not asking for anything we are not already doing, and the minister himself, I am sure, will see the sense in having labelling. I have not actually heard him reply to that issue but I do not think labelling is a big thing to ask for, particularly given that the main country involved here already requires one for meat in its own country.

Even the senior animal health experts in the United States are saying that the abandonment of the National Animal Identification System is an enormous problem. Their CEO, Ron DeHaven, says the American Veterinary Medical Association cannot endorse Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s new approach to animal disease traceability because there are simply too many unanswered questions. As I understand it, they will let each state and tribal nation more or less develop their own program, so I am concerned about interoperability of 50 or more different systems. Will one state be able to talk to another state as an animal moves through interstate commerce?

In the regulatory system that the minister proposes to introduce, we are willing to look at more than one system within the one country. The American Veterinary Medical Association says we could be looking at 50 different systems within America, and my understanding is that even a company might be able to come up with one within that system. How in the heck could a company tell you—given that they only slaughter the animals and retail them—what happened to an animal prior to slaughter? Given all these different systems, how can we possibly expect our regulatory system to collate that information—because I hope we are not going to rely on somebody else’s word for this? How can we possibly look at these 50 different systems—that is without companies and without tribal nations; that is just the states in America—and give an exact scientific answer as to whether they fit with and are as exact and onerous as our own?

According to Ron DeHaven, who was the Chief Veterinarian of the United States Department of Agriculture when the first US BSE case was discovered in 2003—in Washington State, as I recall—politics trumped animal disease control. The problem with the US is that they export very little, as opposed to Brazil and Australia where the whole industry understands the value of exports. Let’s remember that we are talking about putting at risk our greatest export tool. The minister said that and he is right; it is an enormous export tool—but it is an enormous tool to trace what might happen in Australia and what might have happened in the countries that want to export into ours. The politics in America are simply that they do not want to go to such trouble because exports are not that big amongst the producers and ranchers themselves.

Bruce Knight, the Marketing and Regulatory Undersecretary of the United States Department of Agriculture in the final years of the last administration, said he fears that abandoning the NAIS model will undercut US efforts to obtain a negligible BSE risk rating from the World Organisation for Animal Health. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that it is too big a risk. (Time expired)

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