7 March 2009
DAFF09/96T
Tony Burke interviewed by Col Campbell, 4BC Brisbane
Subject: Philippine banana imports
E&OE
COL CAMPBELL: Well, we’re talking gardening and we are joined now by the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Minister Tony Burke. Thank you for your time this morning, Minister.
TONY BURKE: G’day Col.
COL CAMPBELL: How are you?
TONY BURKE: Pretty well.
COL CAMPBELL: That’s good. You haven’t got a cyclone down in your part of the world?
TONY BURKE: No. I’m in the part of Australia at the moment that’s mid-way between where the fires are blazing and where the floods have been.
COL CAMPBELL: It’s been pretty rough down there, hasn’t it?
TONY BURKE: Oh yeah.
COL CAMPBELL: Minister, the importation of bananas from the Philippines has been on my mind for quite some time. And, you know, the first question is why do we need to import bananas from the Philippines?
TONY BURKE: The indications at the moment are that none will be coming in.
COL CAMPBELL: But the way is open if they want to.
TONY BURKE: Well, the way’s open if they jump through a whole lot of hoops that have now been put in their path. The indication that’s come from the Philippines, the Filipinos have gone nuts over this decision, the Filipino banana growers.
The complaints are all through their media. They’re saying it’s restrictive trade, that they can’t possibly export under the biosecurity rules that have been put in place over the last week.
COL CAMPBELL: What are the rules that apply, Minister?
TONY BURKE: Well, first of all you’ve got to find a plantation that has low pest prevalence. And there’s a limit to how many of those they’ve got to start with. Australian inspectors then have to be on the plantation conducting the inspection and the Filipinos have to pay for the Australian inspectors.
There’s a massive upgrade of their fungicide spraying, the disinfection processes that then go ahead. There’s more clearance, a whole lot of technical clearance procedures that would then have to go through on any consignment. And the feedback that the Filipino growers have been saying in the media, is that if they had to follow all of these rules, then their bananas would be too expensive to be able to sell in Australia anyway. Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily our problem.
COL CAMPBELL: Well, it’s not. No, I agree with you. I remember you saying at a breakfast that I attended, you said we couldn’t stop them from coming in under free trade regulations, but we could under biosecurity. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to say no, we’re not prepared to accept your bananas?
TONY BURKE: This was the breakfast out at the Ekka was it?
COL CAMPBELL: It was, yeah.
TONY BURKE: Look, that argument was gone in the year 2000. I think where we’ve ended up, from all the indications so far, is that we’re highly unlikely to see Philippine bananas in Australia. And if they were to come, they’d have to jump through so many hoops that they would probably be more expensive than what we grow locally anyway.
But the decision to go down this path and to find out what would the rules have to be if they were to come in, that decision was made in the year 2000. By the time I became Minister, it was already in the hands of the Director of Quarantine. But I mean the argument you’ve put there, I’ve had Tim Mulherin on the phone arguing very strongly that that would have been his preferred position.
COL CAMPBELL: Well, I think it would have been most Australians’ preferred position because what it looks like is the biosecurity organisation has capitulated to the free trade God.
TONY BURKE: Well, I don’t want to get into a blame game with the National Party Minister who started this off.
COL CAMPBELL: I don’t care who I blame.
TONY BURKE: That’s right, I don’t want to get into that part of it Col. We’re in this space on a number of issues, where effectively you’ve got something that means no-one’s going to export it to Australia. But instead of dealing with that upfront we go through: if it were to come, how many things would you have to do to it?
I mean, the classic one is chicken meat. Were chicken meat to come into Australia, technically can it come into Australia, yes. What do you have to do to it? You’ve got to cook it at high temperatures over long periods of time, so that it more resembles charcoal than chicken. So it never comes in. And so, that’s the system we’re in.
The most important thing at my end is to make sure that every rule that’s there and every hoop that we’re told they have to jump through, we actually stick to that. We don’t compromise underneath that.
COL CAMPBELL: Can you be sure Tony that our biosecurity is…I think back to equine influenza, citrus canker, daylily rust. Now, you probably have never heard of daylily rust, but this was a disease that came into Queensland and quite frankly the way that AQIS handled it was absolutely appalling.
And so we now have, you just talk to any daylily grower and they’ll tell you how bad it is. Now, these are things that shouldn’t have happened but they do. And equine influenza was a classic one. And I just worry that if we leave it to our biosecurity people, are they going: can you guarantee that a) there won’t be any bananas come in and b) they won’t come in with disease.
TONY BURKE: The rules that have been put in place are incredibly stringent. Can you give a guarantee that something would never get into Australia at all? I mean to do that you’d have to stop tourism, you’d stop all….
