Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my time in this great House of Representatives of the Australian people, I have come across some very interesting and diligent work undertaken by various committees, particularly committees related to agriculture. The report More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries, of the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, is probably one of the most important reports ever to hit this place. It contains 26 recommendations that the government of the day should look at very seriously and implement as quickly as possible. Until the inquiry on the honey bee industry commenced, many people were totally ignorant of the importance of the honey bee to the whole way in which we as a community operate. For example, humankind relies on the pollination process to increase production in agriculture and horticulture.

Many of the issues that were raised in evidence to this inquiry centred around those things that impact on the honey bee population—that is, bushfires, access to national parks and state forests, the stupidity of governments of all political persuasions at the state and federal level, biosecurity and the lack of biosecurity. We recently saw how important biosecurity was to the way equine influenza impacted and savaged in a very short period of time the equine industry in this country. We also have to be aware that biosecurity is very important because we are under threat from incursions of exotic pests and mites, particularly the Varroa destructor mite—or the varroa mite, as it is commonly known. We are the only country in the world that is free of the varroa mite. The varroa mite attaches itself to honey bees and over a period of time infects their hives, and then we see the honey bee population dying.

We have seen more recently the honey bee established in New Zealand. Four years ago, the destructor mite got into New Zealand and we understand from the reports that we have received from New Zealand that it has already impacted on the honey bee population to the extent of decimating it by about 35 or 40 per cent.

Why are we concerned about it? The honey bee industry makes this contribution to this country: it produces about $65 million worth of honey and honey bee products, some of them medicinal products. Of that, $50 million is directly related to honey itself, and the remaining $15 million comes from the medicinal and other products that many people use, which I understand are very good.

More importantly, the honey bee pollinates our agriculture and horticultural crops. That is not only the hived, controlled bees that beekeepers keep but more importantly the feral honey bees, which were released in the 1800s and have multiplied at a dramatic rate. They pollinate not just the fruit and vegetables and other foodstuffs on our supermarket shelves that you and I take for granted but also pastures such as lucerne and other crops on which we are dependent to graze our animals and for our food and other by-products. Depending on who you talk to, the honey bee contributes between $3 billion and $6 billion to the economy of this country. When you look at that and at the actual honey bee industry and at what it contributes directly in honey and honey bee products, you have to say to yourself, ‘Gee, these little animals are punching above their weight,’ and they are. This comment was made during the evidence: no honey, no money. I cannot think of another phrase that would be more poignant—no honey, no money.

As a member of parliament one of the things about which I get very disconcerted and disappointed—and I know you, Madam Deputy Speaker Bird, and other members in this place today have been members of committees that have submitted reports to governments of all political persuasions; I am not being partisan about this particular government—is seeing hundreds and hundreds of hours put in by members of parliament and seeing professional, committed work undertaken by the support crews of the secretariats of this place in putting reports together with very, very significant recommendations for governments to undertake for the protection of the environment, agriculture or whatever; and what do we do? The ministers of the day pay lip-service to them and do not look at them as seriously as they should. More importantly, they do not take up the recommendations and act on them.

I am appealing to the new Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Hon. Tony Burke, who I believe is a very good, honest, committed individual, to look at this report and do something constructive for agriculture and horticulture in this country by taking up its recommendations—and not only from the point of view of protecting the honey bee and putting some money into the system so that we can set up a research centre to train people, which is very, very important. As in many industries, the people in the honey bee industry are ageing and, because of the little income they are able to generate through their professional commitment to the industry, we are not attracting young people to it. As a result, many of the skills in the honey bee industry have disappeared or are disappearing. We have got to the horrifying situation where we import people from Asian countries such as China to supplement the people in the industry to undertake the apiarist work, which is fine in detail and very, very important. It is terribly frustrating to try to maintain an industry and keep the momentum going to make sure that the industry continues to contribute to the economic viability of agriculture and horticulture.

