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

The Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Code Amendment Bill 2010 consists of two measures and will amend the schedule of the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Code Act 1994, the Agvet Code. The bill seeks to improve the efficiency of the registration process of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, the APVMA, without jeopardising human health or the environment. The bill proposes for the APVMA effectively being exempted from the general prohibition on using confidential commercial information when registering a permit for minor use or emergency use, and that effectively allows for multiple applications to be considered at once rather than separately and without the sharing of information, and also trade issues being considered when addressing the adequacy of product labels by extending the definition of ‘adequate’. That effectively means that making minor changes to labels will be made much simpler and will be done more quickly, to the benefit of industries affected, instead of having to go through a full label application, which takes a lot longer. So the opposition is quite happy to support this piece of legislation.