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

I will not put up with the chatter from Senator Sterle but obviously Senator Sterle when this process started knew nothing about it, as did the Cattle Council. The Cattle Council indeed did not know the difference between an import risk assessment and an import risk analysis. I have to say that they did not know there were cattle transported across the border from Mexico into the US, into Texan feedlots, so we started from a pretty low base of knowledge. Once again I congratulate all the people involved who got the government to change its mind. As late as last Friday Mr Crean and his mob still did not want to change their minds, so something happened over the weekend. My congratulations to the people involved, as Senator Nash said, especially to some of the media people, certainly Leon Byner in South Australia, who led the charge back in October-November of last year before it caught on in Sydney with Alan Jones and others this year. As a consequence the power of the people prevailed. So I think it was a fantastic outcome.

Can I just put some things on the record so that we get into context what this really is all about. We are entitled under World Trade Organisation rules to have a full import risk analysis. We are entitled to have an import risk analysis whenever there is a major change of circumstances. There has never been an import risk analysis into the importation of beef into Australia. In fact, the assessment that was done that allowed the Brazilian beef in was a similar process to what the government was going to do until they changed their mind yesterday, which in fact brought meat into Australia from a country that had foot and mouth disease, even though it had OIE accreditation to the fact that it was clear.

This is really as much about trade as it is anything else. In 2003, to get a couple of things on the record, America exported 1,274,098 tonnes of meat worth $3.856 billion. The currency ran from 59c Australian to 70c Australian per US dollar. At the same time and in the same period when the BSE came along—that was when the BSE struck—they went from that amount of meat back to 321,000 tonnes of export, from 1.2 million. This is about market share in the marketplace and us being the safest place in the world to eat beef maintaining our reputation as the world’s leading supplier of clean, green and fresh food that is safe. And it still is. In the same period, 2003, 375,455 tonnes of meat were exported out of the US to Japan. When they got the BSE ban, 797 tonnes went out instead of 375,000 tonnes. In Korea at the same time, when the won was at 77 won, oops, along came the BSE and the US went from 246,595 tonnes to 672 tonnes. Japan went from $815 million down to $4 million. Korea was the same: Korea went from $1.3 billion to $4 million. That is the damage they did to their own trade by not having full traceability. We demand full traceability birth to death. While the government was silent on supporting the Senate hearing, the bureaucrats did not even know and had not considered whether they closed the US border under the protocol. So there were a whole lot of things brought up in the protocols.

This war is not won; it has just begun. We have to go through things like we went through with the import risk analysis on apples. Senator O’Brien knows all about that. The Biosecurity Australia report said that indeed they thought we would import fire blight into Australia in the apples but it would not actually get out into the orchards. Those are the sorts of silly things you have to put up with, and that is why this deserves the full scrutiny it is about to get. We will be demanding that labelling gets sorted in the meantime. We will be demanding that there is full country birth to death traceability and if they are going to source cattle from other countries, Canada and Mexico, they have to be traced back to where they were born in Mexico and Canada. It is only the right thing to do. We can demand it under the WTO rules. So this is a fight that has just begun. We are not allowed to interfere in the subsidised dairy herd reduction in America; we have to compete in the hamburger market with that. We are not allowed to complain about the $200 a head feedlot subsidy in the US— (Time expired)