It must also be terribly frustrating for people in the CSIRO. There are some scientists in the CSIRO who are world renowned for their knowledge of the honey bee and the industry itself. They are in demand in various countries around the world that are having problems with exotic pests and mites such as the varroa mite, but they do not have backup facilities available to them to pass on their significant knowledge and train young people in the very, very important role that the honey bee industry plays through that little insect, the honey bee.

A lot of people do not understand that we have a very lucrative business. As well as exporting honey because of the unique flavours of our honey because of our native flora, we also export packaged honey bees, an industry that is slowly increasing in size because of the demands upon it. Many people do not understand that California in the United States, for example, has the biggest almond-growing industry in the world. The varroa mite has affected that almond-growing industry to the extent that they have lost somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of their honey bee population. We supplement their honey bee population by exporting our honey bees to California so that they can pollinate the blossoms and get the yields from the almond industry in the United States. That is a classic example. People do not understand that we actually take semen from bees, just as we do from animals, to get new strains and improve the strains of existing bees. It is a very intricate and finely tuned industry that is very, very important to people right across the world. It is as important to the Australian people as the survival of our agricultural and horticultural industries.

One of the things that people do not understand about the honey bee pollination process is that, when a honey bee pollinates a flower, when that flower turns into a fruit or a vegetable, because of the pollination process, it becomes a fruit that is more uniform, is larger and contains flavour. So the pollination process of the honey bees actually contributes to the quality and the quantity of the fruit and the vegetables that they pollinate in their little busy excursions from place to place. They probably have a work ethic that is greater than that of members of parliament! We often get criticised about our work effort, but our work effort pales into insignificance when you look at this little animal flying around from flower to flower in the pollination process. They are very busy little bees.

When we talk about biosecurity, we do not just talk about the sentinel boxes around this great country of ours; we talk about the need to have biosecurity measures at our internal borders. In other words, the states have to do something about ensuring that insects and exotic pests that come into this country which are capable of doing some very destructive work to a honey bee are isolated in a state, when they get into a particular state, so that they can be addressed with some very professional biosecurity measures at the state level in conjunction with the federal authorities.

When you look at the other things that affect the honey bee, at all the dangers and the threats around them, you see that they are pretty stoic individuals. They have little, weeny legs and little hands that use boxing gloves trying to fight off all of these threats to them. But they are a very significant and important part of the whole of what we understand to be nature. Unless we grab the nettle of the importance of this particular report and pick up the recommendations in it, and more importantly act upon the recommendations in it, we will see things happening in this country that we have never seen and never dreamed of before if the varroa mite gets in here. I know that the farmers out there are now starting to understand how important the honey bee is to their crops. But, more importantly, the honey bee industry is going to go through a different phase now. It has been concentrating on producing honey and forgetting about the pollination process. When bees go and pollinate they actually give farmers and people some of their honey product as payment for allowing them to put their hives there. But people have suddenly realised that, because of the danger of the varroa mite, and the possibility that the honey bee population is going to drop significantly, they are going to have to pay for the pollination processes. From the evidence we have heard, in the future that is going to make up about 60 per cent of the income of honey bee hive operators. So it is very important that we understand.

Not only is the pollination process important to keep the honey bee industry alive but it is critically important that we understand that without honey bees we will have a massive problem in our food bowl in this country. Australia’s food bowl is well respected internationally for supplying food to people outside of our borders. If we have that threat come into the country—it is not a question of if; it is a question of when—and we are not prepared for it then we will have ourselves to blame. The recommendations in this report quite succinctly point out to the government of the day that the minister of the day responsible for agriculture and horticulture has to put the money into the industry to make sure we give the scientists and the experts in the honey bee industry the opportunity to prepare for the threat and perhaps come up with some answers that may in fact stop the threat, kill off the Varroa destructor and perhaps help the rest of the world get back to increasing the population of honey bees and producing food for the very needy people right throughout the world.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am honoured to follow the member for Hume in speaking to this report—More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries. I will acknowledge up-front his work and his passion in this area. I do not get to go to the movies much anymore—to see movies that I want to see, anyway—but earlier this year I took my three-year-old son to see Jerry Seinfeld’s foray into animation called the Bee Movie. Not having been in the previous parliament, the Bee Movie is probably not the best place to start doing research for this, but I did go along—

Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My grandsons have told me I have to go and see it.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You must see it, Member for Hume. I recommend that you go and see it. Obviously, a movie theatre filled with screaming kids is not the place one would expect to find insight for political commentary, but this children’s movie, the Bee Movie, opened my eyes to a world without bees. When Barry the Bee discovers that humans are stealing honey from the bees and selling it for profit, it leads to him take legal action against the honey industry—in fact, he leads a class action. A rather adventurous US court finds in favour of the bees, who then shut down production. Bees all around the world are free to stop working. This leads to unintended consequences because, without bees, as the member for Hume pointed out, there is no pollination, and without pollination millions of plant species would eventually disappear. Thankfully, however, most of our native flora in Australia are not reliant on European honey bees for pollination. Unfortunately, most of our commercial crops are not native to Australia. The Australian honey bee industry generates around $70-plus million of honey and related products each year. After having been on the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources for this inquiry, like having seen the Bee Movie, I better understand how important bees are for all of Australia.

Honey bees are not just about honey. We need honey bees to pollinate our crops in order to produce fruits, vegetables and grains. If this shut down then the Brisbane markets, which are in my electorate, would be in dire straits. Other industries like wool, meat and dairy also rely heavily on honey bees. It is estimated that honey bees contribute up to $6 billion a year to our agricultural industry. Some figures suggest that every third bite we consume in our diet is dependant on a honey bee to pollinate that food. As the member for Hume stated, they are very hardworking little animals. So 30 per cent of our diet is dependant on honey bees. Honey bees are vital to Australian agriculture, and any threat to honey bees in Australia must be taken very seriously.

Earlier this year, over Easter, I went to a school reunion at my old school in St George and caught up with one of my class mates, David Moon, who now runs a million-dollar agricultural business where they grow rockmelons. His name is Moon, so it is actually called Moonrocks. He was saying that that whole industry is 100 per cent reliant on bees and beekeepers. Even though there are no beekeepers in St George, they drive out west to pollinate the crops. But, like the bee itself, there is a sting in this tail. In response to the biosecurity threats facing the bee industry and the importance of the industry to Australian agriculture, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, reactivated the inquiry into honey bees earlier this year at the request of the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources. Exotic pests like the parasitic mite, very accurately called the Varroa destructor, loom as a major quarantine threat to our border security and to the honey bee industry. One bonus of being an island continent is that we are the only place in the world that does not have the Varroa destructor mite. However, submissions to the inquiry regarded the arrival of varroa in Australia as being a case of not really if but when. How we as a government respond to this threat and help the industry prepare for the future will be a major test.

As well as biosecurity threats the industry is facing lower profits due to international competition. The More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries report offers a thorough commentary on the issues confronting the Australian honey bee industry. The government will closely consider each of the 25 recommendations made by the committee in this report. These recommendations range from improved research and training for pollination services to better biosecurity measures and a new labelling standard to reflect the composition and origin of honey bee products. As we have learned from the equine influenza disaster, biosecurity is something that we must get right and must reassess all the time. Anyone who has friends, family or neighbours who have worked in the horse industry knows how much they relied on our island status and how much they were betrayed by the shoddy standards that let the equine influenza into Australia. I commend the great work of the former High Court Judge Ian Callinan in terms of giving us some salutary lessons.

The Rudd government is committed to learning the equine influenza lesson and is also committed to a vibrant future for the honey bee industry. The Rudd government will closely consider the committee’s recommendations—including establishing guidelines for beekeeper access to public lands, maintaining and enhancing the National Sentinel Hive Program, establishing and funding a new honey bee quarantine facility and establishing and funding a national endemic pest and disease control program. I am also pleased to acknowledge that work is already underway on a number of these fronts. The government recently provided grants of around $660,000 for the industry to develop an environmental code of conduct that can be spread throughout the beekeeping industry. We are also committed to beekeeping training materials and to conducting strategic planning for the industry. That might be as simple as knowing where the hives are and who is responsible for the hives.

