Hague Kevin: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Biosecurity Law Reform Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5192. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 This evening there has been a fair amount of self-congratulation from some of the Government members. I just want to begin by correcting a logical error that has appeared in several of their speeches and that is that finding a pest finding the Queensland fruit fly in Mount Roskill is not evidence that the system works. It is evidence that the system is not a complete failure. We actually do not know how good our system is. We do know that there have already been some very substantial and dangerous incursions and that we have ample evidence of the risk of many others. 
What I wanted to spend the bulk of my time on this evening was an aspect of this issue of biosecurity that has not been explored in the debate tonight on the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill and that is the importance of biosecurity not for our primary industries but for our natural biodiversity. I have said previously in debates on this bill and on other biosecurity measures that the flora and fauna of this country are unique in the world. If they do not survive here they are lost to the world for ever. So the consequences of biosecurity risks are not only to the primary industries—and I am sure that everybody in the House shares concern about those—but also to the natural world and yet this bill and the measures it includes and all of the thinking that underpins it have been largely silent on that issue. 
Why is that a problem? It is a problem because of the consequence of targeting. When we choose to target a particular set of measures or a particular set of issues we are implicitly choosing to de-target everything else. What that means is that when we target even more the primary industries through this bill we are placing even less emphasis on the importance of protecting our natural biodiversity and that is a major problem. It is also a problem within the measures of the bill because one of the things that I anticipate and confidently predict will occur under this bill is that with these Government-industry agreements those sectors that are able to afford a significant investment into such agreements will be the ones that get the great treatment from our biosecurity services and those sectors that cannot will not get that same service. Conservation of our natural biodiversity will be at the very end of the queue. 
But the consequences of this bill for conservation are worse still than those that I have mentioned. One of the provisions of this bill will bind the Crown to regional pest plans. That in and of itself is not a problem—in fact it is probably a good thing to do—but that new obligation which will have at the very least a multimillion-dollar impact and liability on the Department of Conservation does not come matched with the funding to be able to meet that obligation. What it means is that in addition to effectively less protection from biosecurity risks for our conservation estate for our natural biodiversity—in addition to that problem—there will also be effectively a major funding cut to the Department of Conservation because funds that were intended to protect our natural biodiversity through Vote Conservation will be lost to the sector. So there will be multiple problems for conservation. 
I want to finish by talking briefly about free trade because it seems to me that in many ways biosecurity is the victim of the obsession with free trade that seems to have gripped this country—in several ways. No one argues that there is enough money to pay for all of the things that one could possibly do to protect our country from biosecurity risks. But given unlimited risks that are proportional to the amount of stuff that we import and limited dollars the logical rational response would be to take whatever steps we can to restrict the imports. We do not do that because of the obsession with free trade. The Green Party opposes the bill.