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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 3329 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

We are not debating irradiated food or genetically manipulated food. We are debating consumers' right to know. We are not debating whether or not this should not go ahead; rather, that the consumer should be able to make their own decision.

So Mr Moore was able to be strong then; but, as a Health Minister, his position has changed. That does concern me.

Mr Moore: My position has not changed.

MS TUCKER: Mr Moore interjects that his position has not changed in terms of the actual issue, and I acknowledge that. But he has the responsibility now to represent the ACT as Health Minister in these negotiations. This Bill is saying very clearly, "We don't like Australia going with the US model. We would prefer the European or even the Swiss model", if you look at the nature of this particular legislation that we are debating today.

I was interested to hear Mr Moore say that collaboratively and cooperatively is how he has to work - to get cooperation from the other Health Ministers. But compromising, cooperating, coming to a consensus point, has never in my experience meant that you cannot start with a strong position. In fact, that is what you have to do. If you are going to compromise, collaborate and cooperate to come up with a joint position, of course you go in with your strong position initially and you fight for that. You can do that in a cooperative way; of course you can. But it is a negative way of trying to fight for standards, I believe, to say that it is not a good thing to have a strong statement to support a strong argument that you take to these sorts of discussions. The real danger, of course, with these uniform standards is that it will actually become a race to the bottom. We become so keen to always see this uniformity that, unfortunately, it tends to go down in terms of standards, rather than up.

That is one of the problems that are coming up around the discussion of globalisation, free market principles, removal of barriers to trade and this uniform approach so that we can work with this happy global market. That is obviously fraught with difficulties and dangers. In fact, when I was at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in New Zealand, the topic was globalisation and its impact on a series of areas of concern to communities around the world - in this case, Commonwealth countries. Some of those concerns were around the ability of individual regions to actually legislate according to the standards and values of their communities. It is a concern around the world at the moment that this trend towards uniform standards is quite dangerous because it takes away the power of local legislatures to represent, in the way they certainly should be able to, the views of the community. Of course, we have had that discussion in this place before around the battery hen legislation as well.

So I do not think that people should be seduced always by the rhetoric that it is all about uniform standards, and that that is the most important thing. It is not. The most important thing is that, as a legislature, we have the right to have this discussion and to make a strong statement on it. We do not want to be told by a Health Minister that we

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