Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to be speaking, finally, on the Horse Disease Response Levy Bill 2011 and related bills. I spoke on the previous bill in the previous parliament, in 2008. For all that time, the Australian horse industry has been left in a state of insecurity because we did not have arrangements in place to allow the industry and the government to adjust to any outbreak of disease that might occur. This comes after a decade of insecurity and indifference by the previous government to the risk of equine influenza. In my previous speech, I talked about that quite a bit: how the member for Wide Bay had basically adopted a 'she'll be right' attitude to the potential threat of equine influenza, despite being warned by people in the industry.

So this is unfinished business. It is a great pity that it did not come to the House before this. It is a great pity that the opposition rejected the bill in its first incarnation. I thought it was a profoundly fair bill, a bill that protected Australia and the horse industry and provided that industry with the same level of security that occurs in other livestock industries. We have potential levies in place for chicken meat, honeybees, cattle, dairy, chickens, sheep, lambs, goat and pigs. This was not a new concept in the previous bill. It was a perfectly reasonable arrangement.

I am pleased that the opposition has finally seen sense and we have finally been able to get levy arrangements on which there is a greater level of agreement. But I think we need to understand that we are never going to have universal approval for levy arrangements. There is always going to be someone out there who regards it as an impost on their business or on their individual liberty. But levies, taxes and prices on carbon are all arrangements that are necessary for civilisation, for stable government and for security. They are the great compromise we make between our individual liberty and our collective security. I do not mean to fire up the opposition, but after a decade of their indifference and ignoring all these problems it is nice for them to finally come to a conclusion and say yes. It must be a heart-warming thing for the opposition—such a novel experience! One hopes that saying yes might be catching. You might get some warm fuzzies! We can only hope that this might be part of a new era of civility in our public life and that the warring parties might give it a rest. We can only hope.

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