Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens support the intention of the Biosecurity Amendment (Strengthening Penalties) Bill 2021 to raise penalties to make sure that lack of compliance with biosecurity laws isn't just a cost of doing business for some enterprises or some individuals. We accept that higher penalties provide a level of increased deterrence or are a push to get more compliance; however, the punitive system of applying penalties still relies on court cases potentially in the case of criminal offences. I understand this covers civil and criminal offences. This requires, firstly, resourcing so that noncompliance can be detected, which can be through a whole range of different measures, through to levying the penalties and getting convictions in courts, so it's a long and difficult process. As I think has already been alluded to here, the alternative was a levy based system, which has been rejected by the government.

Being a Tasmanian I am especially aware that my agricultural community and our clean, green and clever exports to the world and to the nation are very vulnerable to biosecurity risks. We only very recently saw a fruit fly outbreak in Tasmania that literally brought the stone fruit and other industries to their knees for well over 12 months. Biosecurity outbreaks like that can cripple our agricultural enterprises. I commend the collaborative approach with regulators to stamp that out. It took a long time and there was a lot of work done on compliance, but eventually it was successful. It's not the kind of thing we want to see in future. I note that it's still very uncertain as to the source of that outbreak.

Having had my own agricultural enterprise, having had a vineyard, I'm well aware of the pests and diseases farmers are constantly having to fight across many horticultural and other agricultural industries to be sustainable and to produce crops. Of particular concern to me working in the wine industry was European wasps. This is an example of a biosecurity breach and risk. Once again no-one to this day can point to exactly when European wasps made their way into Australia and Tasmania. It's believed they came in on cargo shipments as early as the 1960s and went undetected.

Of course, these wasps are not just a massive problem for agricultural crops like grapes—in one year I had my entire riesling crop stripped by European wasps before we could kick it, and I know that wasn't uncommon—but also a massive threat to biodiversity in Tasmania because they are capable of stripping an entire area of its insect life as they go through a protein phase before they go into a sugar phase, which is when they tend to go into agricultural crops. It is a textbook example of why we need to have much stronger compliance on biosecurity and the kinds of unintended consequences of having a system that allows pests and diseases to spread.

I also note what has been talked about in the chamber today. The bill we have before us today has come eight years into the process of looking at how we can better manage biosecurity risks in this country. There doesn't seem to have been any urgency at the federal level at all to update our biosecurity system. The Craik review, which was released in 2017, included 42 recommendations. I remember being on the Senate RRAT Committee when this exact system was being looked at and, crikey, I remember some of the criticisms of Senator Bill Heffernan from this place about the biosecurity system and what we needed to do to update it. Of those 42 recommendations, I understand that only eight have been implemented. When we look at the bigger picture, this is window-dressing.

What is one of the biggest vectors for the spread of biosecurity risks for pests and diseases? Climate change. I want to talk a little bit about that today because, if we are talking about future threats to biosecurity and how we manage those risks, we need to talk about how we're going to manage climate change. An interesting panel discussion was reported in the Farm OnlineNational back in April 2017. It was a panel discussion at the New South Wales Farm Writers conference entitled 'Biosecurity: National Strategies and International Challenges'. It had a number of interesting speakers, including Rennylea Pastoral Company director Lucinda Corrigan, who was formerly a director of Meat & Livestock Australia. She said altered weather patterns had changed the biosecurity challenge for her cattle enterprise located in New South Wales. 'Climate change is a major factor for the spread of pests, weeds and disease, which have spread south from hotter areas,' Mrs Corrigan said. An example she gave was Theileria, a blood cell destroying parasite carried by cattle ticks, which has appeared in her region over a short period of time. She said, 'A virulent form of the disease appeared in the Murray Valley 10 years ago, and some people lost 10 per cent of their stock, calves and cows.' She went on to list fleabane and subtropical weeds which she said had spread into her district with changed rainfall patterns—which, of course, had significant impacts on the viability of their operations.