The government also provides assistance to the honey bee industry through quarantine services—including assessing import permit applications; screening imported bees and bee products; conducting surveillance activities on international vessels and ports of call; certifying exports, including providing export documentation; and developing export controls. A National Sentinel Hive Program at Australia’s 20 busiest ports has also been developed to assist in providing early warning of possible incursions of varroa mites. The government has also worked with the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation to establish a new cross-industry alliance to guide the development of a commercial pollination services industry. This alliance, called Pollination Australia, will support the honey bee industry and enable continued pollination of important food crops in Australia. Pollination Australia will help drive a strong working relationship between the honey bee industry and those industries that depend on honey bee pollination, be they rockmelon growers or the many others I have listed. I encourage industry and related stakeholders to continue to work with government as we advance ways to ensure the ongoing viability of the honey bee industry.

In closing I want to thank the committee chair, the member for Lyons, Dick Adams; and the deputy chair, the member for Hume, Alby Schultz, for their efforts in driving this inquiry, which has spanned two parliaments. I also want to thank the committee secretary, Janet Holmes, and the inquiry secretary, Dr Bill Pender, and all of their staff for the high standard of work that they pulled together. This report is a fine example of bipartisan common sense. Out of respect for the member for New England, Mr Tony Windsor, perhaps I should say tripartisan common sense.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Very sweet comments you make!

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not sure if it was this year or last year that we lost one of the world’s most famous beekeepers, Sir Edmund Hillary. What is in front of the honey industry is a bit like what faced him when he considered climbing the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. It took a lot of planning but also a lot of hard work. That is what Pollination Australia has in front of it. I commend this report to the House.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Does the member seek to ask a question?

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a question that is relevant to the member’s speech. Will the member give way for a question?

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the member willing to take the question?

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Definitely.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Would the member consider extending his support to beekeeping in national parks, given the threat to that in Queensland?

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are talking specifically about beekeeping in Queensland national parks and the moves to remove it. The committee did consider this. I commit to discussing this further with the state government. On the weekend I spoke to the Queensland Premier’s major adviser in this area, and I am going to consider it further. I was aware of that policy before coming to parliament. Having been on this committee, I am much more aware of how much work needs to be done to get it right. I do have a bit of hope that, like the horse-riding industry, you can come up with a compromise that will protect the bee industry but also do what is best for our national parks in Queensland. That is the commitment I can give you.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I support the findings of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources in terms of the honey bee industry. I endorse the congratulations that the member for Moreton just made to our committee chair, the member for Lyons, and I congratulate the member for Hume, who is now the deputy chair but who was the chair prior to the election. One of the interesting things about this committee is that it has made a seamless change, irrespective of who is in government. The committee is ploughing on with the work, and I think that reflects well not only on the committee and the secretariat but particularly on the two chairs that we have had. I congratulate the member for Lyons and the member for Hume for the excellent way in which they have both conducted the chairmanship of the committee.

The member for Hume made some interesting comments about the varroa mite and the impact that that can have on the honey bee industry. There is an extraordinary amount to be learnt, I think, from reading the report More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries and from people doing a little bit of homework on the contribution that the honey bee makes, not only in terms of pollination. We have heard that it makes an indirect contribution to our economy of about $6 billion, even though it is only a $70 million industry. It is that indirect effect that I do not think people fully understand, and I take on board the question that was asked a moment ago in terms of access to national parks and public lands.

The honey bee is very important to agriculture, and it is very important to human life in the way it pollinates various plants et cetera. It also produces a very healthy product. On two occasions now, once during this inquiry and once during the inquiry into feral animals, where we originally came into contact with beekeepers, the committee came across some of the health-giving attributes of honey in curing certain illnesses and particularly skin disorders et cetera. I think it is important when we see a beehive that we actually pay regard to what is going on there. Honey bees are small critters, as the member for Hume indicated, but they are very important workers in our environment, and I think the issue of the varroa mite, or the Varroa destructor, that has been mentioned by both the previous speakers—and I am sure the chair will mention it as well—is one that the minister really does have to pay regard to because of the biosecurity issues for this nation. We are blessed to be an island nation, but that does not prevent some of these diseases and mites et cetera coming into our country. If the Varroa destructor gets going in Australia, it could do an enormous amount of damage. The name is well understood—it is an absolute destructor, not only of that industry but also of the contribution that that industry makes to other agricultural and natural industries.

