Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Biosecurity Amendment (Ballast Water and Other Measures} Bill 2017. The bill amends the Biosecurity Act 2015 to make essential changes to requirements for the control and management of ships' ballast water to reduce the risk of invasive marine pests and pathogens entering Australian waters. The bill will ensure that Australia will be legislatively compliant with the international convention on ballast water when it comes into force on 8 September 2017. The bill builds on the original intent of the act by providing additional powers designed to strengthen Australia's ability to manage risks to human health, firstly by broadening the existing power to destroy exotic vectors—that is, carriers—of human disease of concern on vessels and aircraft arriving in Australia; secondly, by reinstating a previous power from the superseded Quarantine Act 1908 for human health officials to direct private parties to undertake control activities if an exotic vector or carrier incursion, such as the mosquito-borne Zika virus, is detected.

I spoke earlier in the House on another issue of biosecurity—the Australian honey bee. As deputy chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, I spoke about the aptly named Safe Keeping report coming out of the inquiry into biosecurity of our honey bees in Australia. It was tabled just yesterday in this House. I am pleased to have worked with chair Rick Wilson on this. I told the House how important the honey bee is to Australia and that its value to our economy is in the order of $4 billion when its role as a pollinator is taken into account.

Our honey bees are healthy, due in part to our isolation, but also because of the vigilance of our biosecurity measures. But the risk of invasive pets and diseases is increasing because of world trade and international travel. There are risks to the honey bee from the Asian honey bee, but the main one is from the Varroa mite, which is present in every bee-keeping country across the world except Australia. That is something that we need to be proud of but also vigilant about. The committee made a number of recommendations, the main one being extending the National Bee Pest Surveillance Program to cover more ports and airports. The program, which involves a system of hives, lures and traps at the main points of entry, currently covers 32 ports.

The committee has recommended the program be expanded to cover 54 ports, or almost 100 per cent of our trade. The annual cost of this $1.9 million program is well worth it, given the annual $4 billion contribution of the honey bee to Australia. I am hoping the Turnbull government takes on board the recommendations of the committee regarding the honey bee to ensure its future contribution to our economy. The government is to be commended for this biosecurity amendment regarding ballast water, and Labor fully supports it. But it must be acknowledged that the Labor Party did the hard work in developing a modernised biosecurity framework, which included a large body of work to strengthen the management of ships' ballast water. We did that work. We set this framework up.

The issue of ships' ballast is a very important one for biosecurity in Australia. Each year around 200 million tonnes of ships' ballast is just discharged into Australian ports by around 13,000 ships from more than 600 overseas ports. Australia is particularly vulnerable to biosecurity incursions, as many cargo ships arrive here without cargo, meaning they come full of ballast water which must be discharged into our waters before the cargo can be loaded. The same can also be said for some arriving cruise ships. When ballast water is taken up in these far-flung ports, marine organisms can be picked up too, and they are released in our waters when the ballast is discharged. Pests such as bacteria, microbes, small invertebrates, eggs, cysts and larvae of various species can all find their way here into our waters. In fact it is estimated that 10,000 different species are moved around the world in ballast every single day.

Sometimes those pests do not cause too much of a problem. For example, we know there are introduced species in Port Jackson and Botany Bay in Sydney, Port Kembla, the Port of Eden, and the port of Newcastle, near my electorate of Paterson. These exotic species do not appear to have an ecological or economic impact. They include aquarium caulerpa, New Zealand screw shell, European fan worm, and European green shore crab. But introduced marine pests can cause serious environmental and economic damage. There has been an invasion in Australia of the Northern Pacific sea star, which was introduced to Tasmania through ballast water from Japan in the 1980s and into Victoria through ballast water in the 1990s.

It led to reduced shellfish production in Tasmania and damaged marine ecosystems in both Tasmania and Victoria. Of course, we now have the much maligned white spot disease. We are not certain how white spot came to Australia, but it shows the devastating effect of a virus on species such as prawns, and how vigilant we need to be. White spot was detected last year in prawn farms in the Logan River, south of Brisbane, and has now been found in wild prawns in Moreton Bay. Queensland authorities say that it is unstoppable and will have to die out naturally. White spot is highly contagious, is lethal to crustaceans and, overseas, has reduced prawn farm productivity by up to 40 per cent. The Logan River prawn farms have seen productivity losses of up to 80 per cent. We have had a bad experience before and we must do our best to ensure this does not happen again.

You have to wonder whether, if the government had acted sooner to bring in this amendment, we might not have the current outbreak of white spot disease in prawns. The government decided it was better to give business more flexibility to choose their own cost-effective option in meeting the requirements of the Ballast Water Management Convention, but this delay may have caused our prawn industry irreparable damage. This current legislation will ensure that Australia is fully legislatively compliant with the ballast water convention when it comes into force this September. That we, as part developers of that convention, are fully up to speed with the rest of the world is a good thing. Schedule 2 of the bill relates to additional vector management powers needed under the Biosecurity Act to ensure Australia is not left vulnerable to significant human health risks. The need for these powers is demonstrated by rising global detections of the mosquito-borne zika virus. The bill seeks to reduce the likelihood of incursions of carriers that could pose a real concern to human health and to provide powers to manage potential incursions when they are detected.

The Department of Health has worked with state and territory counterparts and communicable disease experts to ensure the amendments address contemporary public health concerns posed by exotic mosquitoes, like the zika virus. These amendments will be supported by nationally consistent arrangements to support collaboration across different levels of government, and that is critical as well. The states must be involved. Labor understands the importance of our biosecurity systems and that strong biosecurity will contribute to our economy. The strength of our biosecurity systems is absolutely paramount for Australia's reputation as clean, green and safe, particularly as a producer of food. We must ensure that we absolutely guard 'brand Australia' as being clean, green and safe. Getting rid of introduced marine pests once they have been established is extremely difficult, if not impossible, and we are seeing that borne out by white spot. However, we must be eternally vigilant about our biosecurity, because even though we are a great island nation, that mighty water out there cannot protect us and in fact can sometimes deliver us those vectors that we do not want in this country. I am pleased to say that we support this bill, but we need to continue to be vigilant, and biosecurity is one way that we can do that.

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