COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Official …...The administration of Biosecurity Australia with particular reference to the revised draft import risk analysis report released in February

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

Official Committee Hansard

SENATE RURAL AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS AND TRANSPORT

LEGISLATION COMMITTEE

Reference: Import risk analysis for bananas

TUESDAY, 13 APRIL 2004

B R I S B A N E

BY AUTHORITY OF THE SENATE

INTERNET

The Proof and Official Hansard transcripts of Senate committee hear-ings, some House of Representatives committee hearings and some joint committee hearings are available on the Internet. Some House of Representatives committees and some joint committees make avail-able only Official Hansard transcripts.

The Internet address is: http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard To search the parliamentary database, go to:

http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au

SENATE

RURAL AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS AND TRANSPORT LEGISLATION COMMITTEE

Tuesday, 13 April 2004

Members: Senator Heffernan (Chair), Senator Buckland (Deputy Chair), Senators Cherry, Colbeck, Ferris and O’Brien

Substitute members: Senator McLucas to replace Senator Buckland for the committee’s inquiry into the ad-ministration of Biosecurity Australia—Revised draft import risk analysis for bananas

Participating members: Senators Abetz, Bishop, Boswell, Brown, Carr, Chapman, Coonan, Eggleston, Chris Evans, Faulkner, Ferguson, Harradine, Harris, Hutchins, Knowles, Lightfoot, Mason, Sandy Macdonald, Mackay, McGauran, McLucas, Murphy, Payne, Robert Ray, Santoro, Stephens, Tchen, Tierney and Watson

Senator Greig for matters relating to the Fisheries portfolio

Senator Lees for matters relating to Air Safety

Senator Allison for matters relating to the Transport portfolio

Senators in attendance: Senators Boswell, Cherry, Ferris, Heffernan and McLucas

Terms of reference for the inquiry: To inquire into and report on:

The administration of Biosecurity Australia with particular reference to the revised draft import risk analysis report released in February 2004 relating to bananas from the Philippines, including:

(a) the processes and research underpinning the analysis;

(b) the conclusions and recommendations; and

(c) related matters.

WITNESSES

COLLINS, Mr Leonard Max Dowse, Chairman, Imports Committee, Australian Banana Growers Council ................................................................................................................................................ 1

DALE, Professor James Langham (Private capacity) .................................................................................. 39

FEGAN, Dr Mark, Lecturer, Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Protection..................... 21

HAYWARD, Dr Alan Christopher (Private capacity) ................................................................................. 29

HEIDRICH, Mr Tony Frank, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Banana Growers Council .................. 1

IRWIN, Professor John Alan Gibson, Chief Executive Officer, Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Protection ................................................................................................................................ 21

JACKSON, Mr Marc William, Banana Grower, Australian Banana Growers Council............................. 1

MUIRHEAD, Dr Ian Francis, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council ....................................... 1

PEASLEY, Mr David Lawrence (Private capacity)...................................................................................... 44

PIPER, Mr Richard George, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council......................................... 1

PULLAR, Mr David Murray, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council ....................................... 1

Tuesday, 13 April 2004 Senate—Legislation RRA&T 1

RURAL AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS AND TRANSPORT

Committee met at 9.27 a.m.

COLLINS, Mr Leonard Max Dowse, Chairman, Imports Committee, Australian Banana Growers Council

HEIDRICH, Mr Tony Frank, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Banana Growers Council

JACKSON, Mr Marc William, Banana Grower, Australian Banana Growers Council

MUIRHEAD, Dr Ian Francis, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council

PIPER, Mr Richard George, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council

PULLAR, Mr David Murray, Consultant, Australian Banana Growers Council

CHAIR—I declare open this public hearing of the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee. The committee is inquiring into the import risk analysis for bananas from the Philippines. The committee has authorised the recording, broadcasting and rebroadcasting of these proceedings in accordance with the rules of the order of the Senate of 23 August 1990 concerning the broadcasting of committee proceedings. I place on the record that all committee witnesses are protected by parliamentary privilege with respect to their submissions and evidence. Any act by any person which may disadvantage a witness on account of their evidence is a breach of privilege.

While the committee prefers to hear evidence in public, the committee may agree to take evidence confidentially. However the committee may still publish or present confidential evidence to the Senate at a later date. The committee would consult the witness concerned before doing this. The Senate can also order publication of the confidential evidence. I welcome you all here today, and let you know that we still need rain in the south of New South Wales even if you have had plenty up here. Our first witnesses today are from the Australian Banana Growers Council. I invite you to make a short opening statement. We will then ask you some questions.

Mr Collins—I am the Chairman of the Imports Committee of the Australia Banana Growers Council and I am also a banana farmer from Tully. The Australian Banana Growers Council is the peak national industry body representing 2,000 producers, mostly in Queensland and New South Wales. I thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee with my colleagues Tony Heidrich, the CEO of the council; Marc Jackson, a banana grower from Tully; Dr Ian Muirhead, our consultant plant pathologist; Richard Piper, our consultant entomologist; and David Pullar, our statistical consultant.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes or so I will outline our primary concerns with this IRA. Firstly, there are errors and omissions of basic science. Secondly, there are grave errors in quantitative simulation of risk and statistical or mathematical errors. Thirdly, there are grave inadequacies in process and accountability. Taken together, these three areas of concern have led the council and the industry as a whole to question the credibility and veracity of this IRA process—and what the committee has been told about it by officials of Biosecurity Australia.

Let me begin by saying that banana growers believe that, if the recommendations of the revised draft IRA report and imports from the Philippines were accepted, they would inevitably lead to the devastation of the $350 million a year Australian industry. It would bring ruin to growers and decimate many rural communities. To be quite blunt, the revised draft IRA report is based on wrong assumptions, wrong science and wrong statistics. When combined with some of the chronic failures of process, Biosecurity Australia has effectively condemned the banana industry to outbreaks of moko disease and banana bract mosaic virus within two years of export trade commencing and freckled disease within 2.5 years.

I now direct the committee’s attention to our concerns over the conduct of the IRA process itself. Members of this committee have recently expressed surprise and concern at the assertion and evidence by Ms Harwood and Dr McRae that the panel which compiled the IRA left no paper trail of its decision making process, minutes of its meetings or records of its works. Members will recall that on 8 March in response to a request by Senator McLucas for a copy of the minutes of all the IRA team meetings, Ms Harwood replied:

There is a short summary record placed on the public file. That is the record of the meeting.

When pressed further about the existence of records of the outcomes of the IRA team meetings, Ms Harwood and Dr McRae’s evidence was to the effect that the only records in existence were the numerous draft versions of the two IRA reports. I call those statements an assertion, because we are not sure that they were true.

The council now informs the committee that, as a result of FIO processes in Queensland, the council has been provided with two schedules of documents: one relating to the documents held by Dr Gordon Guymer of

RRA&T 2 Senate—Legislation Tuesday, 13 April 2004


the Queensland BPA, who is a member of the technical working group, and another relating to documents held by Dr Rob Allen of the Queensland DPI, who is a member of the IRA team. Those schedules refer to minutes of the IRA team meetings held on 5 and 6 January 2001, 30 January 2001, 15 February 2001, 23 and 24 April 2001, 12 and 13 July 2001, and 22 August 2001. Again, using the FOI process, the council has obtained a copy of an email dated 23 January 2002 from Dr Sharan Singh of Biosecurity Australia and a member of the IRA team to IRA team members, which states:

Please find attached some draft minutes/outcomes from RAP 2, 3 and 4 meetings in 2001.

I will table a copy of these documents at the end of my speech. The information appears to directly contradict Ms Harwood’s and Dr McRae’s evidence to this committee on 8 March 2004. It raises very serious issues for this committee, the industry and public administration.

