David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the same answer as the last speaker. Of course, this is a very important issue, and it is no surprise perhaps that it should be raised in the manner that it has been raised by the Liberal Party’s country auxiliary, also going by the name of the National Party. As has been so often the case in recent days and weeks, this is an opposition, a coalition, that is in complete denial about its past, irrespective of the fact that that past is so recent and so vivid.

The previous Howard government had an appalling record in matters pertaining to quarantine and in particular on matters pertaining to prawn imports. It was, of course, the previous government that had custody of our quarantine arrangements when the equine flu entered this country, and, as a Victorian senator, I particularly recall the damage that it wreaked upon the horseracing industry in Victoria and in particular on the Melbourne Cup carnival of that year. To have the Liberal Party’s country auxiliary seek to make this issue a high-profile one at this moment is the height of hypocrisy, but of course hypocrisy is no stranger to those on the other side, as we have seen in the debate on pensions and even in recent discussions concerning the prudential regulation of our financial sector.

The fact is that the prawn and prawn products import risk analysis was first published as a draft in 2000. My point is that, when the Rudd government came into office some eight years later, all it found in the cupboard dealing with these questions of quarantine and prawn imports was a draft import risk assessment, together with some interim measures that had been put in place some eight years previously. This hardly stands up as a model for how to proceed. In fact, in the term of the previous government there was a suspected occurrence of white spot virus in a research facility in Darwin, and interim measures were put in place around that particular outbreak. But of course those interim measures were never again revisited, never again codified, and the then government completely failed to take any serious approach to this very serious question.

In fact, with respect to prawn imports in this country, the Rudd government, having found itself inheriting such a shabby set of arrangements, such an incomplete set of arrangements, from the former government, took action, as it has been doing on so many issues and on so many fronts, by initiating a wide-ranging and independent review of Australia’s quarantine and biosecurity arrangements. I am referring to the independent review that is being led by Mr Roger Beale AO. That is a very important review, and that review is filling the cavernous hole which was policy under the previous government. This new-found zeal from Senator Boswell does not change the fact that the previous government completely failed to take this issue seriously. What has belatedly brought this issue rolling onto the deck of ‘HMAS’ Boswell is the recent comments—