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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3210 ..

sort of green cane toads with bunny ears. It is not like that. What is being proposed is not like this. As I said the other day to someone, we are not proposing to put frog genes in the tomatoes.

Ms Tucker: Sorry, you are. There are fish genes in tomatoes.

MRS DUNNE: We are not proposing to put frog genes in tomatoes so that they can jump out of the way of the aphids. We are proposing a series of trials that, before anything can happen, have to be approved by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator. You have to demonstrate that what you are doing is for the good in a whole range of areas.

What we are talking about, for the most part, is—yes, we are crossing over species—taking drought resistance genes out of something like kangaroo grass and putting them in wheat; we are not talking about crossing the phylums in the way that some people were speaking, particularly a few years ago. We have to be very careful because innovators tend to make enemies of people—and I think it was Machiavelli who said something like this—who stand to gain from there being no innovation. That is not the exact quote but it is something like that. The people who do stand to gain are not as activist in a way as those who stand to lose. And this is what has really been happening across the world.

I think that the farming community in Australia and farming communities in many other parts of the world have been the great losers. As a result, people in developing countries will be the great losers because we are not going to have the innovation and the research necessary to create drought-resistant wheat or drought-resistant cotton.

As I have said in this place on a number of occasions, I have a real problem with cotton farming in this country because we use so much water on a crop. I think that there would be better uses for that water. But if we could come up with a cotton that uses less water, perhaps people like me would not have such a problem with the crop.

We have to put aside our fear and loathing of the unknown and allow these trials to continue. Yes, we do have to be cautious—and that is why we have the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator—and we must require him to be cautious. But we cannot afford, for our own sakes, for the sakes of our own farmers, for the sakes of people here and overseas, put a stop to this. What actually happens is that the people who are investing the money, the Monsantos and the Bayers, will stop investing the money. When that happens we will stop having the innovation, and that will be the end of it for some time. We will eventually bounce back from that.

But what is being proposed, especially in Ms Tucker’s bill mainly, basically means that CSIRO in the ACT would have to pack up and go away; they would go somewhere else. And this is not the sort of environment that we should be fostering in the ACT, one where we are afraid of innovation. We will not have a creative city if we pass a piece of legislation here tonight that will cause vast slabs of CSIRO to pack up and go elsewhere. They might move their trial paddocks out to Wallaroo Road just across the border, but it sends a very bad message that we are telling CSIRO that they are not wanted in this town.

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