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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3206 ..

We have just heard Mrs Cross take a totally different view on that, as is her right. But she seems to have no sympathy with the notion of the precautionary principle, as the majority of members here do, as I understand it.

Recommendation 21 states:

The Committee recommends that the issue of liability and adequate insurance coverage be addressed as a matter of urgency and before any environmental release of GMOs occurs.

When some of these recommendations were put forward in a fairly moderate way as amendments to the ACT’s gene tech bill towards the end of last year, it was made very clear that we had a possible problem with corresponding law of the Commonwealth. Arguably, if we had gone ahead, the ACT would have needed to set up a regime to mirror the Commonwealth gene technology regulator.

Accepting the government’s concern with that approach, the Greens chose instead to put forward a bill that would, in effect, implement recommendation 3—a ban on the environmental release of any GM crops or other transgenic. While that bill, the Genetically Modified Organism (Environment Protection) Bill, sets up an unlimited ban, as I made clear at the time, the intention was always to establish an exemption scheme to allow for strictly controlled field trials, consistent with the recommendations of the inquiry.

An amendment to this bill, which I have circulated, was the framework for such a scheme. With perhaps more enthusiasm or resources, I believe we could have found an approach that would have been more or less acceptable to the biotech industry in the ACT, at least on an interim basis.

Putting all the arguments in this debate has limited value. I would like to focus on some of the key ones. As I understand it, even within the very limited scope of the Commonwealth and ACT gene technology acts, the territory can assert its right to make decisions in regard to GMOs for the purpose of protecting areas for non-GM crops for marketing purposes. In the short term, consistent with the recommendations of the committee report, it made good sense to protect the whole of the ACT from non-GM crops and so put controls on all GM organisms.

The exemption scheme circulated to members as an amendment to my bill has the following features. Health and veterinary products are automatically exempt; other exemptions are obtained by application to the minister, who needs to notify any neighbouring property owners, to consult with the public and to seek the advice of an advisory committee. That does not seem unreasonable, nor need it be too time consuming, as any exemption application could be timed to coincide with the OGTR processes. The minister can grant exemptions only for carefully supervised scientific trials and would need to be confident that the information could not be gathered through using non-GM organisms in the interests of a precautionary approach.

One of the key sticking points appears to be that the applicant would need to be able to prevent or remedy any contamination and have the capacity to pay compensation for any harm that results from contamination. I understand that businesses might be afraid that some consequences of their activity might emerge some years down the track. No-one

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