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

Before I make my contribution in relation to the Biosecurity Bill 2014, can I just acknowledge the extraordinarily bipartisan approach that the Labor Party has taken with the government in trying to come up with a good and robust set of security measures for Australia's biosecurity. This particular bill has been around in various guises for a number of years now. It has been debated, and the committee system has consulted widely on this, both when Senator Sterle was the chair of the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee and now with Senator Heffernan as the chair of the committee. What we see today with the Biosecurity Bill 2014 is certainly a reflection of the extraordinary work that was done with the Biosecurity Bill 2012 and the committee that was chaired by Senator Sterle. This particular bill has come about because of the need to replace the complex 106-year-old Quarantine Act 1908. As anybody would realise, an act that was put in place in 1908 is most likely not going to have a great deal of relevance today. That is exactly what has happened over the intervening 106-year period—the act has been continually amended but the original act of 1908 remained principally in place. This particular bill is a reflection of the need to update that 1908 act to make sure it reflects the biosecurity risks we face in 2015.

It is interesting to note that, when that act was first passed in 1908, the only way any goods came to Australia was by sea. You can imagine that sea arrivals only would have meant there were a lot less things arriving by sea, a lot less regularly, and the ability of any government or agency to intervene, and to test and check those sorts of goods, was quite a different story than it is today. In the last decade alone, the number of air passengers has grown by 80 per cent; sea containers have grown by 82 per cent; bulk cargo has grown by 16 per cent; and these numbers are just going to continue to grow. If you look at it in the context of the requirement on the department's resources to deal with these quarantine issues, in 2012-13 alone the Department of Agriculture had to clear 16 million arriving international passengers, 186 million international mail items, 1.7 million sea cargo consignments and 26 million air cargo consignments. It really does put in context the quantum of the issue this particular Biosecurity Bill is seeking to deal with.

The main purpose of this bill is the management of biosecurity risks in general—that is, the risk of pests and diseases, including human diseases, entering Australia, getting themselves established in Australia or spreading in Australia. The risk of causing harm to humans, animals, plant health, the environment or the economy needs to be considered in the context of this Biosecurity Bill. One of the major issues is the risk of ballast water, as you can probably imagine, with our seagoing vessels in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and the extraordinary importance of protecting that particular asset. We have to be very mindful of what is being discharged at sea. Dealing with biosecurity and human biosecurity emergencies also needs to be considered.

The idea with this bill and its principal purpose, as I said initially, is to get into the 21st century with an act to enable the administration of what is a very changeable space. It also seeks to deal with some of the complexities of the regulatory requirements and administrative practices to make sure they are much easier to administer, and to give greater flexibility to the Commonwealth so it is able to manage these risks in a modern and flexible way and in a way that reflects the current environment and contemporary industry practice. It also seeks to give powers to make sure we are able to continuously monitor and manage both onshore and offshore risks, and that the tools we give to the people we require to undertake this compliance are fit for purpose—that they are modern and useful and reflect current-day activity. The Quarantine Act only contains criminal penalties and, as we know in modern society, there are a whole heap of other tools which should be made available to compliance officers to make sure they get the best possible outcome to deliver what is being sought for Australia.

The primary objective of this bill is to manage biosecurity risk. It is interesting. I mentioned in my opening statement that this process was started under the previous administration with the Biosecurity Bill 2012. As part of that process, the rural and regional affairs committee and the department undertook a lot of stakeholder consultation to try to determine what was going to be the best possible outcome. There were a number of things that came out of that consultation process which have been incorporated in the 2014 bill, which makes this bill a much better tool to reflect our needs. One of the things that was very strongly put to us as a committee, in our negotiations and consultation with the broader industry around Australia, was the need to accept that there are regional differences. A one-size-fits-all biosecurity approach to biosecurity risk was something the regions and industries did not believe was necessarily in their best interests, so this new bill reflects the need to identify regional differences and that the risk analysis process that is associated with various products needs to be considered in this context. As a result there have been some changes to this bill, particularly to clarify the consideration of regional differences in biosecurity and how that plays out in the risk analysis—making sure that there is an level of independence in doing so. There was quite a substantial engagement with stakeholders and that consultation has resulted in these changes. One of the things we need to be very mindful of is that, while we have identified the regional differences as they currently exist today, it is a requirement that we constantly continue to talk to industry, and to monitor changes in the region and in the landscape, to make sure that future regional differences which may well come about are considered as an ongoing issue when we develop our biosecurity position in Australia.

