Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not hard to tell that there is no-one—not a single solitary soul—in the government in this parliament who lives and makes a living in the bush. This is the biggest ambush by a government of an agricultural industry in Australia’s history. It is a whole-of-government decision driven by the trade department. That is what I am informed by the bureaucrats and the ministerial staff. Simon Crean is very angry. He has been to America, as has Minister Burke. They put the hard word on them. They have come back here and said: ‘We’ll swear the industry to secrecy. We’ll sign them up to no discussions.’ We were given evidence this morning that their consultation process was three meetings with about 300 people out of 200,000 levy payers in Australia. That was the biggest. There have been 37-odd pieces of correspondence putting pressure on the government from Canada and the United States. There has been no scrutiny by parliament. If we had not raised it in that committee we would not be having this debate today. The 200,000 cattle growers—the levy payers—of Australia should sack RMAC and the Cattle Council, because they have absolutely distracted, destroyed and betrayed the industry. It is a disgrace.

Why there is no IRA, I do not know. We cannot even get the bureaucrats, let alone ministerial staff or the government, to tell us whether there ever has been an import risk analysis on the importation of beef into Australia. I believe there has been. No-one can tell us. The bureaucrats say: ‘I’ve only been in the job five years. You’d have to go and ask someone else.’ DAFF says to go and ask DOHA; DOHA says to go and ask Austrade. They have no idea; they are dodging the truth. Just so people know, we heard evidence today from the CJD Support Group that, sadly, if you are a person who has surgery for CJD in a hospital there is no way to sterilise the instruments. They have to destroy the instruments that they use on you because they cannot sterilise them.

So here we are, after no grower consultation and absolutely no scrutiny by parliament. There has been no import risk analysis. There are no protocols in place at this point. The government said, ‘We’re going to kick it off on Monday, and we’ll know before then what the protocols are.’ Both the Cattle Council and the MLA said, ‘They’ve talked to us about what the protocols might be, but we haven’t seen them yet.’ The government are not going to let the industry see them; they are not going to let the rural and regional references committee look at them; they are not going to test them for human failure, when the committee that I proudly sit on has tested the protocols for apples, pears, fish, bananas and lots of other things that you might think of. All of those things we have tested and gloriously the government ticked off on them.

And we were as big a critic of our government as we have been of this government in terms of the import of beef from Brazil, where the bureaucrats said, ‘She’s right’ to the government. ‘Bring her in, because there are foot-and-mouth disease-free zones in Brazil.’ The OIE says, ‘We’ve got a bit of paper here that says it’s okay, because there is a tick in that box and that box.’ But there was no such thing.

There is no answer to the fact that there is no traceability. There is no equivalence—do not ask me why. Australia’s cattle growers should go and tell the Cattle Council and their representatives to go and get another job. The Cattle Council said, ‘We really don’t want to worry about national status or herd status; we only want to worry about animal status.’ Unfortunately, there can be no such thing as a BSE-free herd, because there is no live BSE test. The only time that you know the cow has the disease is when you kill it. So here we have an industry that is saying: ‘We won’t worry about an import risk analysis, because it takes too long. The process takes two years.’

We have moved from the precautionary principle to risk analysis. The way that they did that was very tricky. This government did not tell anyone. It did not tell the Australian public. It did not tell the growers that we were going to change our status. But by agreeing to move Australia’s status from ‘free’ to ‘negligible risk’ they moved from the precautionary principle to risk analysis.

We have been betrayed. There is absolutely no way that Australia should be going through this process, because at the present time anyone who is a cattle grower—and unfortunately there is no-one on the other side who has any idea about this—is under siege now. They talk about what happened back in the 1990s when only 35 tonnes came in and the dollar was at 48 US cents, not near parity. They are saying that not much will come in. That is what they said about pork.

There has been no answer given to us. There has been no defence made. And nor do we have any way under the free trade agreement to compete with the $100 tonne subsidy per beast in a feedlot in America, because of the grain subsidy. There is no way that we can compete when labour in Australia—the people who work in the feedlot industry—costs three times as much. We cannot do anything about the fact that the average return for an American cattle person in their market over there is 50 per cent more than that of an Australian. We cannot do anything about the fact that the supermarket consumer pays 40 per cent less. There is no way that we can do anything about that.

We have been absolutely ambushed. Australian cattle producers are, in real terms, receiving less money now than they have received in the last 40 years except for the period of the 1972 to 1974 cattle crash. Australia’s cattle producers are getting $1.65 in the Wagga saleyards today for export beef. It is a joke. This is another impost. The one thing that we had in the marketplace was our clean, green and free status. And this gives that away. This is not about how much beef is coming into Australia. Those gooses on the other side do not care, because they have been stirred up through the free trade agreement. This is about us losing market share in Korea and Japan, because we are now saying to the Americans and the Canadians, ‘We’ll surrender to your status, so if you get another reactor, Australian producers will not have a premium in the market.’ They will say to the Koreans: ‘The Australians take our beef. They are negligible. Therefore, you should take it.’ We will lose market share. This is a disgrace. Australian consumers should rise up in anger and tell the government to go to hell.