I support the comments of the member for Hume about this report not being left on the shelf. Too many reports where an enormous amount of work has been done by committee members and the secretariat et cetera never see the light of day in policy. If we are serious about driving policy on a bipartisan level—and we all get up from time to time and make that plea—the committee process in a committee like this, where people do not play games with one another in terms of the politics, is the way we should be driving that bipartisan approach. The easy way for that to be achieved is for the minister who originally gives the instructions for these reports to be done—and I do not necessarily mean Tony Burke in this case but the minister in a generic sense—to pay far more attention to what those committee people are doing.

I think too often in politics we go to the things that we disagree on rather than focus on achieving the things that we all agree on. I hold the media partly responsible for that, and politicians ourselves are partly responsible for it, but we are always hearing this plea from the general public, who say, ‘I wish they’d just get on with it and get together and organise themselves.’ I think that is what the general public wants. Committee processes are the vehicle to drive that—particularly, as I said, the committee that I have been involved in for a number of years now under the previous government and under the existing government. I have very, very rarely seen—I do not think I could instance a time where I have seen—partisan politics come into the committee room.

I have praised the member for Hume. I have just spoken about the bipartisan approach that we should have on various issues. I hope that the member for Hume is out there watching. I think he probably is. The member for Hume is a personal friend of mine. We were in the New South Wales parliament together for a number of years. He was a member of the Liberal Party and I was an Independent, but I remember that on a couple of occasions the member for Hume—or the member for Burrinjuck, as he was called then—actually crossed the floor and voted with me, an Independent. He obviously suffered a whole range of threats from his party at that time. So I have a high personal regard for the member for Hume and his wife and family. But I would take issue, if I could, with the member for Hume on one particular issue that is raised in the document More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries. I refer him to page 143, section 5.36. I will read from the report:

A ‘single desk’ approach to marketing and exports was advocated in several submissions.

I would like the member for Lyons—and other members who recently voted against a single-desk approach—to take account of this as well. I say again:

A ‘single desk’ approach to marketing and exports was advocated in several submissions.

In its submission, the Forests and Forest Industry Council of Tasmania noted:

The establishment of a ‘single desk’ selling system has been advocated together with work to strengthen the brand and more effort to capture value for the iconic value and rarity of leatherwood honey.

However, these structural and marketing changes need to come from a small association without a paid secretariat and require considerable change from the traditional approach and speed in implementation once adopted. An incremental approach will not work. Sophisticated business management is required to bring it off.

There is a little bit more. This has come from an organisation that, except for its top echelon, is largely hobby farmers. Obviously there is a plea out there, in terms of the export of honey, in this case, that a single-desk arrangement would be preferred. I will go on—and I hope the member for Hume is still paying attention to the monitor in his office. At paragraph 5.37, the report says:

In his submission, Mr Rod Yates, of Australian Honey Exports Pty Ltd, advocated a single desk for exports, but not under the industry’s current leadership—

so there are obviously some issues there. But the important point that I think the member for Hume should understand is in the quote which follows:

Export sales of bulk honey have achieved little for our producers, but have given European packers great profits. The answer is to establish an agreement binding on exporters, particularly in regard to minimum prices and quality, that reflects a fair share of the retail prices for packed product in other markets, in other words, dare I say it, there needs to be a conduit through which exports are facilitated, “a single desk” and it shouldn’t be the existing structure of AHBIC—

the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council—

who are generally mistrusted.

Obviously there are some politics within the industry as well, but there seems to be a plea that a fully deregulated export market of a bulk product is not the best way to market that particular product.

