John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to speak on the Agriculture and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment (Removing Re-approval and Re-registration) Bill 2014. The bill does enact an election commitment that I actually made as the shadow minister for agriculture and food security to remove re-registration. The bill also includes additional reforms to improve the efficiency of agvet chemicals regulation.

This is an area in which, unfortunately, I have had a lot of involvement as the member for Calare, in the agricultural sector and as a farmer—largely on the negative front. For too long there have been issues with the regulation of chemicals in Australia, and that is not to say that the regulator—the APVMA—has always done a bad job. It is more that it has not always been given the framework to do it, and it has had interference. However, that is not to say it does not need to be far more efficient than it is—it does.

It is something to think about, that 30 years ago, or less, Australia was the first country in the world where chemical countries wanted to get registered in because we had a very good name for being efficient, for getting it done and for doing it well. Today, Australia is the last place where chemical companies want to come to get registrations done. I think that is a very bad look for Australia, it is very bad for agriculture and it is very bad for chemical companies, without whom we are in huge trouble. They do not always see us as a place where they want to line up early in the piece.

As a former shadow minister, I, along with my coalition colleagues, voted to block amendments proposed by the former Labor government in 2013 that introduced the reapproval and re-registration requirements. We did not supported it then, and we are now working to have it removed. Labor's re-registration requirement actually did not achieve what they stated when they set out on their ill-fated deregulation agenda. The former Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Senator Penny Wong, said that agriculture and veterinary chemicals were a key area of reform to reduce regulatory compliance costs for businesses and improve competitiveness. This was almost humorous when you see that introducing the requirement for chemicals to be reregistered actually added red tape and costs and did not remove anything. And it took away any impetus for companies to want to take away some chemicals that are not used in other parts of the world. In fact, it was a smokescreen for the Labor government to deliver an election promise made to the Greens which, in effect, and as the Greens normally do, effectively crippled some parts of agriculture and affected everybody.

You could go as far as saying that it was completely anti-farming. Labor's promise was made as far away from the farming community as was possible, and was completely about doing a deal with the Greens by making it cost prohibitive to register chemicals and more costly to conduct agriculture generally. It was certainly not made with farmers and veterinary professionals in mind, particularly when many of their electorates simply have no connection with what it is that feeds people and what it is to produce the best food in the world.

The re-registration system did not introduce any new triggers, and I think that is the thing that was so obvious in what they really wanted to do. Not one new trigger was introduced. In other words, the current triggers as they existed then were perfectly sufficient to safeguard the use of chemicals in Australia, be they veterinary or chemicals for the control of weeds or whatever. The re-registration system just made the APVMA run a very costly recheck of existing triggers, which of course added costs for those people who use the chemicals, being the farmers and the vets. Ultimately, those costs have to be passed on, which again made us less competitive with imports because they do not have anything like the same constrictions on them. We are very preventative country—we take enormous trouble, one could almost say unnecessarily so at times, and this was the greatest example of taking an unnecessary step. To add further insult to injury, there was no cost-benefit analysis undertaken, perhaps because the former government knew it was going to increase red tape and costs, not decrease them, which most certainly would have gone against what Senator Wong said they were doing it for.

Our bill seeks to remove this costly and unnecessary re-registration requirement. It also includes additional reforms to improve the efficiency of agvet chemicals regulation. As I mentioned, the current system is not efficient. The many industry groups and individuals who took the time to comment on this bill, and to me previously, have attested to that. Obviously getting rid of the reregulation procedure goes a long way to making the whole thing a bit more sane, but there is more than that. APVMA themselves have to become more efficient. I think that getting lazy is one of the things that is involved here. When something is totally cost recovery, that takes the pressure off bureaucracy to get its act into efficient mode. I think there is no doubt that APVMA have probably woken up that they are one of the bodies that have to do that. Currently they are not meeting their obligations to finalise all applications within the statutory time frame. That is partly because of the new regulations the previous government put on them, which increase the cost for both them and the applicants and impacts on users' access to pesticides and veterinary medicines.

A major flaw in the argument that the re-registration system was for health and safety is that the recheck of the triggers under the registration process will actually reduce resources available to the APVMA, reducing their ability to process the reviews of high-risk chemicals in a timely manner. This is happening. The other major flaw in the argument is the fact that no new triggers were introduced because the current ones do the job and they did the job before the previous government altered the legislation. I am not saying with regard to efficiency that it is all the APVMA's fault. They are merely adhering to an agenda that has been set for them. However, they do have to pick their act up as well. I have met quite a few of the staff and I am sure they want to do a good job—it is very obvious that they do. Removing the re-registration requirement is one way of ensuring that they can.

Internationally, our registration process is already struggling to compete. That is one of the key reasons the industry and the coalition support reforms to make it more efficient. I have already said that years ago we were the first place where companies wanted to come and test their products because our process was good, our word was accepted and once a product was registered in Australia it was like an 'open sesame' in those days to go into other countries; now we are the last place. That has to be changed, and this is the first step to getting that changed. I can quote a couple of examples. One is a sheep drench that Pfizer developed in Australia for Australian conditions which I think I am right in saying, though I cannot be exact, has been registered for use in New Zealand for three years, if not longer. To the best of my knowledge it is still not registered in this country. Another product is a tea-tree sheep dip that is based on tea-tree oil. A tea-tree grower had come up with an innovative way to use natural tea-tree oil—I actually went and saw this—as the basis for a sheep drench. However, it was going to cost about $3 million to generate data on things such as toxicity tests, and with very limited data protection for such a product there was no way that the company could get the return on investment in a small market like ours. We have to accept that we are small market, even though we are big exporters.

Our agriculture needs an efficient regulator so there is timely and affordable access to new technology to reduce the cost of production and keep us up there with our competitors around the world. It is not enough just to say we have got the best product, therefore we can always sell it. Life is not that simple. It is also important that we have access to a range of new technologies to improve options to reduce resistance, which is an enormous concern in modern agriculture and would become more so with limited chemicals on the market. We all know the opportunities that exist for Australia with the Asian boom and the global population demand for quality and safe products. If Australia is to truly capitalise on these opportunities we need to have an efficient chemical regulator that is world first, as we used to have, not lagging behind our competitors because it is wrapped up in unnecessary red tape and burdensome requirements. All re-registration achieves is to limit the market, squeezing out the smaller chemicals and chemical companies that cannot afford the costly registration process. At the end, the buck lands with the consumers, who bear the extra costs for re-registration—or the cheap imports, which are the other possibility. We committed to getting rid of $1 billion worth of unnecessary red tape a year, and there could be no greater example than some of the things that agriculture puts up with

You have the former government willing to do a deal with the Greens who simply do not want us to use any products at all—in fact I am not quite sure if the Greens want people on this planet, let alone something for them to eat. I cannot believe that a previous government, which was supposed to be here for the good of everybody, would do a deal with the Greens which was definitely designed to make life harder for agriculture. It made the best product in the world less available to our own people, let alone to the rest of the world—which has always looked upon us, and certainly still does, as an example of how good a product can be. I have always said our greatest selling point in Australia is that we have a product as good as or better than anyone else's in the world when it comes to agriculture. It is our clean, green image but its quality still has to compete with others who do not have the same pressures on them that we do.

It really is up to Labor and the Greens to get behind our agricultural sector and give them the support that they did not when they introduced this re-registration requirement in 2013. I hope we see a time, not too far away, when once again we are the first country in the world that chemical companies come to to get their product registered and have a trial.

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