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

I move:

That the Gene Technology Amendment (2019 Measures No. 1) Regulations 2019, made under the Gene Technology Act 2000, be disallowed [F2019L00573].

This is a Greens motion to disallow the Gene Technology Amendment (2019 Measures No. 1) Regulations 2019, and I call on senators to support this motion. It is vital that we do so in order to protect our multibillion dollar agricultural export industry and the clean, green reputation of Australian agriculture.

The amendments to the gene technology regulations we're seeking to disallow will deregulate the use of a range of new genetic modification techniques in animals, plants and microbes. We fear these changes will have profound impacts on Australia's agricultural exports. This deregulation is reckless and poses huge economic risks to Australia's $48 billion agricultural export industries. It could potentially kill our organic farming industry and massively hamper our traditional agricultural export industry too. Potentially, vast amounts of Australian produce currently guaranteed to be free from GMOs will no longer be so. This is because deregulation means there'll be no tracking of the production or the release of genetically modified organisms created using SDN-1 technology. There'll be no ability to say whether these organisms are present or absent in produce. We will just not know. This is being done without considering the potential dire impacts of this change, the impacts of losing this GMO-free status.

I'd like to quote from a letter from the former South Australian Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries which was submitted as part of a consultation process about this change:

South Australia's non-GM position provides our agricultural producers and food businesses market access in countries where there is demand for non-GM products or products made with non-GM ingredients … our non-GM status is one of the elements which underpin our global reputation as a supplier of premium food and wine from our clean environment.

Similarly, in a media release in support of this motion, Organic Industries said:

The organic industry urges all Senators to overturn the Government's deregulation of gene technology. Instead, the Government should consider a proper risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis.

The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator assessed this deregulation on a scientific and health basis. But it paid no consideration to the market impact of this deregulation, nor has it properly consulted with the farmers whose livelihoods will be affected. The regulation impact statement that was undertaken by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator was completely inadequate, with extraordinary and wilful disregard for the risk to billions of dollars of exports.

This is what the impact statement had to say about potential impacts on our exporters:

In this context, non-alignment between Australia and some trading partners appears likely, regardless of the direction of the Technical Review or further developments resulting from the Scheme Review. In the event this occurs, industry would have access to the same mechanisms used to resolve non-alignment issues for other aspects of trade.

The lack of concern for what they describe as 'non-alignment' is gobsmacking. Non-alignment means our produce will not be able to be certified as being GMO-free in our major export markets. I'm sorry, but the same mechanisms used to resolve non-alignment issues for other aspects of trade will not put the GMO genie back in the bottle, as much as the OGTR may wish and pray it will be able to do so.

Our farmers deserve better than this. I spoke with many organic stakeholders who told me loud and clear what 'non-alignment' means to them. For example, I met with an organic wine producer in regional South Australia. He told me about the challenges of guaranteeing that his produce is GMO free. If a genetically modified strain of yeast gets into his wine production, he told me, that will be it. It'll be all over. It will be impossible to remove it. The risk that this has occurred—and he won't know whether it's occurred, because it's not being tracked or monitored—will make it impossible to guarantee that his produce is organic, which means he will not be able to reap the benefits of marketing his wine as organic, GMO-free, quality Australian wine. He told me about the challenges he faces already in ensuring that he can access international markets, working through the Department of Agriculture's processes to ensure that Australian standards match up with the export markets he's trying to sell into, and he says that at the moment he just does not bother to try to sell into markets where there isn't that alignment. It's just too hard. So he is distraught about what the impact of this deregulation is going to be on his business and that no-one has even bothered talking to him about it.

Another example of contamination relates to grasses and weeds. I would like to read a quote from the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia in a media release they put out in support of this disallowance motion. They said:

Just one example involves rye grass, a common pasture feed, but in horticulture it is a noxious weed that spreads rapidly. Should a GMO rye grass be released, it could contaminate the entire country in a few short years.

But we just wouldn't know whether it's occurred, because no-one will be tracking it and it's impossible to test for these gene edited organisms.

