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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 3209 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I can see I'm running out of time, and I don't think I'll be able to say as much as I wanted. But I just refer people to the report we've made. If you look at the number of recommendations that were not agreed to by the government, you do have to be very concerned. (Extension of time granted.)

The very first recommendation asked the government to look at the unresolved issues from the Senate inquiry in the report called A cautionary tale: fish don't lay tomatoes. We asked them to look at the specific unresolved issues from that. They included:

application of the precautionary principle;

consideration of Australia's biodiversity and unique flora and fauna;

ethical considerations;

commercial-in-confidence provisions;

public confidence in the scheme and gene technology;

insurance coverage;

licence conditions and review;

roles of the consultative group and committees of the interim Office of the Gene Technology Regulator;

rights of third parties to seek reviews of decisions.

The government would not pick up those issues. They are obviously extremely serious issues. Once again the government's response is characterised, as is the response of other government's around Australia and in fact around the world, by, as I said, almost a Mary Poppins approach. Greens and Democrats are called fairies at the bottom of the garden. I'm sorry, it's the major parties that are the fairies at the bottom of the garden on this one. Absolutely, they are not prepared to look at how you can support claims that this technology is not going to have serious impacts, long-term impacts, for societies around the world.

It appears ministers and governments are content with the current situation and, in Australia, content to just leave it to the regulator. This is despite the fact that there is huge concern in the farming, scientific and environmental communities who convincingly challenge the laissez faire approach of the regulator and the governments that support it.

We also know that the broader community lacks confidence in the technology and is concerned about potential environmental and health problems. The problems are so basic. Genetic engineering is very different from breeding. It involves the insertion of foreign genes into cells, fundamentally changing the close control that normally exists in cells.

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