Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to make a few brief remarks in relation to this matter of public importance. The Greens have long been supporters of the precautionary principle that ought to be applied when it comes to the natural environment or human health. What is going on here is we are abandoning the precautionary principle in favour of a calculated risk. We have no risk at the moment because there is no importation, but we are moving to a calculation by which we are taking some action which will have negligible risk—but that has very little to do with this argument. The only argument that we have here is to do with the World Trade Organisation, and that is what I want to focus on today. The fact of the matter is that the old doctrine of free trade under the WTO is just riven with hypocrisy, with court cases and with bullying of all sorts. The reality is the rest of the world has moved on and Australia is clinging to an absolutely religious view about free trade which has gone out the window in Europe all over the place. I was in Copenhagen at the end of last year and I can tell you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that the big issue in Europe is food and energy security. The Europeans are locking up Europe as fast as they can in terms of being self-sufficient in food and self-sufficient in energy, because they can see the way that the world is going. They will find all manner of ways by which to continue to subsidise their own growers to maintain their own food security regardless of what the WTO might have to say or what anyone else might have to say.

We have been fighting exactly the same fight time and time again, whether it is salmon from Canada, apples from New Zealand, bananas from the Philippines or, now, whether it is beef from BSE countries. We will fight it over and over again. The simple reason is that, if we want to export our product into other markets on the basis of negligible risk, they want to export their product into Australian markets on the basis of negligible risk. If we want to say ‘No risk’ to them, they will say ‘No risk’ to us and therefore reject our product. This is all this is about. It is a fight about the WTO rules and whether you apply the free trade rules to maximum benefit to the home country. That is what is going on here.

If there is no import risk assessment, how do you know what the real risk is to the beef industry here? If there is no traceability, that is inexcusable—and at this stage I understand that is the case. There are no protocols in place as yet. I can tell you why there is secrecy. It is because the Australian community would hate it if they knew this was going on. They were terrified by the BSE outbreak in the UK. There is nothing more frightening than the concept of getting mad cow disease and it being in the population. That is why the community did not want it, will not want it and will not like it. The government wanted to change it to satisfy the WTO rules because of the negligible risk requirements, but they did not want the community to know because the community would not want it and the community would want the precautionary principle and say, ‘Why would we want to do something like that when we are safe in Australia, when we still have a beef industry?’

We know that, with globalisation, globalisation of trade and multinational corporations, what we will get here is a massive import of carcasses. And what is going to happen to our own beef industry in the long term? Let us get real about who is going to be producing beef, who is going to know what is on their table and how you are going to know what you are eating and where it comes from. That is a big concern out there in the community now. It is why people are going to farmers’ markets. People are shifting. They want local, seasonal, fresh, regional products. They are getting more and more suspicious of what is being imported, the lack of controls and the lack of labelling laws. I think the government has really made a serious mistake here—but so has the coalition. You cannot cling to free trade, to the WTO, and then complain about these outcomes, because they are consequential of a belief in the WTO free trade system.