Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He is not commenting! Well, I am here to tell you that the acai berries are delicious. My constituent bought a packet of acai berries, presumably to make himself a delicious acai breakfast bowl but perhaps for other purposes—we did not really get into that. He showed me the packet and, again, it said on the packet, 'Made from local and imported ingredients.' He said to me, 'They're just berries. There's nothing else in the packet except for all these berries. How can they possibly be made from local and imported ingredients?' These are very good and interesting questions, but they are also very serious questions. If you want to buy Australian and you are an Australian who wishes to see money spent in Australia stay in Australia, then you do want to know where your food comes from and whether or not you are able to meet your ambition for your consumption by looking at food labelling.

As you know, Mr Speaker, this bill will give us some assistance in knowing a little more about where the content of packages has come from and where it has been made. Obviously, it will not go into a detailed ingredient-by-ingredient description of every component of everything that is in a packet, but it will give consumers a bit more to go on than they have had in the past. Mr Speaker, you will be aware, of course, of the labels proposed by this bill to be used. The label will give a little diagram that will show people the proportion of ingredients made in Australia in a given packet. That diagram will have your very familiar 'Made in Australia' logo on it—the triangle with the kangaroo; we have all seen that for many years in this country. Underneath the kangaroo logo, there will be a little window that will be shaded to indicate what proportion of the contents of the packet are made from Australian ingredients. The words underneath will say, 'Made in Australia from zero per cent Australian ingredients,' 'Made in Australia from less than 25 per cent Australian ingredients,' 'Made in Australia from more than 25 per cent Australian ingredients,' 'Made in Australia from more than 50 per cent Australian ingredients,' and so on. That will be the 'Made in' country-of-origin claim and there will also be 'Grown in' country-of-origin claims and 'Packed in' statements. All of those three things are of concern to people in the community, and that includes my constituents.

I think that these changes are a step in the right direction. Obviously, ideally constituents of mine would like to know very clearly all of those things—where things were made, where they have been packed, where they have been grown and about all the ingredients in the food that they have purchased—for a range of reasons, and they would be interested in knowing those things when they are at the supermarket. When you are at the supermarket, I do not know about you, Mr Deputy Speaker Coulton, but I certainly do pick up the packets and find out where things have been made or where they have been grown to the extent that the information is currently available because, as a consumer, I do want to be able to make a choice.

We have so much choice available to us, so we do want, when selecting between different goods, to be able to make an informed choice, and we—whether it is because of patriotism, whether it is because we have known people who have lost their jobs in Australia through redundancies when work has dried up or whether it is because we have friends or family who have been in that situation—want a situation where we buy Australian first. That is certainly something that a number of people in my electorate worry about, so a piece of legislation like this one is very important.

Food labelling seems like it is quite a mundane thing; it seems like it is quite an everyday question, but it is really important to the informed choice of consumers, to the money that is spent in Australia and to the question of whether the money does stay on our shores. I do believe that Australians are entitled to know exactly where their food comes from and, accordingly, I take this issue very seriously, as does Labor.

You would also be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, that, in government, Labor conducted a comprehensive review of labelling laws, and that we worked very closely with the states, through the Council of Australian Governments, to improve guidance for both consumers and industry. We also recognised that consumers are not the only people participating in the market in Australia when it comes to Australian food. Producers are also participants, and it is really important that, when we think about the rights of consumers, we do make sure we are not putting an undue burden on Australia's food processors for many reasons: nobody wants to see people have undue burdens placed on them, and it would be counterproductive if it meant that food processing and manufacturing ended up going offshore.

The food-processing industry is an industry that is very important to Australia, and it is something we are good at because we are a safe country, we are not a corrupt country and we are a country where there are very high-quality standards, and those things are all very important for contributing to the quality of Australian-made products. Australian consumers benefit from food being produced, made, grown and packed here in Australia, and so I certainly support the importance of not placing an undue burden on Australia's food processors and thereby avoiding the possible perverse effect of sending manufacturing offshore.

Labor committed to funding a bipartisan solution on food labelling in February 2015. We called on the government to consult with consumer groups and food industry representatives. In doing so, we did highlight the need to get all of the relevant ministers together to develop a comprehensive and consistent approach to supporting Australia's food industry. We also said that the government should start by addressing the recommendations of the bipartisan House of Representatives report on food labelling, and that we stood ready to constructively consider any positive policy processes that might result from this process.

Buying Australian is the best way to secure quality food, and Labor remains willing to work with the Prime Minister and his colleagues to improve the country-of-origin labelling requirements. We also strongly urge the government to think a bit more broadly about biosecurity and we also strongly encourage the government to do what it can to encourage and support Australian manufacturing.