We have just been through the politicisation of the removal of the single desk from the wheat industry. I would also like the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, to pay some heed to what these people are saying—these people who are involved in the industry, who are doing the exporting and who produce the product—as to what is happening on the international stage in relation to the prices they are receiving and where the profits from their hard labours are going. I am sure that, in endorsing these particular phrases, the member for Hume must in fact agree with a single-desk approach in the honey bee industry, but he obviously does not in some other industries.

In closing I will reflect on a few of the major issues that the report goes to. Obviously, research is one. There are certain requests there to the minister and the government in relation to research. The biosecurity issue relates not only to Varroa destructor and other honey bee enemies but also to the other issues that have been raised here, most recently biosecurity issues for the equine industry, for instance. Our biosecurity, our clean, green, island image, is probably the most important natural attribute we have in terms of international trade. We must do everything we can. We all know it is not sexy until something goes wrong, but it is very important that we do have adequate biosecurity measures put in place for our agricultural industries.

Labelling is another issue that the report spent some time on, and once again I will just mention the access to public lands. That is an issue that has been out there for a long time. I remember that when I was in the state parliament it was an issue that was debated along with bushfire control and those sorts of issues. But it should not be seen as a threat to public lands. There is no reason why the honey bee industry cannot or should not have access to those lands. Those lands benefit, the industry benefits and, more importantly, it helps establish a critical mass in terms of those off-site contributions that the honey bee industry makes to the broader economy, particularly agriculture.

James Bidgood (Dawson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is more than honey; it is the money, honey. More than honey: the future of the Australian honey bee and pollination industries is a great report. I congratulate all those of the previous government and previous committee who were involved in this. I note that four of the members of the 41st Parliament on this committee are now on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources in the 42nd Parliament. They are: Alby Schultz, who was the chair previously and is now the deputy chair; the Hon. Dick Adams, who has chaired this committee; John Forrest; and Tony Windsor. Their input has been an education to new members of parliament like me.

It is good work, and I must admit I have learned so much reading this report. It was good to go through it page by page and see that here is an opportunity. Business is all about finding opportunities, maximising opportunities and giving a helping hand to an industry which needs restructuring and which needs government support. The  Rudd Labor government is looking for new forms of investment. We are looking for new ways to increase productivity.

This report recommends that $50 million a year be spent. This will be invested in biosecurity, which I see as possibly the most important aspect of this, because our continent is unique in that we do have the security blessing of being surrounded by oceans. That has made our honey bee unique, and we have to protect that unique Australian honey bee. When we look overseas at export markets, we look at Europe and we look at the standards there. Indeed, we need to help the honey bee industry in this country compete in and export to the European market and to the United States. In order to do that we need higher standards and we need universal standards. We need to bring our industry up to the levels of the European market and the American market. This can only be done with the helping hand of government—a clear hand-up, a clear investment.

As has been said by previous speakers—and I do not wish to duplicate what has been said, but it must be noted—this Australian honey bee industry is worth $80 million a year. In Europe alone, taking in all the aspects of plant based industries, wool, meat and dairy and the way the honey bee interacts with all of those, it is somewhere between $4 billion and $6 billion worth of turnover in the economy. That is a big market and that is a big potential. We have a unique situation with our honey bee. We can offer the world a unique product.

Anyone in business knows that is called niche marketing, and we need to take full advantage of our niche in the global market. I commend the recommendations of this report to invest in building a universal standard which allows us to compete in the European market and in the American market and offer high-quality honey. We obviously need to protect our industry. As I said earlier, I think the most important thing is the biosecurity, because we really do have to protect that honey bee; the investment in increasing standards and increasing research will be wasted if we allow the varroa virus to get into our bees.

There is a five-year plan which has been put forward in this report. It clearly states that, over the next five years, the main aim—and I think it is quite a conservative aim actually, a very safe aim—is to increase the hive yield by 10 per cent and also to increase by 20 per cent the growth in package bees because that is a major export market. Also, through labelling our product correctly and to the standards in Europe and America, we can offer therapeutic honey, as there is great potential to exploit the therapeutic values of honey as well.

