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

I rise to speak on document No. 9, the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee report Adequacy of Australia's biosecurity measures and response preparedness, in particular with respect to foot-and-mouth disease and varroa mite and the government response. From the outset, I'd just like to say that the federal coalition absolutely welcomed this report and the work that the committee undertook from July 2022 when foot-and-mouth disease was on our doorstep in Indonesia. The committee's report, which was published in December 2022, outlined a wide range of notes and recommendations that we appreciate.

It then took nine months for the government to prepare their response. It would've been good to have seen the response much earlier, given that we face the incursion of varroa mite, that we have seen red fire ants start to cross containment boundaries and that we still have the threat of both foot-and-mouth disease and lumpy skin disease knocking on our doors.

This report and this issue of biosecurity are so important because having a strong and robust biosecurity system in our island nation is crucial for protecting our nation against the threats of pests and diseases. Biosecurity is a critical pillar of our national defence, and having an efficient system in place allows our nation to prepare for, to militate against and to respond to the serious risks to our environment, our economy and our very way of life.

Exotic pests and diseases are spreading around the world, and they're putting serious pressure on all of our borders, especially with the likes of foot-and-mouth disease and lumpy skin disease. This year alone, we've seen Indonesia putting export bans on some of our live export ships because they've suspected lumpy skin disease. Thankfully, we've been able to prove that that did not occur in Australia and we have been able to regain those export markets. But that just goes to show how serious and significant is the risk of not addressing biosecurity adequately.

I want to note that the majority of the government's response to this report identifies a number of really important biosecurity measures—measures that the federal coalition, when we were in government, had already committed to. They included the measure for millions of dollars that we invested in establishing the pests and weeds program, with the annual cost established for the vertebrate pest animals program to amount to around $800 million, with about $4 billion in terms of production losses that could be faced without an adequate weeds program.

Our government committed to the establishment of a Chief Environmental Biosecurity Officer. We coordinated the national action for established pest animals, and we committed $68.4 million over four years from 2021-22 to develop a national approach to improve traceability. We also committed $1.1 million for horse traceability and $2.3 million to support the Modernising Agricultural Trade traceability grants program, which helps embed technology and innovation into our agricultural supply chain and traceability systems. And we established the Biosecurity Training Centre via an agreement with Charles Sturt University. We were a government absolutely committed to biosecurity and ensuring that our biosecurity processes were top of the line, were keeping up with international best practice and, importantly, were funded.

As I said before, when this inquiry commenced in July 2022, when foot-and-mouth disease was right on our doorstep, we knew what the cost would be had foot-and-mouth disease entered our nation. The cost to our farmers and livestock industry would have been an $80 billion hit to the Australian economy. When the disease was first detected—