That panel went on to discuss other challenges from climate change. Professor Tim Reeves, from the University of Melbourne Primary Industries Climate Challenges Centre, said climate change will bring an added degree of difficulty to the already onerous task of biosecurity and managing bio security risks. 'Climate change is really important when modelling likely incursions, and where and how they might spread,' said Professor Reeves, who is also a Crawford Fund board member. 'While some very good research is being done, climate change brings a third element to the task,' he said. 'If we manage biosecurity with a steady as she goes, business as usual approach, it is highly unlikely to be satisfactory in the coming years.' Senators can read more of his contribution in that article themselves if they want. He talked further about the balance between summer and winter rainfall patterns across the continent and how that has led to changes and, of course, extreme weather events, which he said 'create the spread of plants with high-wind events, while changing rainfall patterns could alter the range of pests bringing new biosecurity threats into different regions'. He said: 'It will impact on the number and type of exotic pests and diseases that can survive and thrive in certain regions. For example, northern Victoria is no longer a winter dominate climate, but has uniform rain throughout the year. A shift of moisture conditions of that nature will change many things, including the ability of pest and diseases to encroach on new areas.'

Sharing the panel at that event with Ms Corrigan and Professor Reeves was Australia's inaugural Inspector-General of Biosecurity, Dr Helen Scott-Orr, who is also the coordinator of the New South Wales Crawford Fund and its training program and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. Dr Orr said the focus of her role, to which she was appointed on a three-year term—this is going back to 2017—was the federal agriculture and water department's performance of biosecurity functions. That article in the Farm OnlineNational states:

Dr Scott-Orr is reviewing incursions into Australia of pests and diseases over the past 10 years; hitchhikers and contaminants that have come in cargo which is not subject to quarantine regulations; invasive exotic mosquitoes; and the military’s application of biosecurity regulations for when its own forces return from overseas duty, as well as its regulation of overseas forces that travel to Australia.

And she added a number of comments there about biosecurity risks that need to be managed around climate change.

What is my point here? My point is really obvious. We have a party in this Senate, in this country, that has four per cent of the national vote: the National Party. It is in coalition with the Liberal Party. It has a gun to the head of the Liberal Party. It is clearly a climate denying party that purports to represent farmers but doesn't represent farmers. It has just toppled its previous leader, Mr McCormack in the other place, and inserted Mr Barnaby Joyce in the other place. He is openly a climate denier. He refuses to entertain the idea of even weak 2050 emissions targets. We heard this morning that there was some kind of secret deal done behind closed doors to keep their coalition together, where farmers will be paid to take climate action, which they already are and they certainly were under Greens-Labor climate action plans.

But what's my point? Climate change is a threat to biosecurity. It's a threat to farmers across a whole range of factors. It's a threat to farmers because of changes to rainfall, because of extreme weather events and because of extreme heatwaves. It's a threat to farmers because of biosecurity. And yet we have a party in this place that doesn't represent farmers, that doesn't believe that climate change is a threat or a risk, that doesn't believe in taking climate action. How are we going to manage biosecurity risks if we don't take effective action on climate change? How do we even expect to do that as a country? When you consider what we've got before us today—which the Greens support; I will reiterate that—you see it really is a bandaid on a severed limb when you consider the challenges that we face as a country and the challenge that's not being acted on by this government.

Farmers around the country need to stand up on climate change, and many of them, thankfully, are. There's been a big outpouring of sentiment across many organisations and from many farmers around the country disgusted, quite frankly, at the role that the National Party are playing and have continued to play in this government after the last eight years to hijack any action on climate change. Let me say this very clearly: the National Party do not represent the interests of farmers in this country. If they don't have a plan for climate change, if they don't even believe in climate change, if they don't want any climate action and if they're prepared to do whatever it takes to undermine or blow-up climate action, including this unstable coalition that they govern in, then they don't represent farmers. They certainly don't represent the future of farmers.

Farmers know climate change is a threat. They know it's one of the biggest threats they face. Climate action is good for farmers. It can be good for farmers in many ways. The costs of inaction by far outweigh any costs of action. The costs of inaction are severe, and farmers understand that. We know that, with discussions with the EU on a potential trade deal, the EU wants to see carbon tariffs. I know the US is talking about this. The world is talking about penalising countries that don't take climate action, and it seems as though our farmers are going to be penalised because of this government's stupidity and downright short-term, self-interested politics, which has delivered no climate policy in this country for the last eight or nine years.

So by all means bring in a biosecurity bill to try to help farmers and to help share the risk of biosecurity outbreaks, but don't kid yourself for one minute that this bill before us today is going to have any major impact on managing biosecurity risk if we don't manage one of the main causes of future threats to biosecurity, which is climate instability.