In closing, I just want to say it has been a great privilege to be on the committee, and I do say to the chair and the deputy chair that this has been a real education about the unique honey bee. It is about more than honey; it is about money, it is about exports and it is about productivity. The Rudd Labor government is committed to productivity and to giving a helping hand to industries and to agriculture. I know that the minister for agriculture, the Hon. Tony Burke, is also very broad minded and very open to looking at ideas from this report. I think there is great potential and there is a huge market overseas which we could export to.

I would also like to give credit to the committee secretariat. I would just like to name Ms Janet Holmes, Dr Bill Pender, Ms Sam Mannette and Ms Jazmine De Roza. They have had the task of compiling and putting together, under the guidance of the chair and the deputy chair, all that is in this report. I would just like to say that it is a good report. I am proud to have had a small input into it as we went through each page and looked at every recommendation. I commend it to this Committee and to the House.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—This has been a wonderful report to be a part of and, as the previous speaker said, one can learn a lot from one’s work in these committees. In the More than honey report, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industry and Resources has certainly covered a lot of ground. This report really came out of a report that the committee did some time ago, with the then member for Hume as the chair and me as the deputy chair, dealing with rural skills in Australia and trying to find avenues through which to halt the demise of skills out there in rural Australia. The honey bee industry was one of those that came to us and told us of the difficulties that they were having, and we came to the conclusion that there was certainly a need to do a major report into the honey bee industry.

I am pleased that we did, and I am really pleased to have been able to work so well with the honourable member for Hume, Alby Schultz. We have been able to do this in a very, very good bipartisan manner to achieve some great results. I thank the new members—the member for Dawson who just spoke, for his input in getting the report together, and the other new members that have come on. They have made an excellent contribution in getting our report through. Of course, I also thank the old stager, the member for New England, Tony Windsor, for his contribution, which is always worthwhile. I thank the staff very much for all their dedication. I thank Janet Holmes, who is on a year’s leave at the moment; I wish her well and look forward to seeing her back here after that period. And I thank Dr Bill Pender for his work in getting it together.

The work now goes on from the report in promotion and finding ways through to make sure that we get it implemented. I have already spoken to the federal minister’s staff. I certainly hope to have a launch of this report in Tasmania in the near future, and I have spoken with the Tasmanian minister for agriculture about the recommendations and moving it forward there as well. We have a very successful honey bee industry. It has all the same problems that are everywhere else in Australia but is looking forward to a new direction into the future.

One of the great things about our great country is that one can have friends all over it, and my dear friends Des and Karen Hanlon in Western Australia were able to send me a note—which they do periodically, telling me that my beard is too long after they have seen me on a television interview or that my speech was no good or very good—which was to do with the honey bee industry. It was a story by Alison Benjamin that appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, 31 May 2008. It is a really good and interesting piece, which I would like to mention here. It deals with bees in California and the almond orchards of California’s Central Valley. They move bees over there in the US on an enormous 2,600-mile journey from Florida over to California, with each truck having about 500 hives on it. I would just like to quote from this article:

In the cool hours after sunset and before sunrise, more than one million hives are unloaded at regular intervals between the trees by commercial beekeepers such as Dave Hackenberg, who have travelled from the far corners of the US to take part in the world’s largest managed pollination event. The mammoth orchards of Central Valley stretch the distance from London to Aberdeen, and the 60 million almond trees planted with monotonous uniformity along the 400-mile route require half of all the honeybees in the US to pollinate them—a staggering 40 billion.

That is an enormous number of bees and an enormous effort, but it makes the point of pollination being significant. The Guardian article continues:

By February 16, National Almond Day in the US, the trees are usually covered in flowers and humming with the sound of busy bees. Attracted by the sweet nectar that each flower offers, the bees crawl around on the petals to find the perfect sucking position. As they do so, their furry bodies are dusted with beads of pollen. As they fly from blossom to blossom in search of more of the sweet energy drink, they transfer pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part, and so fertilise it. Not long afterwards, the plant’s ovaries swell into fruit, which by late August turn into precious, oval-shaped nuts.

That is how it works. Pollination begins life and the bees play an enormous part in that. Without bees that does not happen. The Guardian article starts with a little quote from Einstein. It reads:

A bee-less world wouldn’t just mean the end of honey—Einstein said that if the honeybee became extinct, then so would mankind.

