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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 3208 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

This is very serious because the region where our samples were taken are known for their diverse varieties of native corn, which is something that absolutely needs to be protected.

The assistant of microbial ecology in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources said that.

Getting back to our particular report: Mr Smyth went into some detail regarding the government's response to the Health Committee's report. I will not repeat what he said. However, I'll briefly talk about the insurance issue. I'll talk about the precautionary principle when we get to the detail stage because I'm putting an amendment on that matter.

But as everyone's aware, insurance is far from being something you can rely on at the moment. Following the collapse of HIH in Australia and the first massive attacks on major Western industrial states by terrorists, insurance companies have become very wary about insuring a range of activities, premiums have risen and companies are demanding fundamental changes to the democratic system of being able to hold negligent people to account in the courts.

In this context, we have the uncertainty of the effects of genetically modified food crops. We have cases where the genetically modified materials have spread to neighbouring crops, where the farmers had absolutely no desire to use the genetic modification and, in fact, were sued for intellectual property patenting problems because they were the victims of accidental contamination.

The committee made it clear that there is confusion over who is liable to hold insurance to protect from any unwanted consequences of environmental release of GMOs and, while there is provision in the bill for the licence to include a condition requiring the licence holder to be adequately insured for these events, there was certainly debate about who was properly the negligent party and over which player in the system should be required to hold insurance.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MS TUCKER: The bill does not make it clear who should hold the insurance. The government suggested that the onus of liability lies with the applicant, that is, the producer or developer of the product, to have insurance for adverse effects on other producers, human or environmental health. On the other hand, the Life Sciences Network, an umbrella organisation of national industry organisations, universities, research organisations, producers and other entities who've made an investment in biotechnology and genetic modification, believe that it should be up to the grower to take out insurance against claims of possible contamination by their product.

This is absolutely, clearly a very unsatisfactory situation, and I find it very surprising that this government and the federal government are prepared to proceed without having this fundamental question resolved.

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