Proponents of this deregulation argue that, because the mutations that are created using SDN-1 technology are indistinguishable from natural mutations, the technology is therefore safe. On that point, I would like to read a quote from Professor Heinemann of the University of Canterbury. He says:

There is a profound difference between what has been genetic engineering using the techniques originating in the 1970s, and which are responsible for the majority of the world's commercially available genetically modified plants, and the genetic engineering that can be done with SDN-1 and dsRNA to any kind of organism. A key difference is that these tools can be liberally used outside leading to simultaneous exposures of all species present. Not just the products of these techniques, but the dsRNA and the editing proteins can be applied at landscape scale out-of-doors by people with very little skill and no or limited knowledge of what the modifications might do.

We won't be tracking them. We won't be monitoring them. They will not be regulated. Crucially, Professor Heinemann says:

Applications of the SDN-1 technique can lead to modifications to genes or other genetic materials as different as can the treatment with DNA from other species. This is due to the ability to apply them rapidly and repeatedly to the same target area in a genome or to apply them simultaneously to many areas of a genome. Even if all the places damaged by a nuclease are repaired by a "random" process, the cumulative scale of change in sequence would be no different, possibly even larger, than the differences created using transgenic genetic engineering. There is no evidence of which I am aware that other mutagenesis techniques can do this to the same extent and preserve the viability of the modified organism.

One of the arguments that have been put forward as to why this change is necessary is that it's needed to facilitate medical research, but, first-up, remember we're not saying that SDN-1 technology should be banned; we just want the status quo to remain so that these technologies are regulated and their use is tracked. In contrast to what some may say, there's no consensus amongst medical researchers that deregulation is needed. In its 2016 consultation paper, the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator put forward a number of options. Option 1 was for no change to the regulations, which would have kept SDN-1 technologies captured under the regulations.

The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research submitted that they supported option 1 as it pertained to new technologies. Furthermore, they wrote:

We see no benefit, and perhaps a risk, …

That's with other options, including the current deregulatory approach. Similarly, the Victoria University Institutional Biosafety Committee wrote:

More evidence is needed on all the risks and potential benefits of the new gene technologies and their products, so the Precautionary Principle … should apply.

Likewise, the Children's Medical Research Institute wrote:

Given that CRISPR and other site-directed repair mechanisms all use a directed and targeted gene editing strategy we believe that these technologies should be regulated, even though the mechanism underpinning the technology is a natural repair mechanism.

But I want to finish by returning to the huge risk that this deregulation poses to our agricultural export industries and reiterating the likelihood that organic regulators locally and internationally will decide that, since Australia has deregulated this technology, none of our produce can be guaranteed to be free from genetically modified organisms. This will mean that farmers will lose their organic certifications, and without those certifications the organics industry will collapse.

Europe already says that these new technologies are genetic modification technologies, so the risk is that, unless we disallow this regulation, countries such as China and the countries of the European Union could reject our exports. The government and the Labor Party have said that because the states have signed up on these changes they should go ahead, but I question how well informed the states are in their support for deregulation. How practical is it going to be to maintain a state based moratorium, such as Tasmania says it's going to do, when no-one is tracking these organisms?

Our national government spends millions on ensuring biosecurity at the national border, facing challenges like African swine fever. Are the states well enough resourced to track organisms that have no registration and that are not being tracked or monitored? It is ludicrous to think that this is going to occur. Tasmania recently extended its GMO moratorium for a further 10 years, but they will not be able to remain GMO free when these GMO organisms are being produced and distributed across the country, unregulated and untracked.

Australian agricultural exports to China alone are a nearly-$12-billion industry, covering a huge sweep of agricultural commodities. So there is huge concern that farmers are going to lose access to these export markets, and the government has not allayed these concerns. What is the reason for the government feeling the need to rush this through? Why is the ALP supporting the government in doing this? It seems to me like a pretty clear-cut case of the excessive influence of big business—in this case, the big biotech companies. They are the ones who are going to benefit from this deregulation. They are the ones with the patents on the technologies. They are the ones who make the big donations to both the Liberal and Labor parties and who have platoons of lobbyists here at Parliament House to keep currying favour.

The Greens believe that the safe and prudent thing to do is to continue to treat the new technologies like the other genetic technologies covered by the Gene Technology Act. It is absurd that that's not going to be the case. We're not talking about imposing new regulations or obligations on these technologies, and we're not talking about stopping the use of these technologies. We're simply asking to retain the status quo and to keep them under the existing regulatory regime.

The Senate must disallow these changes in order for a proper examination of the issues at stake here to proceed. We need to understand what impact this will have on our organic farmers, on our farmers who benefit from being GMO free and on our broader communities.