I will remind the committee of the three key steps in the process to date: first, the first draft IRA report dated June 2002 concluded that the ban on importation should remain; second, exactly the same IRA team members concluded less than two years later in February this year that the ban should be lifted with no new science; third, a month after the revised draft IRA report was published, it was in fact retracted because of a fundamental error in the spreadsheet—a spreadsheet the council’s consultants told Biosecurity was wrong within days of the release of the revised draft IRA report. On their own that series of events is enough to raise questions, if not suspicions. Add to that an apparent attempt to hide the minutes of the meetings of that same team of scientists and the situation is totally unacceptable.

Members of the committee will also recall Biosecurity Australia’s evidence to the committee on 8 March that all seven members of the IRA team agreed with the contents of the revised draft IRA report and had signed off to this effect. Senator Boswell asked:

Did they sign off as agreeing with the report?

Dr McRae replied:

Yes.

Members of the committee will remember Biosecurity Australia was subjected to intense questioning as to whether the revised draft IRA report was a consensus or unanimous document. Again, Ms Harwood and Dr McRae gave very clear answers that it was unanimous. Ms Harwood and Dr McRae were given repeated opportunities to qualify their answers on the status of the revised draft IRA report but they were adamant it was unanimous. There was no ambiguity.

The committee will know that the IRA team included two officials from the Queensland DPI—Dr Rob Allen and Dr Brian Cantrell. The council wishes to draw to the attention of the committee part of an answer in the Queensland parliament by the Minister for Primary Industries and Fisheries, Mr Palaszczuk, on 18 March. The minister said:

I am advised that at no stage have members of the IRA team been asked to vote or sign-off that they agreed with every element of substance in the report.

This would appear to be directly inconsistent with Biosecurity Australia’s evidence to this committee on 8 March.

I would now like to draw the committee’s attention to an issue that would be impossible for me to air in almost any other forum. At the start of the IRA process in 2000 the council retained one of the world’s leading experts on banana diseases, Dr David Jones, to provide scientific evidence. Dr Jones is employed by the UK government department which is the equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. At an international conference in Mexico in April 2002 the council has evidence that Dr Brian Stynes of Biosecurity Australia approached Dr Jones’s boss. The result of the approach was that Dr Jones ended his assistance to the council. For the information of the committee, at the end of my statement I will table the relevant emails to support the claim.

Since the release of the revised draft IRA report, senior officials from Biosecurity Australia have had dealings with senior officials from CSIRO about the consultancy services which CSIRO provides to the council. Whilst the council does not fully understand the nature of the dealings, it is very clear that Biosecurity Australia has attempted to use its considerable influence over CSIRO to pressure CSIRO into not providing the council with information that could be used to criticise the scientific findings of the revised draft IRA. Biosecurity Australia’s pressure on CSIRO has had the practical effect of restricting the consultancy services which CSIRO provides to the council. I would also like to draw the committee’s attention to a 3 April story in



the Sydney Morning Herald which purports to describe similar dealings, if I can use that term, between Biosecurity Australia and CSIRO in relation to another IRA. There is remarkable consistency.

I am also reliably informed that senior DAFF officials have attempted to launch reprisals against the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection for going public with the CRC’s concerns of the science underpinning Biosecurity Australia’s recommendations in relation to moko disease. In fact, I am told by a member of the CRC board that Dr Bill Roberts from DAFF attended the most recent CRC board meeting and, representing DAFF, put forward a series of censure motions, which all failed to receive a seconder. Nevertheless, this was an attempt at a direct attack on the independence of the CRC by DAFF, which was incensed that an independent research organisation should dare to go public with their concerns in relation to the IRA’s recommendations for moko disease.

Unfortunately, the council concerns in relation to the process do not stop there. Why did it take Biosecurity Australia a month to admit the error in its computer modelling when the council’s consultants had advised Biosecurity Australia of a problem with it within days of the release of the revised draft IRA report? Because of Biosecurity Australia’s error in its modelling, the IRA team has recommended risk management measures which are grossly inadequate and which would leave the Australian banana industry seriously exposed to the worst banana diseases in the world. Surely an organisation specifically set up to assess and manage risks would have expected to employ that same ethos when assessing its own work. Unless we are to accept the proposition of rank incompetence, this episode only compounds the concern that banana growers have about the integrity of this IRA process.

In May 2001 the IRA team established three technical working groups with terms of reference which included assessing the likelihood and consequences of pests entering, establishing and spreading in Australia and considering risk management measures. Biosecurity Australia disbanded those technical working groups before the release of the first draft IRA report and before allowing them to complete their terms of reference. Biosecurity Australia never permitted them to reconvene and comment on the science that underpinned the revised draft IRA report, despite the significant change in the recommendations from the first draft IRA report. They have never been permitted to consider relevant risk management measures, despite that being an express part of their terms of reference.

The first draft IRA report pointed out that moko disease was a particular concern because neither Biosecurity Australia nor the IRA team could identify any feasible risk management measures to reduce the risk of moko to an acceptable level. The latest draft has done a complete reversal on moko. It now says there are ways of reducing the risk of moko to an acceptable level, but this newly discovered risk management regime is based on an unfounded assumption, unsound science and unverified data.

We are particularly concerned about Biosecurity Australia’s use of the Philippines data on the incidence of moko, which has not been properly verified. In 2002 the Philippines government officially informed Biosecurity Australia that requested additional survey data was being collected and would be provided. It has never been provided. Biosecurity Australia has not said why it had not insisted on the data being supplied; nor did it explain why it is now acceptable to make a new scientific judgment on the original inadequate Philippines data. As a graphic illustration of the inadequacy of the data, the committee may be interested to know that it is not even known from which geographic area of the Philippines it was compiled. It may very well not even relate to the area from which it is proposed to export bananas. It is simply impossible for Biosecurity or anybody else to say.

Additionally, Biosecurity Australia appears to have ignored reliable information supplied by the council that the incidence of moko in one multination plantation was three times that relied on in the report. Those deficiencies aside, the council also rejects the science on which the revised draft IRA report bases its conclusions about the time taken for symptoms to appear on bananas and the percentage of fruit that will be infected.

Another disease of major concern in the first draft IRA report was black sigatoka, the most devastating disease of bananas in the world. It is ubiquitous in the Philippines and only controlled by the use of high levels of chemicals and labour intensive deleafing. Incredibly, with no new scientific evidence, the revised draft IRA report has downgraded its original estimate of the annual probability of entry, establishment and spread of black sigatoka from high, which means greater than seven chances in 10 of it happening, to extremely low, which means between one in 1,000 and one in a million chances of it happening. That is a 1,700-fold reduction with no new science to demonstrate why. Again, incredibly, the revised draft IRA report concludes that no risk



management is necessary for black sigatoka. Let me remind the committee that black sigatoka is the most devastating banana disease in the world, requiring 50 or more spray applications per year to control.

There are other serious diseases that pose dangers to the Australian banana industry which the council believes the revised draft IRA report has not properly addressed on the basis of science and practical risk management. As an example of practical risk management, the report recommends that to protect against exotic mealy bugs the Philippines packing station workers be required to inspect, brush and sponge between the fingers of each banana cluster—to inspect, brush and sponge between the fingers of 79 million clusters each year. It is incredible.

The huge number aside, Australian banana growers have no confidence that the Philippines authorities will enforce any inspection regime. These fears are reinforced by a letter to the council from a former member of the Australia Philippines Business Council expressing serious concerns about the ability of the Philippines to comply with quarantine conditions because of the high level of corruption and poor standard of business ethics there. The slightest laxity in the Philippines could have dire consequences for banana growers in Australia—and not only for banana growers. Mealy bugs, if established, will also attack cotton, maize, tomatoes and numerous other horticultural crops. It is not a risk Australia can afford.

