Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I take the opportunity to make some brief remarks about the report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Industry, A clearer message for consumers. I appreciated being a member of the committee whilst it carried out the inquiry into country-of-origin labelling for food. I thank all of those people who made representations to the committee. From memory, 50-odd presenters made formal submissions and gave evidence to the inquiry. It was an inquiry that gave a very good overview of the current country-of-origin labelling laws and systems and the issues confronting Australian producers and manufacturers. I walked away from the inquiry having a much clearer picture of what the issues are, the concerns of the industry broadly and the kinds of things we ought to try to do to assist producers and manufacturers in this country.

The committee's report contains eight recommendations, which does not sound like a lot, but they were eight important recommendations. I am not going to go into the detail of them because my view is that if somebody really wants to know about the inquiry they ought to get a copy of the report and read it. It is not a very large report and it summarises the issues much better than I can do in the few minutes that I have available to me.

This inquiry took place only a couple of years after the Blewett inquiry into effectively the same issues. From memory, the Blewett inquiry came up with 70-odd recommendations. I am a little disappointed that we have not implemented all of the recommendations of that inquiry, one in particular, which I will come to in just a moment. Nevertheless, this issue is very important to so many people across the country, particularly producers, food growers and food manufacturers. It is important on two grounds. Firstly, I believe that a consumer has the right to know what is in food, they have the right to know where it is grown and they have the right to know in which country it was processed or transformed. I believe that is a fundamental entitlement of people throughout Australia when they make choices about the food and the product they are going to buy given that standards vary from one country to another when it comes to manufacturing products across the world. Secondly, it is important to the producers themselves, whether they are a manufacturer in the broad sense or a food producer. Again, having a clear understanding of where the product is made becomes a very important and effective marketing tool that we all know makes a difference to the survival of businesses around the place.

If I can just go back for a moment to the question of the right for consumers to know all about this, the right is important because we know full well in today's day and age, when we live in a global environment, that not all countries produce their food in exactly the same way and under the same safety standards that we do in Australia. When someone makes a choice about what they are going to buy, I believe they have a right to make that choice in the full knowledge of where the product came from, and then they can make a judgement as to whether they feel confident in it or not. With respect to the producers, can I also add this comment: again, they also compete today in a global world and their markets in turn have a right to know where products come from, because they can make exactly the same judgements about where they will source their product and where they will not.

The eight recommendations talk about how we can simplify doing that, and I am fully in support of the recommendations. It will be interesting to see whether they are adopted by government and whether they are modified. In essence, what we tried to do as a committee is simplify the information that is available to consumers so that it makes it a little bit easier for them to make that choice. As part of the survey we had representations from the Choice organisation, who from their surveys claimed that 40 per cent of Australians believe that it is crucial for them to know where products are coming from.

There are a couple of other concerns that I have with respect to this whole process, and I want to very briefly touch on them. The first is the fact that food standards, in particular, are controlled under the Food Standards Australia New Zealand protocol that we have in place—it is an arrangement we have with New Zealand. It is an arrangement that I believe was put into effect in about 1995 or 1996—it is almost 20 years old. At the time it might have seemed and sounded like it was a good idea. The reality is that today we and New Zealand operate as competing countries in respect of a whole range of products. It is my view that the arrangement whereby we work in cooperation with New Zealand may well be appropriate with respect to the food quality standards information that goes on the food but, when it comes to the country-of-origin labelling, the matter ought to be separated—taken out of FSANZ and given to the ACCC to deal with—as was recommended in recommendation 41 under the Blewett inquiry. So I guess my view is: yes, we maintain an arrangement with New Zealand about prescribing the nutritional content and the health information that is required on packaging, but, when it comes to country-of-origin labelling as to where the product comes from, that becomes a separate matter and it ought to go to the ACCC and not to FSANZ.

That would also overcome my second problem relating to the fact that we are indeed competing with New Zealand with respect to a whole range of products. In fact, in the course of the inquiry it became clear that because of the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Arrangement that we have with New Zealand there is a degree of confusion about what we allow in from New Zealand and what labelling information is required from their products as opposed to what comes from other countries. In other words, in the eyes of some, the New Zealand arrangement allows products to be brought into Australia—you might say under a backdoor arrangement—that we would otherwise not necessarily have allowed into Australia were it not for that arrangement. There were some sureties given that that is not necessarily the case and that the process we use is quite robust and so on, but I am not sure whether that satisfies everyone. My view is that where we see today that we enter into free trade agreements with countries, as New Zealand has done, we are nevertheless competitors on a whole range of products and it would be much easier and much clearer if we actually had our own system in place.

The last comment I will make about all this is that it is true that in recent times we have entered into several free trade agreements with other countries. The primary reason, in my view, for having pushed through with those free trade agreements is to try and open markets to our producers and in particular our primary producers, our farmers and so on. We know full well that Australian product is very much in demand right across the world because of the way we produce things in this country. We even heard stories about how, for our dairy farmers, the price of milk could well go up to about $8 a litre in places like China where those who are bit more affluent would be prepared to pay those kinds of prices for Australian milk because they have more confidence in it than in the milk that comes from other places.

So labelling, and clear labelling, is just as important if we are going to try and help our primary producers as it is to do all of the other things that we are trying to do. It is important to open up markets in other countries if those other markets can also have confidence in the labelling. But it is also important because back here in Australia our consumers are part of the markets that producers are missing out on because the labelling has been blurred over the years.

I think this issue has been talked about for far too long. I think there is enough willingness from the Australian public to say we need a change. That is what drove this inquiry in the first place. We have come up with some recommendations, and I think it is high time that we made the labelling system of products here in Australia much clearer for all.

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