Page 3742 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (12.11): The opposition will support the government’s amendment. I think it is sensible. There is no question that there will be a time frame for industry to adjust, and the period of time that has been proposed by the Greens is inadequate. I think that the three-year period, for the reasons outlined by the minister, makes more sense.
Again, the minister is essentially arguing in favour of national consistency. She wants to see a three-year time frame before we have a look at any changes to this legislation so that it would be in accord with national consistency. Again, the minister argues for national consistency. She says that that is the way that we should be going, that otherwise it is going to cause confusion, and it would be crazy, in her words, for us to have eight jurisdictional responses to this. So she is supporting what she describes as crazy. But what she does recognise is that we can mitigate the effects of that by making sure that any review is pushed as far to the right as we can so that that review could incorporate advice from people like Food Standards Australia and could incorporate any decisions that are made nationally.
It is quite clear that the Greens are in a rush here. The Greens are in a hurry, either for political or whatever other purposes. Before we start putting salt content, fat content, carbohydrate content, whatever other contents they want in that—no doubt they will want the meat content in that because of some vegetarian ideal to come in the future, but whatever they want labelled—let us make sure that it does not have an adverse effect, that their rush to get the other contents of food in food labelling does not have unintended consequences, either in terms of making it too confusing for the consumer so that it that does not have the effect that we want or, indeed, making it disproportionately prohibitive for business to comply so that it is just impossible for them to do so, particularly if there is national inconsistency. So we do support what the government proposes in terms of delaying the time frame for review.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (12.14): I will not be moving my amendment in regard to this. The government has proposed an amendment that meets the needs of ACT Health, and the Greens are willing to agree to that. I just add that this is actually a particular part of the bill which was discussed at length. We were quite happy to work with ACT Health on whatever worked for them.
The amendment I was going to propose was around one year, and the reason we had actually put that forward was that it was something ACT Health had suggested. So we were quite willing to work in with whatever was going to work for them on this one, and I am very pleased to see that we do have this amendment coming forward. It is something which, as I said quite some weeks ago, we had been willing to work on. It had been raised by the Liberals as well. Again, it is something we would be willing to work with them on. So it is good that we did eventually get this amendment coming through.
I just note, on the issue that has been raised about salt, fat and carbohydrates and about our trying to push something through, these have actually come forward from the Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association. They have put these forward as aspects that they would like to see considered in any future potential labelling
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video