COL CAMPBELL: Of course.
TONY BURKE: That level of guarantee regardless of anything we’ve spoken about…
COL CAMPBELL: I’m really only talking about bananas, you know. If they did come in, there are some awful risks attached to it, aren’t there?
TONY BURKE: Don’t argue with you on that at all. The job since I’ve become Minister – it was already in the hands of the independent Director of Biosecurity, Director of Quarantine – and so my job has been to make sure that there’s no political compromises.
The Filipino farmers complain. Bad luck, that’s not my problem. And our job is within the rules that we’ve now got to make sure that the biosecurity rules are as strict as possible and everything that’s put in place is followed to the letter.
COL CAMPBELL: Whose responsibility is it to see that that happens?
TONY BURKE: To see that that happens is a combination of the Director of Quarantine and as Minister I can’t dodge responsibility there, and don’t seek to.
COL CAMPBELL: So, like if Coles or Woolworths suddenly decide that we’re going to give these guys a try, there’s nothing we can do to stop them except to ensure that those controls that have been put in place are followed to the letter?
TONY BURKE: That’s right. And further work plans have to be developed. It’s not something that can actually happen quickly. But the role that I get to play is to make sure that no matter how much the Philippines complain, that they think this is too strict or this is too stringent or this means we can’t profitably sell bananas into Australia, that I hold the line and say: “That’s not our concern. Our concern is to protect biosecurity. You’ve got seven major diseases in the Philippines that we don’t have in Australia.”
COL CAMPBELL: Well I was told there was 21 potential diseases.
TONY BURKE: In terms of potential, that’s right. In terms of the major ones, when you’re on things like black sigatoka, moko, freckle, there’s a series that are of the highest level of concern. They’re all of concern. The seven ones are the ones that go up and down the whole coastline that are the highest concern.
The starting point on all of this is that they’d have to find a plantation that had low pest prevalence. Now, I don’t know if there’s too many places in the Philippines where they could even get to stage one on that. But the procedures that were brought down by the Director of Quarantine last week say essentially: if you were to bring a banana in, these are all the things you would have to do. The Filipinos have had a look at it and said, “Well that basically means we can’t bring a banana in.” And my response to that is, “Well that’s your problem, not ours.”
COL CAMPBELL: Well we’ve said that New Zealand can’t export apples because we might get fire blight, we’ve just said, “No, you can’t do it.” Why couldn’t we have done the same with the Philippines?
TONY BURKE: Col, can I tell you – with New Zealand it’s actually the same as what’s happened with the Filipino bananas. With New Zealand, they technically can export apples to Australia. They have to follow a whole lot of protocols and they say, “Well, if we did that a New Zealand apple would cost more than twice what an Australian apple would cost.”
And they’ve now taken international legal action saying that they think what we’ve done is unfair. But the same with New Zealand apples, the same with chicken meat and what looks like will now be the same with bananas, technically can you say they can now come in? Yeah, you can.
But for all the hoops they’ve got to jump through, they say, “Well, no other market in the world does that to us, so we’ll sell elsewhere.” And I say, “Well, I’m not going to compromise the biosecurity of Australia to try to help the farmers of a different country.”
COL CAMPBELL: Good for you. Now, the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs Committee – they still have to look at this, don’t they? Have they got the power to change that?
TONY BURKE: No, they can make recommendations to me in terms of making sure that we vigorously enforce that. I don’t need any convincing from a Senate Committee to do that. But this whole process, once it was kicked off in the year 2000… it’s like once a legal case is kicked off you, the politicians still have to take responsibility and that’s fair. We’re a democracy. But the decision’s actually getting made by someone who’s in a position of being a judge.
COL CAMPBELL: Alright, well we’ll wait and see what happens with interest. Because if by chance some of these diseases do get into Australia it not only affects the banana industry, but some of them affect the [inaudible] industry as well. Members of the banana family like heliconias are all at risk. And that’s one of my interests as well as trying to stick up for the poor old banana grower, because they get kicked in the guts at every turn. And I’m trying to support them to the last degree.
TONY BURKE: Oh no, good on you Col. And I’ve got to say, the banana farmers that I’ve visited, these growers, these are not your big, corporate growers. These are family businesses these banana growers and they’ve got every right to expect that we’ll do everything we can to preserve the biosecurity for their industry.
COL CAMPBELL: There’s another issue, there’s a couple of things I wouldn’t mind raising with you as well while I’ve got you and you seem to be in a good mood.
TONY BURKE: [Laughter] I try to always be, Col.
COL CAMPBELL: What are your thoughts on the potential for mining to take place in some of the most productive farmland in Australia, out on the Darling Downs?