The Australian Banana Growers Council urges the committee to recommend to the Senate and the government that Biosecurity Australia be instructed to withdraw the current revised draft IRA report and begin the process anew, adhering to established, accountable and transparent procedures and taking proper notice of the science of banana diseases. We welcome your questions.

CHAIR—Thanks very much, Mr Collins. Could I just, for a start—

Senator FERRIS—Hang on, we want those documents so we have a chance to have a look at them while you are still here. Otherwise we do not get a chance to question them on it.

CHAIR—Will I table those?

Senator FERRIS—Yes. I move that they be tabled.

CHAIR—I just want to let you know that this committee has a reputation for getting to the truth and not playing politics. Banana growers will get a really fair hearing here. If there is bullshit in your submission, we will find it; if there is not, we will not. That applies to every other person that appears before us, because we have a reputation for doing the right thing and not playing politics. I guess you will have noticed from the earlier evidence from Biosecurity Australia that there is an admission in the IRA that the disease will actually come into Australia. Did you notice that?

Mr Collins—An admission that the disease will come into Australia?

CHAIR—That the disease will come into Australia but it will not, somehow, find its way into the paddock. You have not picked that up from the evidence?

Mr Collins—My understanding is that they said that if they did get into Australia there was a risk they would not get into the paddocks.

CHAIR—I think it was plainer than that. There is an acceptance that it is impractical to have nil risk. It is for us to work out what we think about that. My understanding of what they said was, ‘Yes, there is a fair chance that these things will come in but, mysteriously, they will not find their way into the paddock,’ which I find hard to believe. With the mealy bugs and this idea of wiping every banana, why would you not fumigate them?

Mr Collins—We believe that they probably should be fumigated. Apparently in New Zealand now they are fumigating nearly every consignment that is coming in from the Philippines.

CHAIR—There is no technical reason you cannot fumigate them.

Mr Collins—It is probably that they are worried about the ozone-depleting effect that it does have, and they are worried about the outcry from the green movement. We are talking about large volumes here.

CHAIR—You are not talking of a practical scenario when you talk about wiping each banana. That is bloody bullshit.

Mr Collins—We have our consultant etymologist here.

CHAIR—I do not, being a farmer myself, see that as the least bit practical. What it is idea of wiping them? Could you explain the process to this committee so we have an idea of it?



Mr Collins—We brought down some bananas.

CHAIR—Why am I not surprised?

Mr Collins—I might let our consultant etymologist handle it. They got knocked around on the plane; they fell off the top of a port.

Mr Piper—Your question was in relation to mealy bugs.

CHAIR—Yes, which has a flow-on to cotton, tomatoes and everything else.

Mr Piper—The proposed risk management measure, in addition to visual inspection of the bunches as they come into the packing station, is for the workers to examine the spaces between each finger to see if there are any mealy bugs and to sponge or brush. It is ‘sponging and brushing’ or ‘sponging or brushing’ in the revised draft; both terms are used. Mealy bugs are very cryptic insects. They will hide down in spaces where there are closely oppressed surfaces. In particular I draw the committee’s attention to the spaces where the neck of the fruit meets the cushions. The mealy bugs get into that very small crevice. It is of interest that in the original draft IRA the wording was—and I have it off by heart—‘the scenario of concern with mealy bugs is the inaccessible crypts between the fingers’. In the revised draft, the wording of the same sentence has changed. It now reads: ‘the scenario of concern are the spaces between the fingers’. I question why that wording was changed from ‘inaccessible’ to ‘spaces between fingers’. I would suggest that they are in fact inaccessible.

CHAIR—I do not think that matters, because it seems to me that that has not got a shred of practicality about it.

Senator BOSWELL—It does matter.

CHAIR—But it need not go beyond the argument, in my view, that it would be physically impossible to guarantee you did not have mealy bugs by that process. So if there is no process other than that, if there is no fumigation, that will fail for sure. You do not have to be a bloody rocket scientist to work that out.

Senator BOSWELL—You have got to investigate 79 million of those units that are going out.

CHAIR—Please continue. I am sorry to interrupt you.

Mr Piper—I quite agree with you on that. It is impractical. I have brought some photographs of mealy bugs on fruit from the Philippines, which are out of a Philippines textbook on banana growing, that I would like to pass to the committee.

CHAIR—Do you want them back?

Mr Piper—No, you can keep them. There are a number of stages in the mealy bug life cycle. Most of the stages you can see there are of mature females and in some cases ovisacs, but there is also a microscopic stage or a stage that would require you to use at least a 10 times hand lens to look for them. They are crawlers; they are the beginning of the life cycle. The crawlers hatch from the egg sacks and then move off and establish in the crevices and what have you between the fruit.

CHAIR—When you get a bunch of bananas—and blow me down if there is not a mealy bug there—what do you do with it? Sponge it?

Mr Piper—The risk management measure that is proposed—

CHAIR—We will ask the scientists their version of this later, obviously.

Mr Piper—is brushing and/or sponging.

CHAIR—What is that supposed to do to the bug—drop it on the floor, and then it climbs back up on the fruit?

Mr Piper—Presumably it is to remove them from the fruit.

CHAIR—This is ridiculous. Have you ever tried to get little ants off something and, as quickly as you get them off, they get back on?

Mr Piper—All the time.

Senator BOSWELL—How many bunches or hands of bananas go out like that from the Philippines? Are you aware of how many, Len?

Mr Collins—They send out about 13 clusters in a carton and there are 70 cartons to the tonne.

Senator BOSWELL—How many is that?



Mr Collins—The 79 million figure we quoted is using the figure that Biosecurity reckon they have penetration of the Australian market.

Senator BOSWELL—So they would have to examine 79 million clusters of bananas. That would take a while.

CHAIR—It would not work.

Senator BOSWELL—That was a rather remarkable opening statement that you made. Could you elaborate on Dr Jones being removed or removing himself? What actually happened there?

Mr Heidrich—My understanding is from the conversations that I have had with people involved with the organisation at the time that occurred. At a conference in Mexico, an approach was made by Dr Brian Stynes—

Senator BOSWELL—Where is Dr Stynes from?

Mr Heidrich—Biosecurity Australia—to the person who at that stage was the boss—I am not sure whether they still are—of the gentlemen that we had approached about working for the council, which is Dr David Jones. That approach by Dr Stynes was to the effect that Dr Jones could not consult to the council on issues to do with the banana IRA. The emails that I tabled earlier show a series of correspondence between Dr Jones and the ABGC to that effect. We have not been able to use Dr Jones in any meaningful way since Dr Stynes made that approach.

Senator BOSWELL—By what mechanism did Dr Stynes exclude Dr Jones?

Mr Heidrich—It was covert as opposed to overt. It was mentioning to the boss of David Jones that he understood Dr Jones would be providing scientific assistance to the ABGC and was he aware of that. As to the direct and specific nature of the discussion from that point on, I am unaware.

Senator FERRIS—What was the reason for the problem?

Mr Heidrich—The emails highlighted that there was potential embarrassment that could be brought upon Biosecurity Australia, and as it is a sister agency of the organisation that Dr Jones worked for in the UK that was considered to be undesirable.

Senator FERRIS—Is there any difficulty in principle with somebody like Dr Jones accepting outside work on a paid basis?

Mr Heidrich—He obviously did not think so, Senator, when we had the initial discussions about his working for us. There was no mention made by him at that point that there was any problem with his undertaking outside consultancies, as long as it did not interfere with his day-to-day responsibilities with the organisation he was employed by. The problems arose after this approach by Dr Brian Stynes.

Senator FERRIS—Did you approach Dr Stynes or the head of Biosecurity? Did you try to confirm or to clarify this issue with Biosecurity after this email that you got from Dr Jones?

Mr Heidrich—Not to my knowledge, but I will just check.

