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

I rise to speak on the ministerial statement on import conditions for apples. For 10 years I have been chairman of the committee that has kept the apples out and kept bananas out and looked at why we got citrus canker and kept BSE meat out and kept foot-and-mouth meat from Brazil out. This is an insult to the apple industry. What this is really all about is the government saying, 'Let's find a political way to get these apples in,' instead of, as we used to say, a scientific way to keep them out. This is a complete forfeiture of the rights of Australian apple growers. As everyone has pointed out, the import risk analysis, or IRA, on this said, 'We will bring in fire blight.' It is there in black and white. But, magically, it is not going to get out into the orchards.

The reason New Zealand enjoys our pears and we have not enjoyed their apples is because they have fire blight and so they have no pears. The whole thing is just a political exercise in determination to satisfy the people who sit around and drink wine in Geneva at the World Trade Organisation. It is a lowering-of-the-bar exercise which is going across all trade around the world to make it simpler to bring back to the pack people who, like us, have a trading advantage through being clean, green and free. It is exactly the same as the BSE argument and we had to do a lot of work to stop that. This is the same principle. With the BSE and the beef, the Canadian government eventually came back and we said, 'What about an IRA?' and they said, 'We do not have the resources to comply with that.' The US came back and said, 'Stick it—the American cattlemen's association does not want to have full traceability, they do not want to close the border with Mexico and they do not want to close the border with Canada and there is no such thing as a BSE-free herd.' This is the same thing.

Fire blight in New Zealand is not a reportable disease because it is endemic. What they do is go around saying, 'Oh, God, blimey, it is too high; I won't prune that one.' The evidence is that we are going to have apples coming into Australia from trees which have fire blight. They have accepted that because, they say, it is not going to get out into our orchards. The original IRA said we would have to have buffer zones and so on. Under the science, there is an acceptance that we are going to bring fire blight in but that it is not going to do us any harm—it is going to be under a code of farm manage­ment practices. I note that there is no-one here from the Labor Party to respond, probably because they are all ashamed that a political imperative has taken over the right to keep our industry clean, green and free. They are saying, 'Oh, well, our farm manage­ment practices will sort this out.' They would not show us their farm management pract­ices. They would not let us go to an apple orchard. I know as a farmer that every farmer has a different farm management practice, so that is just jiggery-pokery political garbage.

What are we doing? We are going to go along with it. For God's sake, New Zealand are in court now locked up with the pork growers because the WTO—you cannot have your bloody cake and eat it too—has said to New Zealand that they have to take pork from countries that have porcine reproduct­ive and respiratory syndrome, and they have said, 'No, we don't want to take it because we haven't got it.' It is the AIDS equivalent in pigs. At the same time as they are at the WTO telling us that we have to take their apples, they are in court saying, 'We don't want to take the pigs.'

If they actually lose that case in their court, because it is a lowering-the-bar exercise, the people who want to take this pork into New Zealand will go to the WTO and say, 'New Zealand has taken it therefore Australia should take it,' which was what the BSE thing was all about. The Yanks and the Canadians did not want to bring beef into Australia particularly. They wanted us to lose the advantage that we have in Korea and Japan every time they get a BSE reactor. Bear in mind there is no live test for BSE and there is no sterilisation for the prion of the CJD human variant. Yet, under the trade arrangements with the trade minister in this government, he was suggesting, as were the dead-head cattlemen's council, that we should take this beef into Australia just to satisfy the people that drink wine at the WTO in Geneva.

How much of this crap have we got to put up with? What is wrong with this govern­ment? Who is going to get the sack or a smack in the ear if we do what the import risk analysis says and import fire blight? How can it be and what game is being played that an official can fly into Australia one night and fly out the next night after having had a walk through the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne—which I walked through the other day just to get the feel of the place—found an obscure plant in a whole heap of other plants and said that it had fire blight? What sort of game are we being played here? They are trying to play us on a break. It is a disgrace.

We have only another four minutes all up so I had better sit down and be quiet, but this is not the finish of it. The government must understand that the one trade advantage we have in Australia is our clean, green and free status. As for the free trade agreements, which we enacted with the United States when the dollar was 67c, we now have a 40 per cent tariff against us through the currency, having got rid of the tariffs. Thank you very much.