Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise today to speak on the urgency motion on country of origin labelling put forward by the Greens. Firstly, we need to be really clear what we are talking about here because there are actually two quite separate issues. One of them relates to country of origin labelling, which, despite what we have heard, does not actually protect public health. Public health, largely, is protected in this space when it comes to imported products or products on your shelf by the quarantine and testing regimes this country has in place. We need to make sure that we do not mix up these two very important issues. I am not saying for a minute that country of origin labelling is not an important issue. I assume this motion has been raised on the back of the mixed berries contamination issue of recent weeks. It should be said that the labelling on the packaging of those berries clearly said that they were made in China. Changing the country of origin labelling on that packet would not have done anything or gone any way to dealing with the issue that there was contamination of hepatitis A in that particular product. That would have only been dealt with by changing our quarantine and our testing requirements for imported products. So I just put that on the record.

If this issue of truth in labelling—and country of origin labelling is but one part of it—had been an easy issue to fix, it would have been fixed by now. This is a very, very complicated issue, and we have to remember that there is a number of players that potentially could be injured if we come up with a set of labelling laws or a set of requirements that could potentially make it detrimental to our Australian producers.

First of all, in dealing with country of origin labelling particularly, we need to establish whether we are talking about food products and only food products. If we are talking about food products then you have a completely different set of requirements, particularly in relation to the difference between the product that is contained—the actual product that is in the container—and the total package of the cost of the product that is on the shelf. I raise this because, in many instances, the product that is actually being sold may be a very small component of the overall cost of the product that is for sale. In many, many instances the packaging, the promotions and the like, and the treatment that occurs in Australia, is the lion's share of the cost of the product, and the actual primary product that is in the actual product is only a very, very small part of it.

So we come down to: what does the consumer want? How do we go about providing truth in labelling that allows the consumer to have some confidence of what they are getting without making it ridiculously onerous for the manufacturer or the producer to comply with? I raise this because of the recent House of Representatives agricultural committee inquiry into this very issue. The report has only recently been brought down. I would certainly suggest to Senator Milne and those who intend to participate in this debate that they get a copy of this particular committee's report because it is an excellent report. It does come to the conclusion that Senator Milne wants us to come to—that is, we have to do something about country of origin labelling and we have to do something about truth in labelling. It also highlights all of the little issues that collectively make up some very significant issues that are faced when trying to deal with this issue in too great a detail.

I can give you a couple of examples, and Senator Milne raised one in her discussions—that is, chocolate. Take an Australian chocolatier like the South Australian company Haigh's Chocolates as an example. We do not have the cocoa powder in Australia, the cacao powder, so they have to import their raw chocolate from overseas. Therefore, if Haigh's wanted to put on their label that their products were entirely Australian, they could not because they have to import this very important ingredient. Everything else that goes into their chocolate is grown, manufactured, sourced and packaged in Australia. Everything happens in Australia but this one vital ingredient of their product is imported—and, as you quite rightly would understand, it is a little hard to make chocolate without the chocolate ingredient—they would not be able to call it Australian made. As the people in this chamber would know, everybody in South Australia thinks of Haigh's Chocolates as being not only Australian but very, very much South Australian.

Another issue is where the majority of your product is made in Australia—take mixed nuts as an example. Your macadamia nuts, your cashew nuts and your almonds are all grown in Australia, but your brazil nuts or whatever have to come from overseas, and you may have to source them from different places during the time of year. If you were required to write on your label every single ingredient that goes to making your product as well as the country of origin, it would be an extraordinarily onerous task. The compliance would probably make it prohibitive for the manufacturer.

The point to make there is that, if we make these things so difficult for the manufacturers or the producers to comply with, we will actually end up disadvantaging our consumers. Right now the most heinous crime a producer can commit in this space is to put something on their label that is false, misleading or incorrect so, if we make the rules so terribly tight and onerous that it puts manufacturers in a position where they have to overcompensate, we will end up in the situation where they will not put on their label that their products are 90 per cent or 80 per cent Australian, that they are majority Australian, because of fear of not complying and the penalties that go with that.

I assure the mover of this motion that this government is very keen to improve our laws in relation to truth in labelling, particularly in country-of-origin labelling, and support in principle what has been moved here today but we need to be very careful. We need to move with some caution and ensure that when we bring down these new laws—and I assure the mover that we intend to do that—they are laws that are in the best interests of not only the consumer but Australian producers as well.