Mr Collins—This occurred before Tony became our CEO. We have had a change of CEO during this process. We did ask what they were doing, and Dr Stynes said that it was just over drinks that he had mentioned it. But it had the effect that we could not use Dr Jones. Dr Jones is the leading banana expert in the world; he has written a textbook that everybody refers to.

CHAIR—Did you consider that to be intimidation?

Mr Collins—We did. We believe there was no reason for Biosecurity to approach Dr Jones’s boss about it. We felt that we lost the benefit of Dr Jones’s scientific ability in putting our case.

Senator FERRIS—Let me just go back: you got this email from Dr Jones. Dr Jones himself had not been approached; it was his boss who had been approached. When you checked it out it appeared to have only taken place informally over drinks. A pretty serious allegation is being made here. Clearly you wanted Dr Jones to be your consultant, so why did you just leave it at that? Why didn’t you attempt to chase down this issue and go to Ms Harwood or even to the minister, given that this was a very serious allegation against a senior officer within a department?

Mr Collins—Dr Jones himself was worried about his job in England if he continued to do any work for us.

Senator FERRIS—I accept that but, coming to the Australian perspective, there were many things that you could have done if you were seriously unhappy with it, including going to see the minister. As I said a minute



ago, this apparent intimidation on a scientific basis is pretty serious, and I would have thought there were more things you could have done rather than to just accept what somebody told somebody, and it was not actually the scientist you wanted to employ and it was not actually done back to the scientist in Australia. I agree with you that, on the surface of it, it appears to be a very unusual set of circumstances, but it surprises me that the council gave up so easily. It does not normally.

Mr Collins—We were very concerned that Dr Jones would lose his job, so that is why we did not pursue it.

Senator McLUCAS—Is it also relevant where, in the second paragraph of the second email—I do not know whether this is a public document yet, Chair?

Senator FERRIS—Yes, they are.

CHAIR—Let us double-check that and move that they be so. There being no objection it is so ordered.

Senator McLUCAS—In the second paragraph of the second email it says:

I understand that PHD do not want to provoke an official letter from Biosecurity Australia on the issue of me giving advice to the ABGC as it will have to go through the Foreign Office and become awfully messy.

Is it because of that sentence that the council did not act in the way that Senator Ferris is referring to?

Mr Collins—As this took place quite a while ago I just cannot remember all the detail, but we made a decision then that we did not want to risk Dr Jones’s job.

Mr Heidrich—At that stage we were very early on in the IRA process. Whilst we were very unhappy about that approach, I think with hindsight what it indicates, and what we were trying to demonstrate, is that it was the beginning of a pattern of subsequent behaviour on the part of BA to influence the people we had previously approached to work for the council.

CHAIR—You have not had any of the CSIRO people consulting for you, have you?

Mr Collins—Yes.

CHAIR—How did they get on?

Mr Heidrich—We have recently encountered some significant problems with the consultants.

CHAIR—Are the people you had as consultants here today?

Mr Heidrich—No.

CHAIR—Why not?

Mr Heidrich—They were not comfortable attending today.

CHAIR—Why weren’t they comfortable?

Senator FERRIS—Hang on. I want to finish off the David Jones issue before we move on to the CSIRO issue. Do you normally pay public officers in that way to do consultancy? I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with it; I just want to get it on the public record that these people who are employed in this way—whether it is CSIRO or someone in England—are able to do commercial work for payment for outside organisations. Was that the case in this arrangement?

Mr Collins—Dr Jones was being paid for his work, yes.

Senator FERRIS—Can you put on the record how much payment that involved? Was it a daily rate? Was it a significant amount of money?

Mr Collins—It was an hourly rate.

CHAIR—Did he take leave from his other job while he was copping your money?

Mr Collins—I think that sometimes he was on holidays, sometimes he was on leave and sometimes he did it at night.

CHAIR—He wasn’t moonlighting?

Mr Collins—No; sometimes he did it at night.

CHAIR—Going back to the CSIRO, why aren’t they here today? You have employed them for expert advice and yet today is the big day and they are not here.

Mr Heidrich—No, that is right. We started to run into trouble with the work the CSIRO were doing for us at about the time when the pork IRA was coming to a head and there were some comments in the media about



the differences of scientific opinion between BA and the CSIRO working for the pork industry about the length of time it would take for a particular disease to enter Australia. That elicited a number of meetings between BA and CSIRO, we are led to believe, that had the effect of impacting on our ability to use those same scientists who were doing the work on pork.

CHAIR—Did Mary Barnes work for you?

Mr Heidrich—Yes. It became very difficult for those people to continue to provide the council with advice in a capacity whereby that advice could become public. The relationship remained the same in terms of their ability to provide us with advice; what changed was our ability to use that advice in a public way.

Senator BOSWELL—You contracted a number of CSIRO scientists. Now you are saying you cannot use the advice they gave you.

Senator FERRIS—They can use the advice; they are just not here.

Mr Collins—The contractor was actually the CSIRO, not the individuals.

Senator FERRIS—That is not unusual. CSIRO do a lot of outside work.

CHAIR—So you have contracted CSIRO to give you advice but, perhaps for intimidatory reasons, they are not here today to provide us with their expertise on your behalf, which makes a bit of a sham of the whole thing. What are the reasons? Is it because they are frightened of losing their jobs, of getting punched in the ear, or what?

Mr Heidrich—The scientists we would have liked to have here were uncomfortable providing advice to the council in a public forum. It is the same as the pork industry using CSIRO’s name when they put out a press release saying, ‘The CSIRO, working on behalf of the pork industry, has said that inside 10 years we will have the disease.’

CHAIR—So you think it is the pork precedent?

Mr Heidrich—From that point on, we had a substantial change in the relationship we had enjoyed with those consultants.

Senator FERRIS—Presumably, you were contracting CSIRO the organisation, not the scientists involved by name.

Mr Heidrich—Correct.

Senator FERRIS—Therefore, it was an organisational decision whether or not CSIRO were able to offer their scientists as individuals to come to the hearing. I should say that I used to work for CSIRO—I am just declaring that. The difference is between the organisational contract and individual people’s contracts, I assume.

Mr Heidrich—Yes.

Senator FERRIS—And the money that you would have paid would have gone to the organisation and not directly to the scientists. Is that correct?

Mr Heidrich—Yes.

Senator FERRIS—I understand.

CHAIR—I take it you are familiar with the memo dated 1 March, which was prepared for the minister, Peter McGauran, and says:

CSIRO statisticians are currently in contact with scientists at BA and it has been agreed that technical differences should be considered between the CSIRO and BA scientists, and not aired in the media.

Do you think that that is the mood of—

Mr Heidrich—Yes, I do, Senator.

Mr Collins—We believe that CSIRO are contracted to us and therefore they should not be talking to BA unless through us. Their information on what they discover is confidential to us. CSIRO’s loyalty is to who contracts them, not to BA.

Senator FERRIS—I would argue that the taxpayers, including all banana growers and members of this committee, fund CSIRO.

Mr Collins—When they are doing outside work they are contracted to us.



Senator FERRIS—I have always felt that it is a very difficult thing for CSIRO, which is a publicly funded body, to take on individual contracts—but that is another matter. The question of intellectual property is the issue here, isn’t it?

CHAIR—In any event, to assist the committee, will these people not being available damage your ability to present your credentials on the issues or have you got all the information?

Mr Heidrich—Not today, Senator. We have got David Pullar here and he was very well over the issues. I should say also that because of the problems that we had encountered with the CSIRO relationship we have since had to move to employ an additional scientific consultant with expertise in that area through the Queensland University of Technology. So it has been a substantial upheaval to our ability to respond to the technical information in the IRA.

Senator McLUCAS—Mr Collins, I want to go to when we had black sigatoka in the Tully Valley. Can you explain to the committee what the economic cost of that outbreak was and also what practically had to occur when we had that event in Tully?

