Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the amendment. I too want to speak about the labelling laws and the complementary medicines industry. The complementary medicines sector made various representations to the government and to the federal opposition, outlining their concerns about the impact of this legislation, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Consumer Law—Country of Origin Representations) Bill 2020. We know that there is a thirst among the Australian public and the Australian consumer for good labelling, knowing what's in their products and where they're sourced. That may be said for food products and different manufacturing products, but in the case of complementary medicines there was a bit of overkill. Many pharmaceutical companies that produce complementary medicines source particular ingredients, parts of ingredients, from other parts of the world when they cannot be grown or sourced here to make that product. What happens is that those ingredients and products come here, and the complementary medicine is manufactured here. The bulk of the work is done here in Australia—as we heard, by over 30,000 people employed in a $5 billion industry. As a parliament we should be doing as much as we can to keep those jobs here, to keep these companies manufacturing products here and to ensure that we are creating jobs out of it.

I will give you some examples of the way that the legislation will work. Let's look at some of Australia's iconic products and names. One that used to exist but no longer exists—and we won't go into the reasons why it no longer exists—is Holden. Can you imagine Holden, an iconic Australian brand and product, manufactured in Australia, as it had been for many years, not being able to meet the requirements to sell itself as an Australian made product because the raw ingredient of the rubber had to come from Malaysia? That's similar to what's happening here in the pharmaceutical industry. Another example is Arnott's, a great, iconic company in my electorate, in Marleston. They produce Tim Tams. You can't get more Australian than Tim Tams. They have to source the cacao from Africa, I think, because we just do not produce it here. It doesn't come from anywhere else. Can you imagine if they weren't allowed to get their Australian Made logo?

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