BIOSECURITY Tasmania has used the state’s Queensland fruit fly incursions as a foundation for building new biosecurity legislation.
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Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment secretary John Whittington told a captive audience of about 200 fruit growers and stakeholders that they would soon be called on to offer industry insights to the legislation in preparation for it to be presented to parliament.
“We’ve worked hard on a draft,” Mr Whittington said.
He emphasised the importance of decision making, but also acknowledged the butterfly effect those decisions had.
“One of the things we’re trying to get right in the bill is how do we make decisions, who makes them and how do we make good the pain through our decisions,” he said.
“With Queensland fruit fly some of the decisions that we’ve had to we’ve had to implement, like movement controls and treatment protocols, impact businesses by the imposition of those controls.
“Those controls, though, are absolutely for the benefit of the industry. Without them we lose all sorts of market access.”
While he acknowledged the department did not grow anything, produce fruit, retail or value-add to products, he told the Fruit Growers Tasmania conference audience that staff “do care passionately about your industry”.
“Our job is to assist you in producing and growing the value of your industry,” Mr Whittington said.
“It’s through the people you see at the border, the dogs, people you never see in back rooms doing paperwork, out on farms, it’s about working with the Commonwealth and working with your industry. It’s about market access,” he said.
One of the areas that has sharpened the department’s focus of late is the impact of good biosecurity controls at a state, national and international level, including working with southern states on fruit fly response.
“Biosecruity has got a much bigger focus over the past few years. It has gone from four or five on the [ministerial] agenda to number one over the last few years,” Mr Whittington said.
“Some of the scariest data I’ve seen recently is data on interceptions of ‘nasties’ at the Australian border. What we are seeing are detections of horrible diseases and pests, and they are going up really rapidly.
“Opening up borders, free trade and movement of products around the globe, from which we benefit, also brings great risk on us,” he said.