Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

In deference to time, I will be brief. The coalition is going to support this bill and the amendments proposed to it which, we believe, substantially improve the bill as initially proposed. With all due respect to Senator Moore, while I found the speech we just heard very informative about food standards and about process, if I had to point to a reason why this bill needs to be passed, it would be that speech. There are many processes. They go on for a long time. As Senator Siewert outlined, this has been proposed for many years. But there has been no action. So the coalition, in supporting this bill, is simply saying consumers have the right to know what is in the food and goods they purchase. We believe this will improve consumers' ability to make informed choices.

I will speak very briefly when the amendments are proposed to indicate that we do support the amendments because we think that it is more appropriate to have these provisions in the competition and consumer law. We believe we already have a frame­work there, with an existing regulator. That is the place where we try to guarantee consumers rights and provide guarantees to consumers that what they think is in the products they purchase is indeed in those products.

No-one that I know dislikes orangutans. I am an animal lover myself. Some of the numbers that have been put by some of the proponents of this bill about the clearing of forests for palm oil and the impact upon orangutans are contested; I think I should state that. Clearly I do not think that if people disagree with those numbers it should be implied in any way that they do not like orangutans any less than the proponents of this. This is about people actually knowing what is in the goods that they purchase, particularly in the food they eat.

I will finish on this brief point. I would not want—and I am not saying this has happened so far—this issue to become a vilification of farmers in these parts of the world. People clearing land to grow produce which they sell, trade or eat has been quite important over the course of human history, and the people who do this are actually quite poor. While the proponents have not suggested this, I think we do need to be careful because there may be an impact on people from this. But I do not think that giving more information to consumers is in any way a bad thing. And that is the reason that the coalition is supporting this legislation as, hopefully, to be amended.