Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

tor DAVEY (—) (): I congratulate Senator Walsh on her admirable defence of Minister Watt on this issue. However, the first point that I want to raise is this claim by the government that this is the largest investment in biosecurity in Australia's history. Thanks be to the coalition government! Thanks to the coalition who, when in government, made sure that we had in the budget $1.1 billion extra investment in strengthening Australia's biosecurity. That funding has enabled Minister Watt to resource 18 extra biosecurity officers, even though they're not yet on the ground. He shouldn't have needed to wait for so long—for eight weeks—because the funding was already there, thanks to the coalition government.

I also want to address the time line issue and the claims that we are fearmongering. I live on Australia's oldest single blood line sheep stud. If FMD comes into this country, that sheep stud will be devastated, just like Senator Canavan's cattle industry, our dairy industry and our goat industry. We cannot underestimate the impact that this disease will have on our trade. You claim that we're impacting negatively on our trade markets. Well, it would be far more serious if this disease actually encroaches on our borders and comes into our country, which will decimate our trade.

I also want to address Senator Watt's response to multiple questions and his inability to actually answer anything properly. What we've seen is a lot of rhetoric. We saw Senator Watt, on returning from Indonesia, tweet a photo of himself disinfecting his shoes, saying that shoe disinfection was being implemented. It must be being implemented only for Minister Watt and his touring party because no-one else has had to disinfect their shoes on arriving back in Australia. We'd like to see it implemented. We called for foot baths or sanitation mats on 5 July when the first cases of foot-and-mouth disease were detected in Bali. It took until 22 July for the minister to actually announce it was happening. It took until 25 July—a full 20 days after we called for them—for even the first foot mat to be rolled out.

A passenger arriving at Perth Airport over the weekend asked about foot mats because they had read about them. They said: 'Where's the foot mat?' They were told that the AQIS people who were in charge of implementing the foot mats didn't work on weekends. That is the reason for the delay from the announcement on the 22nd to the actual implementation on the 25th. It's because they didn't work on weekends. Imagine! Tell the farmers—who work each and every weekend, who work seven days a week—that their livelihoods need to be put on hold because our bureaucrats don't work on weekends. The minister couldn't answer the question, when first asked, about how many passengers had come since 5 July. What we did hear was a breakdown of week-by-week numbers, but on average around 23,000 passengers are returning from Indonesia and Bali every week, yet there has been a delay of 20 days for foot mats.

We've also been calling for establishing 3D X-ray screening programs, which, again, have been funded under our strengthening Australia's biosecurity—