Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for that correction. They gave us fire ants in 2001; small hive beetle affecting bees in 2002; citrus canker, and a poorly managed investigation into its source in 2004; and let us not forget sugarcane smut in 2006; and the biosecurity quinella of Asian honeybees and equine influenza in 2007. They flogged off Australia's post-entry quarantine facilities, stripping hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget. Now, Campbell Newman is making the same short-term budget mistake. He is flogging off Queensland's Eagle Farm post-entry quarantine facility, without consultation with all the affected parties. They say a lot but deliver very little. They were all alarm and no action on New Zealand apples and Mr Cobb, despite the profligacy of the Leader of the Opposition, has not managed to get a single dollar to improve Australia's biosecurity system through the shadow cabinet.

If they checked what they said about quarantine with their record in government and in opposition, they would hang their heads in shame. It was up to the Labor government to commission a comprehensive review of the quarantine and biosecurity system—the Beale Review. The review made 84 recommendations to improve Australia's biosecurity system, one of which was to take the politics out of the system. The government has agreed, in principle, with the recommendations and is systematically implementing Beale's recommended science based risk-return framework.

With respect to potatoes from New Zealand, there is a Senate inquiry into the matter. The minister has announced an independent review of the department's potato report and no decision has been made on the matter. In fact, the Senate Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee has three inquiries into science based import policy reviews, one of which is into potatoes from New Zealand. The other two are inquiries into ginger from Fiji and pineapples from Malaysia.

Because of those inquiries, I will not make any further comment on those topics. But I will say that all of the participating senators on those inquiries are politicians; none are plant pathologists. Perhaps of even more concern is that none of the National Party senators on the committee seem to have the slightest grasp of risk assessment. They seem to think that the risk assessment matrix, which is used to assess risk, is some kind of biosecurity ouija board. Perhaps that is why they have such a bad track record on biosecurity, because risk and risk management is too big a concept for the monkeys in the zoo. Senator Xenophon, by the way, is a lawyer and, as a lawyer, he should—