Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me a deal of pleasure to speak to this, although I have to say it gives me a deal of concern that we have to deal with an issue as serious as the government’s process of changing the protocols to allow beef imports from countries that have had mad cow disease. As we heard during question time and as we have heard over the last week or so, the manner in which the government goes about its process of dealing with reform and the inadequacies of that have been clearly demonstrated again through this process. Right from the commencement of this process the government was asking industry to keep this a secret. The government did not want its constituency to know and it desperately did not want the opposition to know what was going on. In fact, it asked industry not to talk to the opposition about it and industry, disappointingly, was compliant. I think that it has lived to regret that because it has been proven since, through revelations during the Senate inquiry, that the industry was largely being led by the nose by the government on this.

It has been put to the parliament, the industry and the Australian people that this is an issue about food safety and the safety of Australia’s food supply. That is clearly a very serious and legitimate concern that all Australians should have. We heard a range of evidence during the Senate inquiry about the potential impacts—some concerns were raised as late as this morning—but what we really know about this is that it is about trade. We know that it has been driven by the Trade portfolio, we know that countries have been pushing Australia to change its protocols through the Trade portfolio for some period of time and we know that countries, particularly the United States, desperately want to take part of our market share—particularly markets like Japan and Korea.

Prior to the initial outbreak of BSE in the United States in 2003, Australia shared, by roughly one-third, the beef market in Japan. It was shared between Australia, the United States and the Japanese market itself. About one-third of the beef came from Australia, one-third came from the United States and one-third came from Japan. A little bit of it came from New Zealand, which has a similar reputation to Australia. What happened when the BSE outbreak occurred was that 50 per cent of that market went to Australia, 50 per cent went to Japan and a little bit remained with New Zealand.

The performance of the industry representative groups through this process has been abysmal. The performance by the Cattle Council of Australia this morning was one of the worst I have seen at a parliamentary inquiry for a long time, and I have seen a lot of Senate inquiries in relation to the beef industry in my eight years here. The performance this morning was really very disappointing, but the performance of the government was too. As I have said, it has tried to keep this quiet. Nobody has seen the provisions yet. This measure is supposed to start on Monday. We still do not know what the protocols are going to be for importing beef into Australia. We were told this morning that, hopefully, we will find out this afternoon or perhaps tomorrow. Tell me: under what circumstance is that a reasonable period of time for this parliament to scrutinise it or for the industry itself to scrutinise it?

The government has gone to every possible measure that it could find to avoid putting this through a process that has scrutiny of the parliament. It is using a measure that does not go to the Senate and does not go to the House of Representatives. It cannot be disallowed by this parliament if it is proven that it is a problem, and yet industry leaders this morning said, ‘We just hope that the government does what we’ve asked it to do.’ That is what they are saying: ‘We trust that it’ll do what we want it to do.’ I do not know how you could actually trust the government to do what the industry has asked it to do. This whole process has been cloaked in secrecy. If you look at what this government has done to the agricultural sector since it has been in government, you would have to seriously question whether it would actually do what the industry has asked it to do. We have seen it buying water, but it will not put any money towards upgrading infrastructure; we have seen an abysmal performance with respect to releasing its drought review; we have seen it taking grasslands off farmers without consultation. It has done a whole range of things and yet the industry has been quite happy to sit there and say, ‘We hope that the government will do what we have asked it to do.’ The industry has not seen the regulations. None of us have seen the regulations. We have asked; we asked this morning. The way that this has been managed is an absolute disgrace. This is all about creating the perception of equality in Australia’s primary produce with other countries and them attempting to attack our markets. That is what this is about.