Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

It is a funny light: it is a light that shines on just one ingredient—it is an important ingredient that affects the orangutan population, but it is one ingredient in all of the food and other products in our country. So we are shining a light on palm oil, and that is important and good, but we had the opportunity and we have the opportunity to be comprehensive about our labelling regime in this country, and responding to the Blewett review is the way in which our government has shown the way forward. You had 12 years to do something, and you did nothing, and now we are, it would seem, going to deal with it ingredient by ingredient. Bit by bit we are going to change the food-labelling laws if this is the precedent we are setting today.

My final question before we go into the full committee stage is to Senator Xenophon or Senator Siewert: how will this affect the review of labelling process that we are going through?