Mr Collins—One of the farms it was found on was my own. We were immediately put into quarantine. I have a large farm and we were cutting a lot of fruit and so we just had to cut it all to the ground. For the paddock that it was found in and every paddock within 500 metres I had to knock down, destroy and bury all the fruit. Our farm was in quarantine for two or three weeks and then we were only allowed to send to markets in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. About 50 per cent of Australia’s production was in quarantine and prices tumbled. We were getting $4 and $5 a carton for bananas—the cost of production is about $12—and in three months while we were in quarantine it cost me half a million dollars in cash.

CHAIR—Did you ever work out how it got there?

Mr Collins—No, nobody ever worked out how it got there. We believe it was brought in. Whether accidentally or on purpose nobody knows but the QDPI came to the conclusion that somebody had brought it in—it had not blown in. No scientist believes that it was blown in. But whether it was brought in deliberately or accidentally was never established.

Senator McLUCAS—Has the cost to the industry as a whole been ascertained for that event?

Mr Collins—I do not think that the cost to the industry as a whole has been established, but $20 million was spent on the eradication and there was a lot more money lost by individual growers on top of that. The actual cost of the eradication program was $20 million.

Senator McLUCAS—In your view, how do the events of the outbreak in the Tully Valley compare with the regime that is proposed in the IRA?

Mr Collins—For black sigatoka there is no regime.

Senator McLUCAS—Thank you. I would also like to talk about the impact. I understand that, if you get black sigatoka, to keep it on the property a fairly major chemical regime has to be implemented. Can you tell us a little bit about what is currently happening in the Philippines?

Mr Collins—There are something like 40 to 50 sprays used per year in the Philippines. If they have a particularly wet time that number would be increased. But the issue is not only the cost of the spraying and the environmental effects of the spraying; it is the amount of leafing that they have to do. They manicure the leaves. As you know, a banana leaf hangs down. If it gets a spot of black sigatoka they go through and manicure that bit out. Every week they go through their plantations and check every leaf. Labour is cheap and they can do that; we cannot do that in Australia because our labour costs are so much greater. So you cannot compare controlling these diseases in Australia with controlling them in the Philippines. It is the same with moko; the control would be totally different in Australia because we farm differently, with capital intensive machinery, whereas in the Philippines they stick to labour and they can do these things.

CHAIR—They can move their plantations around, I take it, too. They can shut one down and start up another one over there.

Mr Collins—No, they do not do that; their plantations last a long time but they do not have any machinery moving through the plantations. That is a big issue in relation to moko. We have bagging machines, four-wheel drive motorbikes and picking trailers moving through our paddocks every week and they shift the soilborne diseases. There is none of that in the Philippines where it is all done manually.

Senator McLUCAS—Mr Collins, you said they used 40 to 50 sprays per year—sprays of what?



Mr Collins—The would use demethylase, Tilt and some other chemicals. My pathologist might be able to say what they are.

Dr Muirhead—It is a mixture of protectants and systemic sprays. They are used in cycles depending on the disease intensity and whether the fungus is resistant to a particular spray.

Senator McLUCAS—In one of the other submissions there is quite a good analysis of the proximity of the Tully River to the plantations and also an understanding of the waterborne diseases in a flood event. Is it reasonable to say we get one flood in every five years or have we missed a couple of floods?

Mr Collins—We have floods just about every year. In the last 20 years it has only been the last two years that we have really missed out.

Senator McLUCAS—What concerned me when I read that is the potential for both nutrient load and these sprays to go into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park region and into the lagoon. Has any work been done on the effect on the lagoon of increased sprays? I read on the weekend—I cannot remember what paper it was in—that a number of growers in North Queensland had been accredited for a whole range of environmental practices. Would that process of accreditation be jeopardised if all of a sudden we were spraying 40 or 50 sprays per year?

Mr Collins—I do not know if any work has been done on the loads that would go in but there has been a lot of work going on in our banana industry to reduce the use of chemicals. Over the last 10 years insecticide use has been reduced by 90 per cent. Spraying for leaf diseases has been reduced greatly and there are a lot of growers moving into an ISO for environmental issues. It is giving them a marketing tool as well as improving the management of their places.

Senator McLUCAS—In your opinion, was the issue of the potential impact on the water quality of the Great Barrier Reef considered in either of the draft IRAs?

Mr Collins—I do not believe the environmental issues have been covered in any great detail. I am not referring to your particular point.

Senator McLUCAS—So we do not know whether the chemicals that we have been talking about would have an effect on the lagoon. Is there any information that will help the committee on this matter?

Dr Muirhead—There is nothing that I am aware of. There is a real concern about nematocides, which is not one of the subjects today. There are concerns in Latin America, particularly in Costa Rica, about the use of pesticides, where they are using the same kinds of sprays. There are big environmental programs over there but there are no examples I can quote of the effects of the fungicides in water.

Senator McLUCAS—At the 8 March hearing, when I was questioning BA about the new evidence and the new science that would have informed the second report, they said there are 130 additional scientific citations that were not contained in draft 1. In your submission you say:

Of the additional citations in the Second Report, less than 25 are for publications that were not already in existence at the time of the release of the First Report.

Do you have an exact number of how many in fact are new pieces of work? You refer to one in particular.

Mr Collins—No, I do not.

Senator McLUCAS—Could you get us a list of those 25 citations because we have asked BA for the list of the 130. I am trying to get an understanding of whether there is in fact any new science. You refer to one in your submission.

Mr Collins—We will get that for you.

Senator McLUCAS—Can you tell me what you really mean in your submission. Are you saying that around 105 of those studies were in existence at the time of draft 1 but were not cited—that is, were not considered by BA, the IRA group or the TWGs—or that the science was considered but ignored in draft 1 but reconsidered and taken into account in draft 2? I am trying to understand the point you are making in your submission.

Mr Collins—I believe they knew they were there. Some of the scientists they used are banana generalists that have been around the banana industry for a long time—people they got from the states. I think they were just not quoted in the first one.

Senator McLUCAS—Because they were not relevant?



Mr Collins—They probably knew that some of them were not relevant. They just had not quoted them. They just missed ministration.

Dr Muirhead—My view is that there are some subjects which received greater attention between the first and the second drafts. When that has occurred—I can recall one relating to whether moko would establish or not—there was more information provided because the scientists had gone into greater detail in the literature, so they burrowed a bit further. Some of those extra references would have pre-existed. I can recall probably three additional studies—it might go up to four or five—but very few additional bits of new research done. During this process, there were agreements between the Philippines and Australia that there were various critical bits of research where more information was required. There are lists of what these were and, of those, we only saw two experiments that had come to fruition.

Senator McLUCAS—Between draft 1 and draft 2. What were they about, Dr Muirhead?

Dr Muirhead—One related to whether the moko bacterium would survive on the outside of banana fruits and the second one related to the risks of symptomless infection if the organism infected either through the pedicel, which is the end of the bunch, or through the corm, which is the bottom of the plant. They were two new bits of scientific information. There was also a greater assessment of the likelihood of establishment. I do not happen to agree with the conclusions, but there was a greater emphasis on looking for information. They are the main ones I can recall, but there was very little new information.

Senator BOSWELL—We were told 130 pieces of new science were presented. Are you aware of those?

Dr Muirhead—No, I am not. I thought it was 130 new references between Nos 1 and 2 but I may have been mistaken.

Senator BOSWELL—What is the difference between new references and new science?

Dr Muirhead—If the reference was not there in draft 1 and it was there in draft 2, it becomes an additional reference therefore you could say it is new.

Senator BOSWELL—Were they made public?

Dr Muirhead—They were in the list of references, yes.

