Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The bill before the Senate, the Agriculture Legislation Amendment (Streamlining Administration) Bill 2019, seeks to amend laws relating to biosecurity and imported food to provide for streamlined administration through computerised decision-making. It allows risk identification and management across a large number of goods and conveyances, reduces the burden on importers, enables a fast, accurate clearance, and provides some flexibility in relation to existing and emerging risks. The Labor Party will support the legislation, but I want to make a few comments about the legislation and about biosecurity and Australian agriculture more broadly.

The bill itself allows for discretion for authorised officers to override a computer decision if it's inconsistent with the objects of the act or if another decision is circumstantially more appropriate. It provides a process of reviewing both computer and human based decisions to ensure that they're accountable. This does represent an important balance between the efficiency of computer decision-making and the inherent risks that exist in an important and sensitive area such as biosecurity.

The use of artificial intelligence is controversial. The government's robodebt approach to social security demonstrates some of the hazards that are involved in AI approaches to managing policy. They are sensitive issues. We're waiting on a full report from the Human Rights Commission, to be released later this year, on the legality and ethics of the use of artificial intelligence in areas of policy like this. However, in a discussion paper last year, the Australian Human Rights Commission said:

The progress in AI-informed decision making since the early 2000s could not have been contemplated by lawmakers at that time. The possibility of full automation of AI-informed decision making, for example, is now a realistic prospect. This means that older legislation dealing with this issue should be reviewed. Technological development necessitates a new approach to ensure AI-informed decision making is accountable.

So there's a democratic imperative and there's a policymaking imperative here. There are proposals that the Australian Human Rights Commission has provided to the government about the government use of artificial intelligence, including a requirement of cost-benefit analysis and public consultation with affected groups before deploying AI-informed decision-making; legislation to require that an individual is informed where AI is materially used in a decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on their rights; and legislation which creates a rebuttable presumption that the legal person who deploys an AI-informed decision-making system is liable for the use of the system.

We will see plenty more bills and much more legislation come before this parliament, and future parliaments, that grapple with the implications of regulating and utilising this technology. Caution on this bill is understandable. However, this bill represents the opportunities that artificial intelligence can bring to government and explores some of the possibilities involved in regulating its use.

On biosecurity more broadly: we are an island nation. Our agriculture, environment and tourism are not just fundamental economic values but social values that make this country a great place to live. We have to fiercely protect our ability to prevent contagions coming from overseas. It's a key competitive advantage in agriculture, a key competitive advantage for the environment and our tourism sector, and a key competitive advantage for not just agricultural exports but food sector exports as well. We have $59 billion of agricultural production, $45 billion of agricultural exports and $38 billion of inbound tourism.

Equally, biosecurity efforts protect human health and social amenity and help to maintain our unique biodiverse natural environments. The Australian Bureau of Statistics—and it's extraordinary that you would do such a thing—sought to value our environmental assets in dollar terms. In 2016 they valued Australia's environmental assets at $6 trillion. It was, therefore, reckless and dangerous to have made the kinds of cuts to biosecurity regulation that have occurred under this government.

In 2014 Mr Abbott—remember him?—abolished key agencies that work with industry to increase compliance in biosecurity, abolished the Biosecurity Advisory Council and abolished the National Biosecurity Committee stakeholder engagement consultative groups. There are fewer biosecurity workers on the ground than there were under the last Labor government. The economy and the volume of imports have gotten bigger but there are fewer people protecting Australia, Australians and Australian agriculture from imported pests than there were a decade ago.

The department of agriculture is now prohibited by the government from reporting total inspection figures, but in the last report that it made it found that, over the decade, there have been 39 per cent fewer seizures of items from air passengers—and you can pretend to be worried about African swine flu—and 56 per cent fewer mail articles seized. So the volume of imports has increased but the numbers of inspections and seizures are down.

Where on earth are the National Party? They come into this place talking about standing up for agriculture and they make a big noise in country towns, hoping that people don't read the big-city papers. They have been part of an operation that has materially compromised Australia's biosecurity capacity. The National Party, sucking up to the Liberal Party and their ideological commitment to cutting public services, has put Australia's biosecurity regime at risk.