There is no doubt that there is constantly a dilemma in this space about our ability to assist our agricultural industries, particularly in finding new markets around the world and making sure we have as free a marketplace as we possibly can to benefit the consumers of Australia, so they can get access to products which are coming into Australia they may well want to consume. As an exporting nation, Australia relies heavily on our primary producers and manufacturers to make sure the balance of payments of this country is such that we remain the prosperous and First World country we are. But one of the things that constantly and increasingly has become a risk to Australia is biosecurity. It is about maintaining a level of biosecurity that ensures into the future so that Australia does not end up a country that does not have the clean green image it currently has. But, at the same time, we have to be very mindful that we are a trading nation—and we would not be as successful or as prosperous as we are if we were not.

Senator Sterle raised in his speech the consequences of an incursion and how terribly difficult this balancing act is. Governments are faced with finite resources to put into the myriad areas which government has to fund and look after. As a primary producer myself, I would love to think that we had unlimited resources to put into biosecurity but that is not the case. So we need to make sure that we have legislative tools in place to maximise the level of protection that we can give to our farmers within the reasonable context of those parameters.

Whilst I have been a critic of the way the department has approached risk analysis in the past and I have also been a critic of letting biosecurity play second fiddle to trade on a number of occasions, there are some very clear examples that we can put on the record. There are two things that need to be balanced here. One is: what is the likelihood of an incursion? And the second one is: what are the consequences of that incursion should it actually occur? Subsidiary to that are a whole heap of other things about our readiness to respond to any incursion and our capacity to actually deal with it even if we had the resources.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics and Sciences estimated that even a relatively small outbreak of foot and mouth disease in only one state has the potential to cost Australia in excess of $5 billion. When you consider that that is one tiny little outbreak in one state, you can imagine the consequences if an outbreak of foot and mouth disease was able to get away in Australia. You have to weigh up the cost of the biosecurity measures that are put in place against the potential outcome should an outbreak occur. The level of likelihood of an incursion may be quite small but it does not take you very long to realise that the cost of such an incursion would have such a devastating impact, not just on the people who are in this industry but on the broader Australian economy. We need to be very mindful that that is considered when making a decision to allocate resources.

Citrus canker occurred in Emerald in Queensland and we saw the entire citrus industry in one state completely decimated. Luckily for Australia, we were able to quarantine it in Queensland—no consolation for the Queensland industry but certainly for the rest of Australia. But once again you see how something as small as one person being able to import a particular product into Australia that was infected by disease completely took out an entire industry in a state. It is really important that when we are looking at this risk analyses that we weigh up not just the cost of the biosecurity measure but also the potential cost to our economy should such an incursion occur.

As I mentioned, we have been working on this in the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport since 2012. This particular bill was referred to the rural and regional affairs committee to have a look at. The committee has only had the bill for a very short period of time but, given the amount of work that was done previous to this bill, we were able to use a lot of the information that had been obtained in the consultation that occurred over the 2012 bill. The committee made a number of recommendations, 14 of which were recommended in a non-partisan approach.

I suppose it was a tiny little bit disappointing that despite the extraordinary amount of effort that went into this particular investigation as well as the one in 2012 that there was a dissenting report and also so some adverse comments by the Greens. I was disappointed but, nonetheless, that should not go against the fact that there was a genuine attempt to try and come up with a consensus report. It was just disappointing that in the end we failed to achieve that. Given how sensible the recommendations in the report appear to be, I would think it very likely that the government would certainly consider them. There was a recommendation to ensure that any review undertaken under ministerial review powers is publicly released and tabled in parliament to give a level of transparency to this particular review process. There is no doubt that the committee unilaterally thought that that was good idea.

It was once again very clear that the committee thought: that the use of or reliance on scientific evidence and best scientific endeavour were absolutely essential to getting the right outcome; that the director of biosecurity should be given the opportunity to use whatever expert skills and advice needed to ensure the biosecurity risk assessment was as thorough as it possibly could be; and also that in the process of undertaking these risk assessments there is a constant and ongoing requirement to consult with industry. We have got science underpinning the decision making, but we also need to make sure that the interests, needs and first-hand, on-the-ground experience of the people that are going to be impacted by any consequence of an importation of a product into Australia are included in that risk analysis.

It once again comes back to this whole balance between the likelihood of the outbreak and the consequences of the outbreak. The only people who can truly give you a clear—

Debate interrupted.