Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment (Operational Efficiency) Bill 2017. Overall, the Greens are in support of this bill, although with a few important caveats that I'll come to later on.

Although the Greens don't always agree with the Productivity Commission, its final report Regulation of Australian agriculture, which was published in March 2017, noted that despite numerous reviews and subsequent reforms there are concerns remaining about unnecessarily lengthy, complex and duplicative registration procedures. This, of course, has been exacerbated by the turmoil and the changes at the APVMA, which we have all known about for the last couple of years, but some of the problems go to things that can be fixed with minor changes to this legislation.

This bill would improve the ability of the APVMA to go back to proponents when it finds errors in an application at the preliminary assessment stage without requiring the process to be reset entirely. It would enable the APVMA to grant only part of a variation application, instead of requiring the complete rejection of an entire application if parts of it require rejection. It would clarify the definition of 'expiry date' in the Agvet Code to mean the date after which a chemical product 'must not' be used, instead of 'should not', which is a much better indication of the safety for use of most of our agvet chemicals and of critical importance. And it makes a number of other minor technical reforms, which we have confidence will not in themselves compromise human or environmental safety.

The Greens fundamentally support the concept of an efficient and effective pesticide and veterinary medicine regulator. It's in the interests of all parties, whether they be Australia's farmers, chemical companies, public health advocates and experts or environmentalists, that our chemical regulator works well. But it's interesting that, on the one hand, the government is making these minor reforms while, on the other hand, the APVMA is in crisis. It's a crisis of capacity and a crisis of public confidence. The adequacy of these reforms must be compared and must be shown in a harsh light compared to the scale of the problem.

The fact that the APVMA has lost capacity is uncontroversial at this point—everybody knows it's the case. The decline in approval time lines, the loss of scientists and other staff, the need at the last budget to inject a large amount of money into the agency to prop up the relocation to Armidale—these are all signs of an agency that has become a political plaything for the Nationals' decentralisation agenda. Then there's the fact that the APVMA, after being so certain that they were going to shift all of their operations to Armidale, decided no, actually they were going to have to keep operations in Canberra as well. It shows that the whole management of the APVMA under this government has been a complete shambles.

The smoking gun in the shambles we've got at the APVMA at the moment is that in the other place this week is the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment (Streamlining Regulation) Bill 2018. We'll have a lot more to say about this bill when it comes through to the Senate, but it is really just astounding that this government is considering the privatisation of our chemical assessment process. What could be a bigger admission of failure—an admission that they have lost control of their workflow, that they can't cope, that they haven't got the capacity to deal with the amount of work that's required—than accrediting third-party bodies to assess the public health and environmental safety of our agvet chemicals? And it's astounding that they're doing it in the current environment; that they're not seeing the risks in allowing proponents to choose their own assessor. What kind of culture does this create? Has this government learned nothing from the banking royal commission, from the vocational education disaster, from the piles of examples of poorly regulated or unregulated conflicts of interest that are allowed to grow when the government decides to leave things entirely to the private sector? I hope that Labor and the crossbench will join the Greens in ruling out such a dangerous proposition when the bill comes to the Senate.

Even more dangerous, though, than the collapse of the capacity of the APVMA is the collapse in public confidence. In our Senate inquiry into the performance of the independence of the APVMA we heard witness after witness tell us that there was little to no faith that the APVMA was operating in the interests of the broader community. Its approach to glyphosate was a case in point. Despite multiple senior executives at the APVMA admitting that the finding by IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic was correct, there was no formal reconsideration, no robust review, which is astounding. The situation with glyphosate is appalling. Here you've got a chemical that's probably carcinogenic, but there's been no formal review by the APVMA. It really seems to be the case once again that the APVMA is singing to the tune of the big agricultural chemical industry rather than doing the thorough and independent investigation and regulation that is required for the safety of our farmers and our environment.

There are chemicals that have been on the books since the APVMA came into place in the early 1990s and that haven't been assessed for over 25 years. Some of them have been banned in many overseas constituencies, such as the European Union. There was legislation in 2013 that the Greens were very supportive of. It would have ensured we re-evaluated and reviewed this cohort of chemicals and we'd have a robust and straightforward way of keeping our chemical regulations up to date with the most recent science. But—guess what?—when this government came into power in 2013 it decided to scrap that legislation, and, appallingly, the Labor Party supported them in doing that. Labor and the coalition came together to tear up that process of reassessment—of looking again and re-evaluating this cohort of chemicals that haven't been assessed for over 25 years. They tore up that process before it even began.

And then you've got the money swirling around our politics. Corporate donation laws and election funding rules are absolutely broken. We recently saw the AEC returns for the 2017-18 financial year. The agvet chemical industry and its lobbying bodies gave over $130,000 to the major parties in that year alone. Bayer, the company that holds the patent for glyphosate and that is desperate, of course, for glyphosate not to be independently re-evaluated, contributed over $80,000, split almost evenly between Labor and the coalition. Is it any wonder that trust in our agencies, our departments and, most importantly, our ministers and parliament is eroding? The rot goes very deep.

What have we got in response to this? The government has circulated amendments that would create a new board structure for the APVMA, with the idea that this would magically improve its governance, would magically make APVMA a trustworthy institution that everybody could have trust in. But the details are light, the costs are unclear and the government is actually yet to make a case as to why a board would be better than the current situation. We've got a lot of sympathy for improving the governance of the APVMA—don't worry about that. In general, the idea of having an independent board that would have independent oversight is something we'd support, but it needs much more than that, and it needs much more detail than what we are being given in this amendment. One of the recommendations from our inquiry was that there needed to be much more robust community involvement and representation and engagement with the decision-making, but that is not being considered. We've got the possibility that the board may set up some subcommittees but no certainty, no mandatory community engagement, in the processes of the APVMA. Yet the community are huge stakeholders: it's our safety. It's the safety of the people who are using these chemicals and the people who are affected by these chemicals as they are being used in our environment. The Greens know that a board by itself is not going to be enough to restore both competence to the APVMA and confidence in it. Given that the addition of a board isn't necessary for the passage of this bill, we agree that the government should not proceed with including it.

If we're going to change the governance of the APVMA—and I repeat, it's something that the Greens absolutely and fundamentally support—we must not make the mistakes of the past and do it in a piecemeal fashion. There is a lot more work that needs to be done. We need to re-look at the structure of the APVMA and make sure that it's a body that can really have the support and the confidence of the community. Let's do that reform comprehensively and do it at once with really good consultation with the community and the industry and with broad agreement about the path forward. But we need to do it separately to the, frankly, very minor reforms that are contained in the original bill before this place today.