Mr KATTER (5:33 PM) —In addressing the Quarantine Amendment Bill 2002 we are addressing one of our most serious problems. I endorse the remarks by the member for Parkes. The fourth or fifth biggest export item in the Australian economy is beef. If we include hides and live cattle, it is probably the third biggest export item, and as such is very important to the Australian economy. If we had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease or of any of a number of exotic diseases, the value of that export item would become almost negligible to the Australian economy. Any measures as outlined and the worries that were outlined by the member for Parkes I must endorse wholeheartedly. Having said those things, many times in my life I have been disgusted by the performance of a government department but nothing has ever prepared me for the level of disgust that I feel towards the AQIS department. It has become so unpopular that it has changed its name to Biosecurity. You can change the names of a lot of items, but they still smell the same. Let me be very specific in addressing this issue.

Mr Hockey —You're a disappointment.

Mr KATTER —The minister can say, `You're a disappointment.' I will tell you about one group of people I am not disappointing, and that is the people I represent in this place. When the durian farmers came to me and said, `Are we going to be overrun by imports from overseas?' I said, `No, you're not.' We have been trying to get mangoes into the United States for 16 years, and we have a seed weevil, so the United States says, `No, you're not allowed in because you have a seed weevil.' Thailand durian has a seed weevil. Apples from New Zealand have fireblight. Grapes from California have Pierce's disease. Did that stop any of those items being brought into Australia by AQIS? No. I have repeatedly asked AQIS about it. It was thought that papaya fruit fly, which ended up costing the economy of Australia some $40 million or $50 million, came in through the Torres Straits. Virtually everyone agrees that that is where it came from. I said, `It is very easy to quarantine the Torres Straits.' I was minister for the Torres Straits for nearly a decade. I would like to think that I know a tiny bit about movements in and out of the Torres Straits because, as minister, I was responsible for about 60 per cent of them. The airstrip at Horn Island can easily be policed by Customs and quarantine officials who live only a few hundred metres away, if you like, on Thursday Island. It is no difficulty for them to go over and inspect the planes going out, as at the very most only one or two planes go out every day from the Torres Straits.

I am oversimplifying slightly, but I think that most people who know the Torres Straits would agree that you would capture 90 per cent of the material on people leaving by an inspection at the airport at Horn Island of all planes leaving the Torres Strait. The second issue is the ferry at the Jardine. There is only one way of crossing the Jardine, unless you want to get your feet and the roof of your motor car very wet indeed, and that is by the ferry at the Jardine. So all you have to do is pay the ferryman. Are we paying the ferryman? Are we inspecting the aeroplanes, after repeated calls by me? No. We are doing neither of those things. If this horrific outbreak of papaya fruit fly, which cost the Australian economy tens of millions of dollars, occurs and threatens us—as does spiralling white fly and a number of other similar exotic diseases—surely there should be some effort by these people to stop, inspect, and prevent. But they still do not see any necessity for them to do that.

I attended a meeting here of some 23 members of parliament on the coalition side of the House with the minister and the issue of the grapes was raised. I took along to that meeting the Bulletin magazine which had a two-page article on the destruction of the grape industry in California by Pierce's disease, which is carried by a little insect called the glassy winged sharpshooter. It has destroyed one-tenth of that industry. In a three-month time frame in which that article was published in an Australian magazine—in that same three-month time frame—this group of people who are paid to protect this country decided to allow the grapes into Australia.

It has been said in this place continuously that if we prevent bananas from a black sigatoka ridden country like the Philippines to come into Australia, then they will prevent our live cattle from going into their state. I represent one of the bigger live cattle export areas in Australia so I am naturally very concerned from the point of view of the cattle industry. One-eighth of our cattle go on to the live cattle trade. The Philippines makes $3 out of those cattle for every $1 Australia makes. If they cut off our supply of live cattle, the biggest losers will be the people of the Philippines. Do not quote me on the figures, but I think you will find that they are roughly correct.

