Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

If we are, in fact, going to roll it out across the country, which should have been done years ago, then it is really important that we provide multipartisan support for this piece of legislation.

One of the challenges to this legislation being adopted is that it is the responsibility of the states and territories, and the Northern Territory government, as we have already heard, has already provided some leadership in that regard and has gone forward. There are some technical issues, and I spoke to every state and territory in the early days of being in parliament and before I was in parliament, and they were always coming up with reasons why they do not all have the legislation. The technical part of the legislation in the Northern Territory that allows this to be the case was an amendment to ensure that anyone who handled fish that was for sale required a licence. Because you require a licence to sell fish in the territory, that means, as part of the conditionality of the licence, you are able to ensure that those things on the menu are labelled Australian.

So a simple amendment is available to every single fisheries act around Australia that would make this a very simple and a seamless process to ensure that people have a choice and they are making a choice as they look at the menu. I can give you an example. This is from Crustaceans on the Wharf, and I know Senator Peris would also, no doubt, have eaten there and will sing the praises of the wonderful seafood that is available there. You can now have Australian creamy garlic prawns. You can have Western Australian rock lobster mornay. You can have crustaceans seafood platter for one, and you go, 'Oh, there is no local on that.' But it will identify in the menu local barramundi and crumbed imported calamari. So they are just giving you a choice.

People can make those choices, and a lot of people, when they are making those choices, do think. It can be motivated by a whole range of motivations. It can be motivated by saying, 'I should support what is Australian.' It is a great thing to support what is Australian. And, indeed, supporting an industry is a wonderful motivation. Whilst I was not here to hear Senator Xenophon's contribution, I know he has recently quoted that the numbers of Australian jobs that this sector can increase by is in the thousands. In this place, any opportunity to ensure that such a simple thing would create thousands more jobs in an industry where Bob Richards in the aquaculture industry can have more demand for his product and therefore employ more people would be a terrific thing indeed.

But there are other motivations. A lot of people want to know what they are eating, and they assume—and rightly assume—that if you are eating an Australian rock lobster or if you are eating an abalone or eating barramundi or eating a piece of whiting, it is a reasonable assumption to make in Australia that our food standards are such that you can have a very high level of confidence that this is the quality of the fish that I am being provided. I have to say we have come a long way in the seafood industry, perhaps because of many of the MasterChef type shows we have on television. It was an issue 20 years ago: do you buy a lamb chop or do you buy a whiting? And they would say, 'I'll buy the lamb chop because I actually know how to cook it. It's all very simple. It's not hard.' The whiting was a bit of a different issue. But now people are very interested in seafood. The culinary delights that we are exposed to on our television screens very regularly have excited people into taking a different approach to seafood.

Of course, many people also are motivated by health issues. They might ask, 'Why would I pick seafood? If I turn over the menu, they have some rump and some other stuff happening.' In my view, this is always less interesting. Seafood is very good for you. A number of types of seafood have a whole range of health benefits—and they are not only low in stuff that is bad for you. If you are on a seafood diet, you are on the best diet you can possibly have. But there is one other motivation, which is a really important motivation. I often tell this story. It is a real question when you sit down with a young lady, particularly if you have met her for the first time, and you are wondering if you should have the garlic prawns or the garlic bread.

An opposition senator interjecting—

With respect to the garlic prawns, people might be concerned about the sustainability of prawns. It is a really important issue. You are not sure if people are going to be wondering about the sustainability of it. So you say: 'Okay. I might be a bit worried about the prawns.' But I will tell you a little bit about bread. Do you know how we make bread? We knock down native forests. We knock down virgin pastures. We plant a non-endemic, really thirsty wheat. We manage that by making sure we spray insecticides that kill every insect—every single insect. We divert rivers to irrigate those sorts of things. We might even have sexy megafauna like kangaroos. We get a permit to shoot them to make sure they do not eat the wheat—and you think that the bread would be safer than the prawns! The prawn is managed in an Australian fishery that has turtle-excluding devices—devices that exclude fish and prawns of a certain size by square netting. We can demonstrate in Australia that, if I am eating a prawn or a whiting or some seafood from anywhere across Australia, it is sustainably managed. It is a really important part of the motivation for a lot of people now. They wonder if the prawn that they are eating is a sustainable prawn, or if, somehow, taking that prawn is going to affect the environment or the sustainability of seafood negatively.

The reason for that is, of course, that we have had a lot of real tragedies across the world. The desertification of some of the coastal areas of Asia—the total desertification, and permanent desertification, through inappropriate use of very low-lying land and the introduction of salt to aquaculture ponds. You can fly over areas of Vietnam and South-East Asia where that will never return. It is now a desert. It will never return, and there is nothing you can do to save that particular country. It was unknown at the time that that would happen. That obviously has had a real impact on the people who are aware of that and about their decisions. They want to make sure that if they are buying a vannamei prawn, for example, that it comes from a sustainable place. If they are not sure, they would like to know—and the place that you would like to know should be directly before you eat it on the menu, because that is when you make a choice.

As Senator Peris pointed out, Coles and others already have that in place. Their policy is that you need to ensure that all the seafood is labelled from the country of origin at the place of sale, as it is in Coles. As chair of the Australian Seafood Industry Council, I was very pleased to have that put in place right across the country as part of seafood labelling. It is really important. It is not only in Coles where you are buying raw product before you take it home and cook it, or processed product. Every single thing you buy now, in any outlet, that is not cooked already has to have a label that says what its country of origin is. This next step is very important, whether you are motivated by safety, in terms of food safety, by sustainability, or by the national interest of employing people of Australia. These are all very important processes. The challenge we have in this place is, while it is not quite like traffic regulations, it is not a matter that this parliament would normally be dealing with. However, I support very much Senator Xenophon's approach to this. It comes out of frustration, which I share and everyone shares. We need to bring this to a point where, if the states and territories are not prepared to act on behalf of Australia and Australians in our national interest, then we need to send a very clear signal that that is what they should be doing. If we can, we should.

I was not here for the whole debate, but I understand that there are a number of technical issues. I would probably make an argument that this is about Australian interest not necessarily about foreign interest and New Zealanders and the others. Without offending them, I would make that case. I commend the Senate for what it has been doing, but this legislation will not definitively provide what we want. FSANZ provides advice to MinCo, and then MinCo would make some other decisions, so we are still not actually defining this. I think there is another opportunity, and I understand that Senator Joyce has—