Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This document, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s Innovating rural Australia: research and development corporation outcomes—report for 2005, lists a range of programs being undertaken by the various rural research and development corporations and companies which look at expanding Australia’s rural R&D effort. There is one particular industry in here that I would like to emphasise. Across the board, I, and the Democrats more broadly, have strongly supported increased research and development, and we think there needs to be more of it. A lot of it of course is produced and funded by the industries themselves.

The area I wanted to look at was the Australian egg industry and specifically the work of the Australian Egg Corporation Ltd, which is an industry owned company that integrates marketing, R&D and policy services for the egg industry. A couple of the components of this report are about the work that the Australian Egg Corporation Ltd has been focusing on—some of its R&D initiatives. I want to take the opportunity to draw attention to the recent statements by the federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr McGauran, with regard to concerns expressed about the egg industry and the potentially false labelling of egg products, misleading consumers into thinking they are buying free-range egg products. Certainly, there has been a lot of evidence put forward to suggest that in some cases those eggs have been substituted and they are not produced by free-range means at all.

I note that, in amongst the report on the egg industry, there is a nice photo of a lovely, healthy looking hen pecking away at some open ground. I am sure there are hens that produce eggs that look like that but, certainly, the majority of hens that produce eggs do not look like that at all. The vast majority of hens that produce eggs spend their lives in extremely small, cramped and unpleasant cages. All the ones that I have seen, when I have seen hens in battery cages, do not have a nice, lush coating of feathers like the hen in the photograph in this particular report.

I think it is important that the federal agricultural minister does more than just say he is going to be looking into this issue. The issue of ensuring that eggs are properly labelled was considered by agricultural ministers, state and federal, back in the year 2000. There was a very significant community push to try to get the state, territory and federal ministers to agree to phase out the battery cage, as is being done in some European countries. Plenty of and various surveys showed that there was widespread public support for doing that. I remind the Senate that there was also a Productivity Commission inquiry which showed that if that was done on a sufficiently large scale the impact on the consumer would be as little as one cent per egg extra. Unfortunately, the various ministers did not agree to do that and instead agreed on a very small increase in cage sizes, which is starting to be phased in around about now; so that agreement has had a very large and long lead-in time. Despite that, the industry—certainly, some of the smaller players in the industry—are indicating the financial difficulty they have in transferring to the slightly larger cages. That, to me, makes it all the more reasonable why it would have made more sense to simply go the whole hog and phase out cages altogether. But that did not occur.

The other decision, made at the same time—at that ministers’ meeting in Brisbane back in 2000—was that there would be implemented a proper and accurate system of labelling for egg cartons. It took a very long period of time—a number of years. You would think it would be pretty simple to come up with a system of labelling to indicate to consumers what is an egg produced from a caged hen and what is not. But it did occur eventually. Despite all that, we now find a lot of evidence, even with those that do have the ‘free range’ label, that that is not what people are actually getting. This is a very serious breach of faith by the industry. I call on the federal minister and, indeed, the industry itself to not just produce some nice photos of hens looking nice, healthy and glossy but also look into ensuring that the labelling of the product for the consumer is accurate. If it is not then I think it can only be a detriment to the industry as a whole, and that is not something anybody wants to see. (Time expired)