Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Rhiannon for her first supplementary question. First, I do not accept the premise of her question. I will outline. MLA is an independent research and development corporation. The government's involvement with MLA is to provide assistance to the extent of their research and development work, which is 0.5 of the work that they do. It is not a representative body for the meat industry. It provides a range of marketing and research and development work for the industry. In doing that, it does have overseas interests to ensure marketing is done and to ensure that the appropriate meat industry is represented in those markets. Second, if there are breaches in ESCAS, as I indicated, they or anyone else who sees breaches in ESCAS should bring them to the attention of the regulator.