We often say that, if there were no bees, there would be no food. That is a little extreme but it is getting close to the point. Our report makes some very good recommendations. It asks the government to help this industry, especially with new directions through funding Pollination Australia. That will give it a leg up, get it onto the right settings and provide opportunities to move the honey bee industry down the road to becoming Pollination Australia. Then we will be able to do more pollination and the industry will change enormously.

This is very interesting. This morning I met with representatives of the agriculture sector, which is one of the sectors in my electorate and the Braddon electorate in Tasmania. In the meeting with one of the poppy-growing companies in Tasmania, I mentioned the honey bee report and gave them a copy. The chap who looks after the farming side of the company said to me that only last week he had a meeting with a honey bee producer in Tasmania and that they were actually talking about it. Work done some time ago showed something like a 10 or 12 per cent increase in productivity from having more bees in their poppy fields. It grows and expands. The importance of pollination in Australia is being seen more and more. The industry is starting to grow. Some beekeepers now have half honey and half pollination services, and this will continue to change and grow as more markets become available.

I would like to touch on the really important subject of labelling agricultural chemicals to reflect their potential impact on honey bees and other pollinating insects. We need to make sure that that is done so that bees that are out there doing a good job are not killed if some farmers down the road are not quite aware of the impact of their sprays on the honey bee population or the pollination industry. Of course, bees act as a very good environmental indicator—just as frogs do, and we talk about that quite often. Honey bees are quite important and can be used that way as well, and there is a debate going on in the US about that.

We had good evidence from the industry about products whose labels contain the word ‘honey’. Often you will see ‘honey’ on a product, and the industry feel that that is taking their name—the word ‘honey’—and using it without any regulations. They feel that at times something that says it has a certain amount of honey in it or has honey in it or even that has ‘honey’ on the label might have 0.000001 per cent in it. In other parts of the world, they have regulated to make sure that, if you use the word ‘honey’, you have a standard and an amount that meets that standard within the product. There is a need to make sure that we develop standards for honey and maybe identify honeys from different regions and give them recognition and identify the differences between different areas and the different sorts of honeys that exist, just like the wine industry and just like good olive oil. As any of us who know about good olive oil know, there are different sorts of olive oil and different years when they are produced.

We also received evidence in relation to making sure that food and honey that come into Australia are tested against a standard that gives recognition that the product meets the same standard as we expect from our own honey. There was some feeling that that has not always been the result. Honey has even come into Australia in imports that have had chemical contamination, and that has been mixed with our honey, and that has had some reflection back, even on the market for honey in Australia.

There are recommendations that the state and federal governments look at guidelines for beekeepers’ access to public lands and there is the issue of national parks in Queensland. A lot of the old state forests in Queensland are now called national parks. That has some implications for access for beekeepers. I understand there have been some issues up there in relation to horse riding and other activities that used to take place in the old forests. We have recommended that we have good guidelines so that beekeepers do have access to these flowering resources—so that they have access to enable them to put their bees down and get them back.

We also recommended that in the climate change debate and carbon credit systems, if we are going to plant trees, there be some consideration given to the honey bee industry when we plant trees so that the flowering plants can be a benefit to that industry as well. Of course, there is fire management and the issue of making sure that the honey bee producers are well aware if there is fire in the regions where their bees are. Wildfire can devastate hives and bees.

Biosecurity issues are of great importance to the honey bee industry. The sentinel hives, the guarding hives that we have at our ports, are to be maintained and enhanced. If a swarm of bees comes in on a foreign ship or on a ship trading into our ports, those bees may have the incredible mite called the Varroa destructor, which is a very deadly little devil to honey bees and also to ordinary bees and wild bees in Australia. In other parts of the world the experience is that they wipe out the whole of the wild bee populations and possibly up to 40 per cent of the managed bees in the hives. This has been the experience of our colleagues in New Zealand, who were devastated. This of course then has an ongoing effect on food production and the pollinating needs of the rest of our industry. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Ms George) adjourned.