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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 4633 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

While we realise that human activities may involve hazards, people must proceed more carefully than has been the case in recent history. Corporations, government entities, organisations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all human endeavours.

Therefore it is necessary to implement the Precautionary Principle: Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity rather than the public bears the burden of proof.

The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic, and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

The Greens, along with many farming and environmental protection and community-based organisations, simplify the principle further to argue that industry should always prove a substance is harmless before releasing it into the environment. Scientific doubt must be taken into account. In fact, it is self-evident that once released, intentionally or not, self-replicating GMOs offer no possibility of recall; so the question of due care, of being safe rather than sorry, is particularly important.

It is evident, and becoming more evident as the days go by, that the processes and procedures that govern the use of these organisms are not safe. I will outline just a few examples to make the point that, until there is significantly more assurance of both the control of organisms when being tested and of the impact of such organisms when they are intentionally released into the environment, we have a duty to ensure that research is conducted in strictly controlled environments. I will then remind the Assembly of some of the other factors that are driving these decisions and that provide the context for this debate.

The results of farm scale trials that studied the environmental impact of GM crops in the UK were released in October. This is important to this debate because even larger farm scale trials are being permitted in New South Wales, despite the three-year moratorium on more general commercial release. One of those UK government funded studies, led by Mike Wilkinson of Reading University, came to the conclusion that cross-pollination between GM plants and their wild relatives is inevitable and could create hybrid superweeds resistant to the most powerful weedkillers.

It had previously been suggested that the danger of hybridisation-where two types of plant cross-pollinate to create another, for example, a superweed-was limited, but the results of this research, which included satellite image analysis and close examination of river banks, revealed that hybridisation was more widespread and frequent than anticipated. The fear is that superweeds could absorb resistance to weedkillers from GM crops engineered to be herbicide-tolerant.

Mike Wilkinson was quoted in the Independent of 10 October as having said that physical barriers such as buffer zones designed to stop pollen spreading from GM crops have only a limited impact. The article said:

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