Senator FERRIS—A number of witnesses have talked to the committee about a lack of science in the Philippines and the difficulty of getting scientific information out of the Philippines. Has the Australian industry ever considered funding some work in the Philippines? I would have thought that it was in the interests of the Australian banana industry to have this information. We seem to come up against a bit of a brick wall in terms of specific technical information from the Philippines, perhaps for cultural reasons as well as other reasons. Has your council ever considered funding Australian scientists to do some work in the Philippines to get this information yourselves which you could probably argue would prove once and for all the veracity of the information?

Mr Collins—For Australians to go over there and do the scientific work that needs to be done would be very expensive. We are very limited in our finances, as most industries are. Also in the Philippines—I have travelled there with Dr Muirhead—there are two industries: there is the export industry and the local industry. Two-thirds of the industry is the local industry that grows different varieties. One-third is the export industry which exports to the world.

CHAIR—They are not quarantined though, are they?

Mr Collins—No, but the Philippines people do not like the cavendish banana. They like the small, sweet banana; they do not eat the cavendish banana. The export industry is based in Mindanao. The government or the equivalent of our DPI over there is only really interested in the local industry. The export industry is comprised of large, multinational companies and they have their own scientists. Some of those plantations are 5,000 to 6,000 hectares. They have their own laboratories and their own scientists and they do not share information even from one company to the other. It is all commercial in confidence.

Senator FERRIS—Not even through the international conference system?

Mr Collins—It would be very hard to do any scientific work privately in the Philippines because the companies are very protective of their own work. We visited one plantation with a driver from one company and he had to wait out on the road while they took us in to show us around their laboratory and to show us their scientific work. They are very protective of their own work.



Senator FERRIS—The Philippines government does not undertake the work; it is done by the two large international companies—is that what you are saying?

Mr Collins—There are more than two. It is done by the large export companies.

Senator FERRIS—It is privately owned research.

CHAIR—But the government does work on the local domestic industry.

Mr Collins—It works on the local industry. A lot of them are very small two-acre places which sell in the local markets. The Philippines government is more concerned with them.

Dr Muirhead—The Philippines local industry also partakes in research through some of the big international agencies such as Innovapp which funds work, for example, on moko and how it might spread and that kind of thing, but they are two separate industries, as Mr Collins says.

Senator FERRIS—Is it very difficult for our scientists to get access to that material?

Dr Muirhead—Not to the international stuff, no, but to the stuff that is done by the companies, depending on its sensitivity, yes.

CHAIR—Have you had requests for information or assistance from Biosecurity Australia?

Mr Collins—When they put out the first draft of the IRA, we put a very detailed submission back to them. When they put out the technical working paper before the first draft, we sent in several hundred pages of detail.

CHAIR—Would it be fair to say that you have a cooperative relationship with Biosecurity Australia in trying to come to terms with all this, or is it strained? How would you describe your relationship?

Mr Collins—At present I would say that it is strained.

CHAIR—Are there any outstanding matters or requests from Biosecurity Australia to your organisation that have not been complied with?

Mr Collins—Not at present, no.

Mr Heidrich—Not to my knowledge.

Senator McLUCAS—In your submission you talk about the relationship between Biosecurity Australia and you. You generally say that there is a lack of response to submissions that you have made, if I can paraphrase it in that way. Is that essentially the point that you are making?

Mr Collins—We believe that—how shall I put this?

CHAIR—You can say whatever you like here!

Senator FERRIS—It is when you get outside that you will have trouble!

Mr Collins—We believe that they have a predetermined outcome that they want to arrive at.

Senator BOSWELL—Why do you think that is happening? Who do you think is driving that?

Mr Collins—I do not know. They ignore any science that does not head toward that predetermined outcome. One example is that for black sigatoka they have ignored anything about trash in cartons.

CHAIR—But we have not.

Mr Collins—No, but Biosecurity have. We sent them information on an inspection regime in Perth that inspects the fruit that is leaving the Tully area. We sent them the results of that. They should have got it themselves from Western Australia but, just in case they did not, we sent it to them. In the second draft, all they do is quote a study that New South Wales did and say that no leaf was found in it. But this is an actual inspection regime in Perth where they found 102 bits of leaf in cartons over a period of time. I even have photos here supplied to me by a grower—they were sent to him by the department in Western Australia—of leaf found in the cartons and the Western Australian department’s paperwork of where it has been found. Marc Jackson, the grower beside me, has even had his own fruit held in Perth because they had found leaf in it. There are many other growers I know who have had leaf found in their fruit. So what they put in the report was selective.

CHAIR—So are they surmising there is going to be no leaf coming from there?

Mr Collins—Yes, and, therefore, that is why they do not consider black sigatoka an issue. Their scientists are saying that does not travel on fruit. We dispute that. They do not dispute that it would travel on leaf, but



they are saying that there would be no leaf in the carton. Tiny bits of leaf can get caught in between the fingers of the bananas and they would not see it. It gets caught in between the fingers where they pull together.

CHAIR—Is this hand-packed in the Philippines?

Mr Collins—Yes.

CHAIR—Are they saying this is a more efficient method of removal of leaf than by machine packing? Do you machine pack?

Mr Collins—No, we hand-pack.

Senator BOSWELL—What has been the experience of bananas going into New Zealand? Are they finding leaf in the boxes too?

Mr Collins—In New Zealand they are finding mealy bugs—

Senator BOSWELL—Tell us what they are finding in the boxes.

Mr Collins—They are finding mealy bugs and other insects, because that is what New Zealand are looking for. New Zealand do not care about leaf because they have not got a banana industry. They are not looking for it. But New Zealand are very particular about mealy bugs and other insects that could spread to their other crops, and they are inspecting. They are not worried about other banana diseases in New Zealand because they do not have an industry.

Senator BOSWELL—What are they doing now? Are they fumigating?

Mr Collins—They are fumigating. I think there are a lot of consignments. Marc has been there recently.

Mr Jackson—Every consignment is fumigated now with methyl bromide or sodium cyanide.

Senator BOSWELL—Between the first and the second draft, the 95 per cent was reduced to 50 per cent. Have you any evidence as to why it was changed and why the risk went from 95 per cent to 50 per cent?

Mr Collins—I will refer that to Mr David Pullar. He is our statistician.

Mr Pullar—I am a consultant to the ABGC. The short answer to your question is no, we have no evidence and no explanation as to why it is that they have changed from a 95 percentile examination of the likelihood to a 50 percentile, other than a fairly bland statement in the revised draft which suggests in part that, right through the whole process, they have attempted to look conservatively at each of the likelihoods and then that they felt that the 50th percentile gave a good picture of the central tendency of the likelihood, which we actually dispute.

Senator BOSWELL—What do you think is a reasonable figure—between 50 and 95?

Mr Pullar—I think that a perfectly reasonable approach to the task is as set out in the draft guidelines which were put out in 2001—that all quarantine risk should be considered conservatively and the 95th percentile is an appropriate measure.

Senator BOSWELL—Does that mean that you accept that there is a five per cent risk? Is that it in basically layman’s terms?

Mr Pullar—Yes. There is a one in 20 risk that you have got the calculation wrong.

Senator BOSWELL—So you see that as an acceptable risk or an acceptable chance.

Mr Pullar—In the context of the overall IRA, I think it is a reasonable approach.

Senator BOSWELL—So reducing it to 50 per cent is a sort of heads you win, tails you lose, fifty-fifty chance of getting it in?

Mr Pullar—It certainly raises the likelihood that an outbreak will occur and consequently raises the risk. In many cases it would raise the risk above Australia’s appropriate level of protection.

Senator BOSWELL—What is our normal acceptable level of risk? Do we have one?

Senator FERRIS—Is it normally five per cent—is that what you are asking?

Senator BOSWELL—Yes.

Mr Pullar—There are interesting statements made about Australia’s appropriate level of protection. It is normally described as being very conservative. Australia has a very low acceptance of risk. The term ‘very low’ is used regularly.