In fact, there is a very great fear amongst processors in Australia that we will be importing processed meat from the Philippines in the not too far distant future because of the very cheap pay scales they have up there in their meat works. Where can they get those cattle from? The only place they can get those cattle from in the first place is Australia. So there is absolutely no doubt, unless these people are really stupid, that they will not be cutting off the live cattle coming from this country into their country. It is very good for them; much better for them than it is for Australia. As a matter of fact, I am on record—often—as saying we should process the meat in Australia. It is not possible to do that, commercially viable or attractive overall but people like me have been very sensitive to the loss of jobs in the meat processing industry because of the growth of this industry. There is no way it will ever be turned back and most certainly not on the basis of some tit-for-tat arrangement.

The United States uses these threats against us all the time. International trade to some degree is mutual intimidation. But the one country that seems to be intimidated on every occasion is this country; the other countries in the world do not ever seem to be intimidated. But let me quietly go through the cases. In the durian case, the regime that applied in United States was completely different from the regime in Australia. If you have seed weevil, you cannot come into the United States. If you have seed weevil, you can come into Australia. In the case of the grapes, I will not reiterate that case; I have explained it to the House. I am not an expert on apples, but I know that fire blight is endemic in New Zealand and the apples are coming in from over there. If you read the scientific reports submitted by the apple industry, I could not envisage how any responsible public servant could have allowed those apples into this country.

AQIS decided to allow cooked chicken meat into this country. They made the decision public; they gave a brief to the minister—and I felt sorry for the minister because he went public and said that the cooked chicken meat would be coming in. Only by the intervention of cabinet was the decision reviewed. The decision was reviewed because AQIS was asked at a public meeting—there were probably 30 members of parliament at the meeting—`Upon whose authority are you basing your decision to allow these people to come in?' I cannot remember the name, but I can provide it to the House in due course, of the world expert—who was in England—upon whom they had based their decision. At the meeting, they were asked, `Who was the authority?' They quoted the authority and they said, `We are basing our decision upon the work of this person.'

I had in my possession a letter which was sent to Bill O'Chee, the senator, and he had simply asked this person—this leading world authority in England—whether it was safe to allow cooked chicken meat to come into Australia on the scientific work that had been done to date.

Mr Hockey —Bob Baldwin.

Mr KATTER —Be careful what you say here, Joe, because I might tell you who intervened to stop it. You might get very embarrassed when you hear so I would be very careful about interjecting. Let me continue with what I was saying. As a responsible senator, Mr O'Chee simply wrote to the leading world authority—and AQIS openly admitted to 30 members of parliament that they were basing their decision on him—and asked: `Is it safe to allow this cooked chicken meat to come in on the basis of present scientific knowledge?' He wrote back to Mr O'Chee, `No. Definitely, no.' Here we have the body paid to protect this country—and this was not just the poultry industry, this was all of the bird life in our country; they are all at danger from Newcastle disease and similar related diseases—saying, `We relied upon this authority,' and here is the authority saying, `No. No way, Jose. You cannot possibly allow it in.'

As a result of that letter being put into the hands of certain prominent people in Australia, the decision by cabinet was overruled and the minister was forced and AQIS was forced—humiliatingly; God bless the interventionists—to carry out an adequate scientific regime of tests to find out whether or not it was safe. When the adequate scientific regime of tests was completed, it was found that it was extremely unsafe to allow the cooked chicken meat into Australia. So some 5,000 or 10,000 jobs in Australia were blissfully destroyed by AQIS on the basis of what amounts to almost criminal irresponsibility. If someone intentionally brings into this country a disease then he gets put in jail; if someone negligently brings something into this country then he can be sued on a massive scale; but if AQIS acts in a thoroughly irresponsible manner then what action is available for us, the people who are suffering under this regime?

As I rise to talk about these things, we have an application—right at this very moment—for bananas to come into Australia. The disease black sigatoka is to the banana industry what foot-and-mouth disease is to the cattle industry. It would be absolute destruction for the banana industry if black sigatoka were to come into this country. Let us forget that the Philippine government is quite happy for its employees and its workers to work for Del Monte, the big United States company, and other big companies such as Del Monte, for virtually nothing. I think agricultural wages in the Philippines were around about $450 a year—and I am quoting the World Bank—and $1,400 or $1,500 a year is the minimum wage. One set of figures is from one instrumentality, such as the World Bank, and the other is from a similar instrumentality. For a comparable figure in Australia, we have people working in banana plants where those are their weekly wages. About 50 or 60 per cent of the price you pay for a banana is labour content—as it is a very high labour content product—so we have no hope of surviving.

