Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me absolutely no pleasure at all to speak on bovine spongiform encephalopathy. As a veterinarian for most of my career working in the livestock industries, I am absolutely amazed and aghast to think that we are even confronting this question. More importantly, the fact is that we will not be debating this matter in the Senate and the reason is simply that there is no capacity for the Senate to scrutinise it. Because there is no legislation, there are no regulations. This new arrangement will come in on 1 March and this place has no capacity to assess it. The Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee was told by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry today, in a submission, that the updated policy announced on 20 October does not require a change to the Food Standards Code or to control measures. Therefore, there is no amendment to any act or subordinate legislation required to bring this into place. I think this is a perversion of the parliamentary process. We have seven days and we simply do not have any capacity to act.

Why have we been so concerned about this for as long as we have—since it was announced, spuriously, on 20 October? The reasons are twofold: the protection of the community, which is our role, and the protection of beef producers. One would have thought that in a circumstance like this there would have been certain measures put into place. There have not been. They are not yet evident to us. Let me advise the Senate that at this time Australia is free of BSE or, more particularly, under a change that none of us knew about, we went from being free to being at negligible risk. We have now been told, with this change of policy in a week’s time, that the risk will not change. I am at a loss to know how the risk will not change when in fact we are now going to allow and invite beef to come in from countries that have had BSE. In that particular event I would have thought we should go and have a look at it and ask what will the protocols be that Food Standards Australia New Zealand will impose. This announcement was made on 20 October by ministers for health, agriculture and trade—four months ago. As of this moment, as of the third public meeting which the committee had this morning, we still do not know what those protocols are going to be.

Secondly, we have no guarantee that there will be a trace-back system. Again for the benefit of the Senate, we in Australia, alone in the world, expended considerable sums of money with an enormous amount of angst and disagreement some years ago to have a national livestock identification system so that in the event of any untoward disease or other factor we could go back to the farm of origin and immediately determine where that particular disease originated. Let me give you a quick analogy—the case of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK. Imagine the enormous effect on security requirements had they been able when the UK first had foot-and-mouth disease to go straight back to the farm of origin and detect and determine where it had come from. The problem would have been nowhere near as great. Similarly, with BSE in the United Kingdom, again there was no trace-back. So Australia says that is fine, we must not under free trade and other restrictions and legislation impose on other countries that which we do not impose on ourselves. And that is fair—but do you think we could get a guarantee out of government that we will impose those same restrictions on countries who want to import into Australia? The answer, unfortunately, is no.

First of all I was told that there would be an equivalence, so I asked the President of the Cattle Council of Australia this morning whether he knew of any system equivalent to that that Australia has, and he assured me that he did not. I then went to the Red Meat Advisory Council, commented upon by my colleague Senator Sterle. What he did not say was that there were three factors upon which the council would give their support. The first was good science—and I ask where is the good science at this moment to be able to examine beef offshore and be able to guarantee that a consignment of beef is free of BSE? I will tell you the answer: we do not have the science of that testing. The science is not there. Secondly, he said that there had to be a trace-back system at least equivalent to that in Australia. We have already been told publicly and today that we will not be requiring that. The third criterion by RMAC and others concerns the whole question of protocols. Seven days out, and we do not know the protocols. This is a nonsense.

So we go to the industry itself, the producers. A point I have made before and will labour again is that five or six years ago we had similar changes in the pig industry when the vast majority of pig meat consumed in Australia was produced here. At Christmas last year, 75 per cent of all pig meat consumed on Australian Christmas tables was imported. I am inviting producer groups and others to tell me how different they think the situation will be for the Australian beef industry if this change is made. I cannot get any answer out of them. We are an island. We can protect ourselves from and we can contain that which comes in. Regrettably, many of the countries who will be importers under these changed conditions cannot. For example, we have the American-Mexican border. We may have all the faith in the world in inspectors in the United States but how do we know that meat has not come across the border from Mexico, where there is no BSE status at all, into the United States, where there is a controlled status, and then into Australia? Remember, we do not have the science of the testing to be able to deal with this. The final point is secrecy—why was there secrecy?