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

It's been a tough few years for our Australian beekeepers. They've been hit from all sides: droughts, bushfires, floods, varroa mite and New Zealand's trademark attack on Australian beekeeping using the term manuka. These are all significant headwinds that our world-best beekeepers have faced head-on. We thank them for their ongoing resilience because our honey bees are irreplaceable in our food production system. Honey bees pollinate over 65 per cent of all food grown in Australia. We must support this crucial industry.

I recently received an email from Nicola Charles from Mawbanna Blue Hills Honey, in my electorate of Braddon. Nicola is a senior player and voice of reason for the industry. In her email to me, Nicola said that all of threats and challenges the industry has faced pale into insignificance when compared to the importation of artificial honey and the impact that that is having on our industry. Put simply, we're talking about international food fraud. Beekeepers have told me that the importation of artificial honey into Australia is of such a high quantity that it threatens the ongoing viability of our honey beekeepers in Australia.

Currently, 40 per cent of all imported honey comes from—you guessed it—China. A further 15.8 per cent comes from Thailand. You might ask: what is artificial honey? Surely honey is honey. The answer is no, it's not. Artificial honey involves feeding bees sugar water, which is a process of passing syrup through the hives when they're extracted, similar to nectar. But in this process there is no need for flowers, nectar or the natural work of bees. The sugary sweet substance is then transferred to a factory where it is artificially dehydrated and often blended with further, other low-cost sugar-blend syrups in order to effectively cheat or fraud detection tests.

Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Outrageous!

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