Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

It is outrageous. Alarmingly, a leading international honey bee fraud detection unit—there's obviously an acronym that's going to be formed there—found that half the honey samples tested from around Australian supermarkets were altered honey in some way. Shamefully, they were being advertised as 100 per cent honey, but they contained this sugar syrup.

This is an important issue of great concern to me, my state and the industry more widely. I have written to the minister, Minister Watt, on behalf of our honey bee industry. I have been advised by the minister that the department is currently making moves in order to strengthen the test imported honey, which I welcome. However, I must reiterate the importance of listening to the views and knowledge within our industry. I will certainly be keeping a very close eye on this matter to ensure that we move to eliminate honey fraud once and for all.

Honey fraud is not the only pressing issue on the minds of our honey bee industry. Labor's new fresh food tax has been introduced into parliament. Ever since the biosecurity protection levy was first proposed, there have been questions raised about the serious failures within this policy design. A recent report by the Australian National University has found that, given the considerable weaknesses in the proposed levy, an alternative policy approach is recommended. This is just further evidence to back up what producers have been saying to me right from the beginning. Our honey producers, for example, have been directly impacted by the varroa mite and have lost productivity and incomes, and they're paying tens of millions of dollars in emergency biosecurity levies and are now about to be hit by the new biosecurity tax that will go directly into consolidated government revenue.

This call is for the government to scrap the bill and increase charges for those who create the biosecurity risk in the first place, such as importers and travellers. The second option is to further fund biosecurity protections through general revenue. I wholeheartedly agree.

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