But we are not asking the government to stop those bananas from coming in on that basis. We are simply saying that they have black sigatoka and we do not. We had an outbreak recently, and there is now not one single leaf in Australia that has black sigatoka on it. We have fully eradicated the disease at immense cost—and God has been good to us, because we have had probably the driest season and the coldest winter on record at Tully. A combination of those two factors with herculean efforts by the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the local DPI—for which we are thankful to both groups—has meant we have managed to eradicate this disease; but we have escaped by the skin of our teeth. Had it spread into the Innisfail area, I do not think there would have been any hope of holding it out.

We have a most serious disease which is endemic in this country—and there are other diseases, but I am not going to go through all of the other diseases that are endemic in the Philippines that we do not have in Australia—and AQIS believes they have to say yes to everything. My experience with the United States and with Europe is that they do not believe they have to say yes to anything. They have a regime such that: `We have a right to protect ourselves against the introduction of disease, and we will not be intimidated into allowing your disease ridden product into our country.' That is not the regime that is being applied by AQIS in this country.

I defy anyone to go to any scientific forum they wish to and argue the case of the apples against the scientists on our side or argue the case of the durian against the scientists on our side or argue the case of the bananas against the scientists from our side or argue the case of the cooked chicken meat against the scientists on our side. I defy anyone from AQIS to go to a forum where they will be judged in open combat by scientists from our side of the argument, because they would be intellectually torn to pieces. Intellectually, they are a laughing stock; and intellectually and administratively they have failed to protect this country. We have outbreak after outbreak of disease occurring in this country, and the more they lower the boom and the more they allow in product from overseas, the greater will be the regime of outbreaks of disease in this country.

Can any person seriously say that, when the Californian industry in one year loses about one-tenth of its entire production, a country is not justified in keeping their product out? We will hear all sorts of wonderful explanations and exotic arguments from AQIS and Biosecurity Australia—or whatever the hell they call themselves this week; they are so unpopular they will have to change their name next year as well—but you will not hear those arguments being put up in public forums, because they do not stand up to the light of public opinion. The government have changed a lot of the people at the top of AQIS, and for that we thank them, but they have not achieved any of the objectives that should be achieved by this country in protecting ourselves against diseases.

The bigger picture here is: this country is an island that had no commercial crops 200 years ago, so we do not have the diseases that exist in other countries. If we keep agricultural product out, we can maintain the clean, green image that we now have. But we cannot allow every product for which there is an application to come into Australia—and I am assured that there are a number of products that have been rejected. With every single one that I have been involved with, someone has rung me up and said, `Hell, we're going to get wiped out here if you allow this stuff into this country,' and with every single one of those cases, AQIS had said yes. In conclusion, I loved the big sign at Mareeba, after they allowed the grapes in. It had `AQIS' on it, and there was a big black line drawn through `AQIS' and underneath was written `ACQUIESCE'. That person had it dead right: not `AQIS', `ACQUIESCE'. These people agreed to everything.

The price of their agreement to everything will be not only the destruction of our commercial crops in Australia by introduced disease but also the destruction of our native flora and possibly fauna. Just as an aside, in addition to the destruction that will occur in the banana industry, pineapples will also come into this country. There will be some 12,000 Australian families that will lose their livelihoods when that decision is made by AQIS. Since they have agreed to everything else, I cannot see why they would not agree in this case, even though this case is probably the most outrageous case of all, where there is just exotic disease after exotic disease, which is endemic. Over the next few weeks, we will be discussing these matters with people from the environment. They seem to spend all of the time hacking into farmers but, in this case, they should be alerted to the very grave dangers to Australia's native flora and fauna from the actions that are being taken and the continuous acquiescence of this incredible group of people.