TONY BURKE: Can I tell you, it’s not just mining where this is raised with me. This is raised with me on forestry as well. It is raised with urban sprawl. Even with some of the things that people talk about, not for forestry purposes, but on climate change and people say we need to plant trees. On all of these issues I am very much aware of there being a real pressure on prime agricultural land.
You know, if there is something being done on marginal land, that can be a different story. But in terms of our thinking in this – and I don’t have policy carriage of the mining bit – but in terms of our thinking on this as a nation we just have to keep front-of-mind that we’re a food producing nation. And producing food is not something that’s an optional in the economy, it’s an essential.
So there will be particular issues around individual mining leases, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the mining side of it. But I can tell you Col, the concern that you raised there, is one I get on almost every property I visit around the country.
People who produce food are right to be proud of the job they do. When everyone else goes to work, they do it to make sure they can feed their family. Someone who produces food for a living produces food for their family, for families all around the country and often right around the world.
And I don’t think in the whole policy mix we should ever lose sight of the fact that producing food of itself is something that matters, is important in its own right. And as we try to work our way through all the different pressures on land use we just can’t continue at so many levels to be in a situation where we’re losing prime agricultural land.
COL CAMPBELL: I worry that now with the economic downturn that governments are going to be looking for every way at getting some money in, because there is going to be an awful lot needed. And I’m just afraid that mining taxes are going to pay more than agricultural taxes and we’ll lose this fabulous farming productive land for short-term gain. And 20 years later, when the mines have exhausted, the land’s no good for farming either. Because I’ve had experience of it. It’s really a tragedy and it should never happen.
TONY BURKE: Can I tell you something that’s a bit optimistic in what you’ve said just there, Col? And that’s if you go through the trade figures that came out in the last week, our trade figures are being held up. The area where we’ve got significant growth is agriculture. When you look at the general economic figures, whether the economy itself is growing or shrinking – we’re still being hit by what’s going on internationally – but the upward pressure that is riddled through those figures once again is food production. It’s agriculture.
COL CAMPBELL: And there are huge numbers of job opportunities in agriculture as well.
TONY BURKE: Oh, that’s right. During the time of drought, there have been tens of thousands of jobs that have disappeared from the land. And hopefully at least in your part of the country we’ve started to move forward again. We still haven’t in the south, but in the north we’ve started to move forward again. And hopefully we’ll start to see those agriculture jobs coming back.
COL CAMPBELL: One last issue and one that I am concerned about too, again bearing in mind citrus canker, equine influenza and we’ve had a lot of calls from listeners whilst we’ve been talking on this importation of Foot and Mouth Disease organisms in the quarantine department.
TONY BURKE: Oh Col I’m so glad you have asked me.
COL CAMPBELL: Because I worry like hell about that too.
TONY BURKE: There’s a response which I have given to some print journalists time and time again, and they have refused to run it. And it’s a great opportunity to be able to tell your listeners my view on that. Because it’s been run as though there’s a plan from the Government to import live virus for the purposes of experimentation. And the recommendation that came through in that Beale Report was that we shouldn’t have a complete blanket ban on ever bringing live virus in.
Now there’s one reason why I want to make sure we keep the window open to bringing live virus in, and one reason only. And that is, if we did have an outbreak of Foot and Mouth somewhere, we would need to be able to very quickly bring examples of live virus in to work out exactly which strain had arrived. And that’s the only way you can conduct an immunisation, inoculation and eradication program. Now they’re the only circumstances that I can foresee that we would want to bring the virus in, if there was already an outbreak.
COL CAMPBELL: So you’re saying we’ll have it when the outbreak occurs.
TONY BURKE: Lets say if, not when.
COL CAMPBELL: That’s right, let’s say if. So if it did occur, then you would bring it in?
TONY BURKE: Oh that’s right. And when EI happened, I wasn’t Minister when it first broke out, but by the time I got the job we were still in the depths of the problems with that. We wouldn’t have been able to conduct an immunisation process and eradicate the disease unless we’d very quickly made sure we had live virus available.
I’ve got no interest in conducting experimentation, or anything like that. We’ve got no one even applying to want to do that. But for me to rule it out it ever coming in would be to say if we had an outbreak then I wouldn’t try to eradicate it. And I can’t, it would be irresponsible for me to say that. But they’re the only circumstances Col. And I keep giving this to print journalists and your program is now one of the very rare opportunities I’ve had to be able to explain it.
COL CAMPBELL: Well thank you for your time this morning Minister I know it’s your weekend, and I appreciate the time you’ve given us.
TONY BURKE: Oh no, it’s great to be able to talk to you Col, I do appreciate it.
Ends