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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3202 ..

In a sense, the threat of GM food production in Australia has retreated somewhat since the minister announced he would legislate this moratorium. In May this year, the Canadian gene tech company, Monsanto, announced it was pulling out of Australia, frustrated by state government moratoriums on GMOs. The other major player in this technology, Bayer CropScience, announced that it had reached the same conclusion in June. That is no reason not to proceed with these laws, but it does give us a greater time to consider the developments in genetic technologies, particularly in agriculture.

That being said, out of all the states and territories, this government seems to have chosen the least effective model for a moratorium. Instead of declaring all GM food crops under a moratorium, whether we know about them or not, the government has chosen to prohibit them one by one. While at the moment Roundup Ready canola appears to be the only GM food crop on the table for Australia, there are a large number of current and potential GM food crops that are out there. Banning them one by one seems an awfully roundabout way to ensure that these technologies are not used in the territory.

A number of issues have surfaced in federal parliament since the passing of the Gene Technology Act 2000. My colleague Senator John Cherry has been looking closely at these developments. I need to thank him and his staff for his assistance in our consideration of the bills before us.

On 25 July last year, the Office of Gene Technology Regulator announced the approval of a commercial release of a genetically modified canola by Bayer CropScience. This was a very important decision, despite the fact that Bayer has now pulled out of that release. It was the first approval of the commercial release of a genetically modified food crop into Australia. It comes at a time when the world outcome for GM crops is still quite uncertain. At that time, the Democrats raised serious concerns about the regulator’s approval, which was based on a very narrow assessment of environmental and health effects.

The gene regulator is a respected scientist who has always acted with the utmost integrity and comprehensiveness. But they are constrained by a very restrictive mandate under the act to deal with only the immediate health and environmental effects rather than the broader changes from GM. This has resulted in approval based on a narrow set of criteria that expressly excludes key environmental issues such as changes between agricultural practice due to different crop herbicide systems and the ability to effectively segregate GM and GM-free canola.

Ironically, the approval came just one week after a report of a panel of 30 British scientists headed by the chief scientist, Sir David King, about the science of GM crops. That report warned that, in considering the effects of GM pest-resistant crops—and I quote—“it is necessary to judge the crop pesticide combination as a system rather than simply considering the ecological impacts of the crop in isolation”. The Australian decision failed to do just that, deferring any questions to do with pesticide to another regulator, who in turn was to rely on a crop management system designed by Bayer CropScience. The question of the combination of crop and pesticide and its impact on biodiversity simply was not considered.

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