Senator BOSWELL—I think we all accept that you cannot have an absolute zero risk, but I also wonder what the acceptable risk is. One in 20 seems to me reasonably acceptable but 50 per cent seems to be over the top, completely unacceptable.

Mr Pullar—The difficulty we have here is that when we speak of 50th and 95th percentiles we are actually referring to the likelihood of entry, establishment and spread. When we talk about risk there is a different measure. So we have to be very careful when talking about likelihood and risk. I always have to correct myself. Likelihood we can measure in terms of 50th or 95th percentile—

Senator FERRIS—This question might clarify it. You said that Australia is generally regarded as having what is classified as a very low risk. Does ‘very low’ come out at five per cent?

Mr Pullar—No.

Senator FERRIS—What does it come out at? What is very low in a percentile sense?

Mr Pullar—My answer was going to that point. Talking about 50th and 95th percentiles does not answer the question of Australia’s overall acceptance of risk. It only answers one part of the two-step process. To work out risk requires a calculation of likelihood of entry, establishment and spread and a calculation of consequence. Nowhere in this whole IRA process is consequence measured in any way that allows us to come to an answer of 50th or 95th percentile.

CHAIR—How do you differentiate in a scientific sense the entry versus the establishment thing? Because of the symptomless period with moko they have accepted that there probably will be entry, but not establishment. How do you scientifically come to a comfortable position with that?

Mr Pullar—I wanted to make a comment on your original question about whether we were aware that the IRAs, the revised draft and the original, both worked on the premise that there would be entry. That is certainly true. The definition really is entry, establishment and spread. It presupposes that there will be entry and that it may even establish in some small place—in one plant, let us say. Then that plant might die and there would therefore be no further spread.

CHAIR—This is where the blackbird picks the banana peel up from the playground and drops it out in the—

Mr Pullar—That sort of scenario. Do it enough times and the likelihood becomes quite high. I beg your pardon—what was your question?

CHAIR—How do you come to a comfortable scientific position, in terms of risk, in accepting that a thing is going to enter but not establish? How the hell do you work that out? I know how I would work it out.

Senator FERRIS—We hate to think.

CHAIR—You do not have the answer, I guess.

Mr Pullar—I have an answer. In the interests of time I suggest that the best way of looking at this is to say that the whole process of import risk analysis is a developing field. Some of the work that is now done in looking at likelihood is advancing quite well. Some of the work about consequences is remarkably inaccurate and imprecise.

CHAIR—Is the risk matrix a bit dodgy?

Mr Pullar—I would say that it is a work in progress.

CHAIR—God bless you. Senator McLucas and Senator Cherry have not had a go yet. Senator Cherry, you were late, so you have been disciplined.

Senator CHERRY—I have questions about some of your earlier statements about process. I am particularly interested in your opening statement, Mr Collins, where you drew the attention of the committee to the comment by the Minister for Primary Industries and Fisheries. He said:

I am advised that at no stage have members of the IRA team been asked to vote or sign-off that they agreed with every element of substance in the report.

Are you aware of any evidence that any aspects of the report are not unanimously supported by all scientists on it?

Mr Collins—We have that statement from the primary industries minister. He says that those two scientists did not say that they were—I forget the exact words.

Senator CHERRY—That they had not been asked to sign-off.



Mr Collins—I have no reason to doubt those words that Mr Palaszczuk said in parliament. I think they were flagged a couple of weeks ago by Senator Boswell asking the question at the Senate inquiry. Therefore I think Mr Palaszczuk had plenty of time to be ready for the question in parliament. I dare say he would have asked those two gentlemen.

Senator CHERRY—The other question is about the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection and their role. They are our next witnesses. I am very concerned by the story—and I heard this story before this hearing—that the senior department of agriculture officials were trying to put pressure on the CRC board to put pressure in turn on their employees not to raise issues about this particular inquiry. Are you concerned about approaches by DAFF to the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection?

Mr Collins—Yes, I am very concerned. I was amazed at this. I could not understand why Biosecurity did not say, ‘We welcome any new science and we will consider it with all the other submissions when they come forward.’ That is what you would expect from Biosecurity if it is new science that Dr Fegan had that he believed was different. CRC were putting in a submission and you think they would just say, ‘We welcome it coming forward and we will consider it.’ To take the steps that we have heard that they have taken—

Senator BOSWELL—Could you please explain that again. I was quite concerned about that. Can you expand on who said what?

Mr Collins—A board member of the CRC had told me that DAFF, through Dr Bill Roberts—I do not know who his superior is—had been sent up to the CRC. He is on the board. He went to the board meeting and moved some censure motions at that meeting.

Senator FERRIS—What were those censure motions?

Mr Collins—I do not know; I was not told. They were censure motions against the CRC. Your next witnesses will be from the CRC. Maybe you can ask them.

Senator CHERRY—Yes, we certainly will. It is a disturbing development. I was disturbed by the evidence from Ms Harwood on this issue last time we met and I am disturbed by the additional points you raise today. Coming back to the issue of the 130 new references—we have raised this before and we are still waiting for the list of the 130 new references—in your view or the view of your experts here today was there anything dramatically significant that would justify the huge change in risk assessments as a result of the first IRA to this IRA?

Mr Collins—My experts have not told me there are. I invite you to ask Dr Muirhead, who is our main scientist in most of those areas.

Dr Muirhead—I have been looking at the reasons why the assessments for the main diseases, moko and black sigatoka, have dropped significantly. For example, in moko there are eight separate categories that have dropped. I have been looking at what new information there is and seeing whether there is justification for those drops. I am concerned that in many instances there is no new information yet the assessment has changed. Sometimes there is a reconsideration of existing information, particularly of things like the use of chlorine, which is one of the subjects where I think BA have the assessment wrong. Probably because of the comments we made on draft 1 there is greater attention to the detail in the references there. Overall I find it very difficult to understand how those assessments have dropped so significantly.

Senator CHERRY—I found it fascinating that, even in areas where there did not seem to be a significant change in rewriting the IRA, there were changes in the mathematical calculations of risk of not just moko but also other areas. The probabilities seem to fall across the broad. Have you had a chance to look at all of the Excel spreadsheets that we had discussed at the last committee hearing?

Dr Muirhead—No. The modellers look after all that for the client.

Mr Collins—They have not been provided yet. When the fault was made, BA said they were going to issue an addendum to the report. They said that they will give us the spreadsheet when they issue their addendum.

Senator CHERRY—My understanding is that the addendum has been issued, hasn’t it?

Mr Collins—No, it has not been yet.

Mr Pullar—It has generally been agreed that spreadsheets for various IRAs that are in progress will be put on the web sites. The information that has been provided in those falls well short of that which is appropriate to give them a proper analysis. It would be great to think that Biosecurity Australia would provide more information about the numbers behind those calculations.



Senator CHERRY—You also mention in your report a discussion about the inspection processes in the Philippines. Do you have any additional information on your concerns about the veracity of inspection processes in the Philippines that you could provide to the committee at this stage? One of the questions we have put to Biosecurity Australia concerns the Philippines end of inspection.

Mr Collins—I have visited the farms in the Philippines. I do not believe inspections will be carried out correctly. Banana jobs are well sought after in the Philippines, and there are many people after those jobs. I cannot see a plantation worker coming forward and recording that they had found another case of moko that is going to put that farm in a position of not being allowed to send to Australia anymore. I just do not believe it would be recorded. There is no culture of quarantine in the Philippines.

When I was there, they had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. All vehicles had to drive through a foot-and-mouth treatment bath but they were all driving around it. The vehicle we were in was piloted by somebody from one of the companies that we were visiting. They thought it was a great joke. They just came up to it and drove around it. They also thought our whole quarantine thing was a joke. At that stage our troops had just gone to Timor and the Philippines’ troops were just about to go to Timor, and their great joke was, ‘You Australians won’t take home all your equipment from Timor, but we’ll have it all in the Philippines. We’ll be taking it home.’ There is just no culture of quarantine in the country.

