Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Senator Van, for your question regarding a really important issue—how the government should fund our biosecurity services moving forward. I appreciate you having contacted me directly about this issue in general. You understand, I'm sure, like all of us, that it is vital that a country like Australia maintains strong biosecurity protections. It was only shortly after our government came to office that we faced the risk of foot-and-mouth disease entering Australia, lumpy skin disease and many other biosecurity threats.

It's only through the hard work of our biosecurity officers in airports, ports and elsewhere around the country, as well as through the great efforts of farmers and others in rural Australia, that we're kept safe from various diseases.

When we came to office I was pretty horrified to learn that the former government had not built in long-term ongoing funding of our biosecurity protections; in fact, the funding for biosecurity was on track to fall by, from memory, around 25 per cent despite the fact that those threats were increasing. So what the government did at the last budget was to significantly increase taxpayer funding for biosecurity protections and dramatically increase the charges that we were placing on importers for the biosecurity services that we provide—something the former government had never been prepared to do. The former government said that we needed stronger biosecurity and were not prepared to make importers pay the full cost of those services.