It is unfortunate that we have not really seen that strong commitment to Australian manufacturing from this government since it took office in September 2013. You only have to think, when it comes to manufacturing more broadly, of the way that the car industry was goaded into leaving Australia or you only have to think about what happened with SPC, for example. More broadly, what is really lacking from the discussion in this House is a serious industry policy aimed at reinvigorating Australian manufacturing. There are some people who say, 'Oh well, Australian manufacturing cannot be reinvigorated,' and they are absolutely wrong. In fact, if you look around this country you will see amazing examples of advanced manufacturing and what is possible through technology, through systems innovation and through leveraging that really high quality that we have. A good example, in my view, is the company Swiss that does the supplements—a really interesting firm, a really innovative firm. They manufacture here in Australia, because it gives them an advantage in overseas markets to be able to say that they produce their products here in Australia where there are those high-quality standards.

I also had the benefit recently of getting to know a little bit about some of the other manufacturing that is happening onshore. In fact, Johnson & Johnson stopped by my office, as I am sure they did many offices in this place recently, and mentioned their view in the course of the conversation that Australia is a great place for manufacturing, particularly for advanced manufacturing.

I would like to see more from this government in terms of Australian manufacturing, promoting Australian manufacturing and talking up our ability to be a great place for manufacturing to occur. That goes for food manufacturing, but it also goes for so much more when we are talking about what is possible in manufacturing, including advanced manufacturing, in this country.

We all know, everyone in this place knows very well, that there is a great big challenge for this parliament and for the government when it comes to Australian jobs, because Australian jobs need to be better. We need more jobs, and we need our jobs to be more secure. There is a real set of problems in our economy at the moment. There are 700,000 people in the unemployment queues, people who cannot even get a single hour of work. There are 1.1 million people who are underemployed, who want more work or who want more secure work. The underemployment rate is the highest it has been since the records started being kept in 1978, the year after I was born. That is a very worrying thing, and it should be worrying for all of us because that sometimes more hidden element of underemployment is really contributing to a range of the problems we have in this country—problems like really low wages growth; wages growth is at its lowest level since 1997 when the Wage Price Index commenced being kept.

It is a problem for the Commonwealth government budget—slow income growth affects revenue negatively—but also it is a problem for those households. They are not seeing wages growth. They are not seeing their living standards increase at the rate that economic growth in this country is increasing. It is not a problem that we want to import. It is a US style problem and they have had this issue for a number of years. We should not be importing that into Australia.

We need a jobs focus. We also need to remember that there are around one million people in Australia on temporary work visas of one kind or another. That should be concerning to people, particularly of that group. We should be particularly concerned about those who are here on visas that are designed to fill skills shortage gaps, the 457 visas. We should be particularly concerned about that because those numbers have been stubbornly high.

Why should it be that we have had the occupation of bricklayer on the temporary skilled migration list for longer than it takes to train bricklayers in this country? Fair cop that there was a sudden lack of bricklayers in Australia and we needed to get a bunch of them in to overcome that lack, but why in the years since then have we not trained enough bricklayers so that we can make the 457 visa for bricklayers obsolete? There are plenty of occupations on the 457 visa list, and that is something that should be of concern to us. That means we do need to be worried about jobs. We do need to talk about jobs in this place. And when we talk about jobs we mean jobs for locals, jobs that are secure, jobs that are available and jobs for which training and skills development are available. They are very important things.

These issues do not just affect the households of people who do not have work but also they affect the whole economy. If people are in secure work, if people have high levels of private debt, which we have in Australia, and they are worried about their capacity to service that debt, if people cannot get work in the first place, those things as well as affecting the household budget also affect the Commonwealth government budget and the national economy. This is because they have a detrimental effect on consumption, on aggregate demand. Those things should be worrying for all of us wondering where we are going to get the economic growth from that our country needs.

I would say that in talking about a bill that relates to issues on manufacturing we do need to be constantly mindful of making sure that there are jobs for Australian kids when they grow up and that people who are already in the workforce and employed, in the workforce and employed but underemployed, or seeking work, participating in the workforce but not having work, are able to get the jobs they need and the jobs they should be able to, in a country like ours with strong economic growth.

For all of those reasons as well as for the consumer-driven reasons I mentioned earlier, it is important and relevant for us to be talking about buying Australian, building Australian and employing Australian. Those three things are important when it comes to this bill. We do want to help consumers be in a position where they can be confident, when making a choice, that they are buying Australian, if that is what they wish to do. Accordingly, I am very pleased there has been some progress on the country-of-origin labelling. I know my constituent Mr Korlaki will also be very pleased that there has been some progress, although I suspect he would have liked a bit more progress. I commend the built the House.

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