Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You can't muck around when it comes to biosecurity, and certainly not in Tasmania. We're GM free, we're hormone promoting free, and until the last month we were fruit fly free. Now all the hard work done by our farmers and producers over many years to carve out a premium edge in the global market is being put at risk by the Hodgman Liberal government's failure to invest in biosecurity—a million dollars out of biosecurity in their first year in government! Since 2015, flights in and out of Tasmania have gone up 12 per cent. Over the same period, the number of cruise ships coming to Tasmania has more than doubled, from 55 a year to 121 this year. That's great news. But how many biosecurity officers did they employ? Not one more—the same number of biosecurity officers, when there's been a massive increase in activity on and off the island.

That is a disaster waiting to happen, and three weeks ago disaster did happen. For the first time ever, fruit fly larvae were detected in our prime fruit-growing region of Spreyton, just over the border of my electorate. Apples, pears, cherries—a $200 million industry is at risk. Chinese buyers quickly shut the gate on cherries from this new exclusion zone that's been thrown up. This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest in a string of biosecurity failures by the Hodgman Liberal government.