Joe Bullock (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very grateful to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, for whispering to me that it was $5,000. It is not peanuts, indeed. So this is a serious penalty, and even the legitimate inability of a person to be able to comply with that requirement will not prevent them from feeling the force of this law. I am concerned about that provision. I think it should be reviewed and removed and that the mandatory nature of the 'must require' in the bill be sufficient. If a person cannot comply then it is something they could use in defending themselves against the charge that they have failed to comply with the provision with which they must comply.

Another issue which attracted my attention in the bill was the change in the definition of the 'quarantine zone' It has long been the case that Australia's exclusive economic zone, extending 200 nautical miles from the coast, has been the benchmark for establishing requirements for quarantine. That is no longer the case. The bill says in section 12:

A reference in a provision of this Act to Australian territory is a reference to:

(a) Australia, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands and any external Territory to which that provision extends; and

(b) the airspace over an area covered by paragraph (a); and

(c) the coastal sea of Australia, of Christmas Island, of Cocos (Keeling) Islands and of any other external Territory to which that provision extends.

Note 2 to that provision refers to 'The definition of coastal sea of Australia or an external Territory in subsection 15B(4) of the Acts Interpretation Act 1901.' As I understand it, that definition extends the coastal sea only 12 nautical miles from our coast.

Like you, Acting Deputy President Back, I come from Western Australia. Off our shores are riches beyond comprehension, which we are endeavouring to exploit. The biosecurity regimes employed on those rigs and operations off our coast are renowned for being of an exceptionally high standard. The vessels servicing those offshore installations can today leave the mainland, supply the offshore installation and return, and remain comfortably within the 200-nautical mile border of our exclusive economic zone. But that will be the case no more under the terms of this bill. Those vessels will be leaving Australia and then returning and having to meet all of the compliance requirements as if they had come from foreign shores. This is something that has concerned the Australian Shipowners Association. They have said:

This change will result in an enormous compliance and operational burden for thousands of vessel movements compared to the handful of international facilities that previously required quarantine clearance each year.

They are concerned, as they say, that this will result in an enormous operational burden for thousands of vessels. The Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association share those concerns. They say that they estimate that the change in this definition will add compliance costs of $10 million a year. Our LNG industry, which is soon to be leading the world, is facing an extra $10 million a year in costs. For a government that is committed to cutting red tape, this is just a ridiculous additional expense. At the stroke of a pen, by changing the definition of our maritime boundary in this way, it is imposing that sort of a cost on our industry for no good reason, when the facilities that the industry visit offshore are of renowned biosecurity standards. Again, that provision needs to be revisited.

I understand it is suggested that it will all be sorted out in the regulations. That is another issue that we are very concerned about, because we have not seen the regulations. When the Labor Party had carriage of these sorts of measures, it brought forward at the same time, in draft form, some regulations that people could see to see whether concerns such as this—a $10 million impost on the shipping industry—were going to be adequately addressed. The Australian Shipowners Association say this:

"We'll sort it out in the Regulations" is not a satisfactory basis for industry to be assured that the requirements will not pose an excessive burden.

They are absolutely right, and they are echoing the concerns that the Labor Party has raised that the regulations are nowhere to be seen. This legislation operates at quite a high level, with the nuts and bolts hidden in unseen regulations that we really do need to examine before we can cast a judgement as to whether or not this bill is deserving of being passed. That is a third issue that I have drawn from the provisions of this bill.

There are other issues that have arisen in more recent times. For example, I am sure everyone is concerned about the 27 Australians who have been infected with hepatitis A as a result of the importation of berries into this country from China. I am sure that the average Australian thinks that somewhere along the line these contaminated berries slipped through a sound testing regime, that somehow there was some failure with the tests that would normally be applied to detect hepatitis being brought into this country on berries or anything else, and that these berries just slipped through the net. I think that was generally the feeling of senators at estimates—that somehow this had been an anomalous breach of a testing arrangement, which the department should explain. I was not convinced that that was the case, so I asked whether they had the capacity to test for hepatitis. The answer was a shocking no; there was no testing for hepatitis A or any other pathogens, merely for some chemical residues in imported foodstuffs. That is something that I am sure the people of Australia would be very concerned to know.

The bill defines an appropriate level of protection, which I am sure will come to be called an ALOP, for the high level of sanitary protection aimed at reducing biosecurity risks to a very low level but not zero. I am very concerned that we as a country have not learnt from the other outbreaks of hepatitis A, in this country and around the world, and have so far taken no action. In 2009, a multistate outbreak of hepatitis A affected 280 people in Australia. As far as I have been able to ascertain to date, there were no steps taken to prevent a repeat of this outbreak associated with any of the foods known to be a real risk of carrying hepatitis A. There is a list. Pomegranate seeds, tomatoes and, surprisingly, berries are commonly known to carry hepatitis A. But it is not just in Australia. Just a couple of years ago, there was an outbreak of hepatitis A, associated with frozen berries, in several European countries. It affected some 1,318 people between January 2013 and April 2014. I have not been able to find out any steps that have been taken to protect Australia from a similar outbreak. Authorities in Ireland and Italy recommended that consumers boil their berries. If similar advice had been issued here, perhaps we would not have suffered the outbreak that we did. There have been a range of measures taken by other countries to reduce the chances of hepatitis A contamination.

Now we have in Australia the Biosecurity Bill that is before the Senate. Will the Biosecurity Bill improve things? I have got no idea, because this bill does not deal with matters at that level. The answer to these questions will be in regulations, which we have not seen. Until we have got a good view of what the whole package of this legislation offers us, we should be very cautious in dealing with its terms. We have consistently said we need to see the regulations. Issues like the hepatitis A outbreak are certainly sufficient to attract our attention in the biosecurity area, and yet there can be no confidence, based on this bill alone—without the material that we have not seen—that we will have those issues resolved.

I was going to talk briefly also about the importation of prawns and the level of antibiotics that is found in prawns from Vietnam. (Time expired)