There are innumerable threats to our biosecurity. The Russian wheat aphid has the potential to affect 75 per cent of our grain crop. Fire blight in apples can destroy a whole apple orchard in one season. The tomato potato psyllid, discovered in Australia for the first time in 2017 in a suburban garden in Perth, has the potential to reduce tomato and potato production by 50 per cent. The cucumber green mottle mosaic virus was discovered on watermelon farms in Katherine and Darwin in September 2014. The Panama TR4, an existential threat to the banana industry, has already cost the Queensland government $26 million in attempting to eradicate it. The Pacific oyster mortality syndrome, discovered in Tasmania in 2016, destroyed $50 million worth of Tasmanian oysters. These threats have all happened over the course of the last decade, and the risks presented by these diseases or pests is far greater because the government does not understand its biosecurity responsibilities. White spot disease, discovered in the Logan River, near Brisbane, has already done $25 million in damage to the Queensland prawn industry. It's highly infectious and kills more than 80 per cent of prawns in an infected farm.

There are even bigger threats out there. African swine fever has spread across the world and killed 25 per cent of the world's pork population. Farmers understand what such an epidemic would mean. They are counting on the government to deliver a biosecurity regime that works, but the government has comprehensively failed to deliver for Australian agriculture, in terms of biosecurity. We know what's required. In 2017, a comprehensive review of the Intergovernmental Agreement on Biosecurity came out. It spelled out what banana farmers, oyster farmers and prawn farmers in southern Queensland already know. It said there is:

… broad concern that existing funding and resourcing arrangements are inadequate and ad hoc and, if continued, they will not be able to support the national system into the future.

There are 42 recommendations, all set out there. Recommendation 34:

Funding for the national biosecurity system should be increased by:

• implementing a per-container levy on incoming shipping containers of $10 per twenty-foot equivalent unit and a levy of $5 on incoming air containers, effective from 1 July 2019 …

That is straightforward. One of the critical aspects of maintaining biosecurity is maintaining funding for biosecurity. It makes a great deal of sense for those importing goods into the Australian economy to cover the cost of funding the biosecurity regime that monitors those imports. The levy was promised by the then minister, David Littleproud. It was supposed to come into effect last year and generate $100 million a year for biosecurity. Well, where is it? Did it come into effect on 1 July? No, they moved it back to 1 September. Did it come into effect on 1 September? No. The government missed the deadline again.

They can deliver an ad in record time in the middle of a bushfire season but they cannot deliver this basic requirement for funding biosecurity monitoring in this country, because it's not politically important to them. Where is the National Party? Nowhere to be seen. It's of no political importance to Prime Minister Scott Morrison. It's of zero political importance to the government. They've missed the deadline again. In December, the next Minister for Agriculture, Senator McKenzie, pushed it back to July 2021, claiming that it needed more consultation with industry. When The Nationals talk about consultation with industry, are they talking about family farms? Are they talking about food processors? Are they talking about agricultural employers or people who work in country towns? No. They're talking about the Minerals Council of Australia. Here's what they had to say:

The levy would impose additional costs on the import of key inputs that are crucial to the ongoing success of the minerals industry, including fuel, chemicals, construction materials and mining equipment.

So, when it came to backing in the interests of either big miners or the farming industry, the government made a choice and they left Australian agriculture behind and backed the profits of big miners up to the hilt. The National Party went missing—nowhere on country towns and nowhere on workers. These are country towns in which the grandparents of the residents had jobs as rural labourers and workers in factories, but these towns have now not had decent work in generations.

What passes for the National Party now—Senator Canavan and the member for New England—can produce weird podcasts but they cannot produce a sensible level of pressure on government to actually deliver what is in the national interest, and that is a sensible biosecurity regime. Remember when the Deputy Prime Minister was asked to list a single instance of the National Party backing farmers over the interests of mining bosses, and he couldn't do it? He couldn't do it, because it's never happened. That's what the modern National Party is. They don't represent farmers. They don't represent workers. They represent bigwigs in corporate suits and their donors. And that is all they are good for.

The government's response on biosecurity is a mess. It's a shambles. But no wonder the government is confused—not because the policy area is particularly complicated, but they've had six agriculture ministers over the course of the government. And the National Party is consumed by their weird psycho dramas about who's going to be the next leader of the National Party and who's going to have whatever ministry it is. The current leader couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. The guy who wants to be the leader, the member for New England, has really gone troppo over the course of the last four or five years, and he's absolutely unelectable and unsuitable for office.

We're still waiting for somebody to take the interests of Australian agriculture seriously and deliver for country communities and call this government to account. You would think, in the position they're in, that the once great National Party of Australia could pull it off, but they are completely distracted and unable to face up to their real responsibilities. They can squabble, they can suck up to mining bosses, they can even threaten to kill Johnny Depp's dogs if it gives them a cheap headline, but there will be a price to pay for this failure of policy, and it will be paid by rural and regional Australia, it will be paid by blue-collar workers in the towns, the country towns that traditionally vote for the National Party, and it will be paid by Australian agriculture. The Nationals have failed them on water, they have failed them on drought and they have failed them on biosecurity.