Senator McLUCAS—It seems from the IRA that the onus is now on the exporter to maintain the quarantine regime. My reading of it is that, irrespective of where the exporter is, there is no motivation for that exporter to maintain quarantine status. In fact, there is almost a motivation not to. Would you agree with that?

Mr Collins—I believe that they will not. I think over there it is called the BPI, the Bureau of Plant Industries; it is equivalent to our AFFA.

CHAIR—Is that the group whose minister is the biggest grower?

Mr Collins—That is right, the Lapanday foods group. The BPI does not have a lot of concern with the export plantations. Their main concerns are with the small growers. The big plantations have their own scientific research and do everything internally. They keep all those records internal to their companies They are very protective of them. I do not believe that the BPI will have access to them on an ongoing basis.

CHAIR—What would happen if we sent our own inspectors over there, which I would have thought was a minimum requirement? Would they become rich overnight?

Mr Collins—My colleague Marc Jackson has been to the Philippines several times.

Mr Jackson—They would be shown special areas of plantations that are all prepared for them. They would never see the true story.

CHAIR—You would if you were the least bit inquisitive. I bloody well would if I went over there.

Mr Jackson—I saw it because I am friends with one of the big exporters over there. I have been on many of these plantations unannounced and I saw a lot of different things to what we see when we go on an organised tour. There are two different stories.

CHAIR—But, surely, random inspections would be a base requirement if we were going to try to progress this. I understand the Japanese have inspectors there. I asked at a previous hearing what ‘random’ means. Does that mean you ring the farm and say, ‘We are coming in the morning. Have the sandwiches ready’? Or do you just bowl out there and dive through a gate and have a look?

Mr Jackson—You will not get through the gate. There are guards on every gate.

CHAIR—If you could not have random as random is, then it would fail and you would say, ‘See you later, fellas.’

Mr Collins—The plantations are all fenced with armed guards.

Mr Jackson—If you pulled up at a plantation, they would say to make an appointment and come back.

Senator FERRIS—If it were decided that there was going to be an Australian team of inspectors then there would be a process in place. I think that is a bit of a red herring in this argument.

Mr Collins—Most of these audits are just paper audits. You would have to have an audit in the plantations—people going through the plantations. What is written on paper and what is actually happening on the plantations could be two entirely different things. When they say they are going to audit, most of that is just the paper audit.



Senator CHERRY—My final set of questions is about the pathway for moko to come into Australia. Ms Harwood went to great lengths in our last hearing to explain to us, in the most simple terms she could use, how it was virtually impossible for moko to get established in Australia—it would have to be near a flowering banana plant et cetera. Could you take the committee through the pathway of how moko could come into Australia in terms of the various pathways? I am sorry to ask such a simple question, but I think it is important to have it on the Hansard to contrast with Ms Harwood’s pathway.

Dr Muirhead—There are a series of steps that have been identified involving entry, establishment and spread. With entry, for example, you have to have import of the organism and you have to have distribution of it. The import step is divided into nine separate steps. The key one in this being really whether the organism is on the fruit or not. Let us say that the bacterium is on the surface of the fruit. Through the entry pathway you have to show whether it will survive the conditions of transport—whether it would die in transit and that kind of thing. Once it is here you look at the chances of it being actually in the bit of the plant which is going to be distributed. The question is: is it in the peel or in the pulp?

Having done that, you look at the chances of what proportion of the fruit would go to the different banana risk areas—that is, commercial bananas, backyard bananas and wild bananas. You then have to look at the chances of the organism moving from the surface of the fruit to susceptible banana tissue. So you need to define what all those susceptible banana tissues are. You then have to look at the chance of establishment. You need to look at whether the weather conditions are suitable and at the susceptibility of the plant. Once it is established, you have to look at the chances of spread—whether it can spread from the initial focus of infection through the industry.

All those steps are looked at independently and each one is given a likelihood. They are then multiplied together with this model, that we are all aware exists. With some of those steps the likelihoods can be high. Everybody agrees, for example, that the likelihood of survival in the fruit between the Philippines and Australia is very high. Some of them can be very low, such as the chances of spreading from the fruit to the plant itself. When they all get multiplied out and you come to a combined likelihood of entry establishment and spread then you go on to look at the risk by assessing the consequences. Did that actually answer the question, Senator?

Senator CHERRY—It broadly did. I know that it is in the report; I just want to have it on the Hansard. I am interested in how the transport protocols change that likelihood. Biosecurity’s argument is that because there is a big fat dotted line south of Coffs Harbour no banana will ever cross that line and the disease will not spread, and so importing Philippine bananas into Sydney is not going to end up as an infection in Tully.

Dr Muirhead—With the view of reducing the likelihood of certain events happening bananas are not taken into the growing area and the likelihood of its getting from here to there is obviously reduced.

Senator CHERRY—What are some of the most likely paths to get a moko infected banana from Sydney into a banana area like Tully or Coffs Harbour?

Dr Muirhead—It would be the removal of the actual fruit itself. There is a lesser chance of it actually escaping into other hosts including weeds or heliconias which might carry it.

CHAIR—What other hosts are there? Say if I am driving from Sydney with the kids and I have packed some bananas to shut them up—it probably speeds them up actually—and we get up to Coffs Harbour and they eat one and sling some out the window, what is the host if it has moko?

Dr Muirhead—A banana, if you are in Coffs Harbour. But you could also be in an area where there are solanaceous weeds including cobblers pegs and quite a few others. As you go further south obviously the banana distribution decreases, which is why they are looking at what we call the ‘high tide mark’ that is drawn across Australia—

Mr Collins—Brisbane is a big case there. There are a lot of bananas in backyards in Brisbane. It does not necessarily have to go direct to a plantation. It can get into a backyard in Brisbane and then you give people suckers from the tree and—

Senator McLUCAS—I understand that heliconia is what they call a ‘reservoir’. Is that correct and what does that mean? Have we looked at the transportation of heliconia flowers around Australia and how that might be affected?

Dr Muirhead—Heliconia is an alternate host, which means it suffers the disease itself and can act as a reservoir because when the plant dies the bacteria will be released into the soil and then distributed. So it is



another mechanism. It just depends whether the disease gets into either heliconia or a weed host or bananas. If it gets into bananas it is obviously there and you have to look at those chances of spreading from one plant to another or one plantation to another. But with heliconias I believe that it is systemic in the plant and more likely to be released through the plant dying and releasing bacteria into the soil. Whether it travels in heliconia flowers I do not actually know, but I suspect it would because it is fully systemic in bananas so it is probably fully systemic in heliconias too.

Senator McLUCAS—So would we have to have a high tide mark for the removal of heliconia flowers as well?

Mr Jackson—I was reading Dr Jones’s book, the bible on bananas, and in there I noticed that he said that insects can also spread the disease up to 90 kilometres.

CHAIR—Has there been only the one outbreak here? How many outbreaks of moko have there been?

Mr Collins—There has only ever been one plant enter a quarantine nursery in Cairns. It was on a heliconia that was picked up. I think that Ian was the Director of Quarantine in Queensland when that broke out.

Senator BOSWELL—Talking about insects, Dr Muirhead, have you read that NAPPO document?

Dr Muirhead—Yes, I have.

Senator BOSWELL—What weight of evidence did the IRA put on that? Did they take it seriously?

Dr Muirhead—Yes. I think they used it as a significant tool in their assessment. They used the process as an example of an international process for assessing risks.

Senator BOSWELL—That document was not signed off until December some time. We have asked BA when the last meeting of their IRA panel was. It seems to me that that document may have been used before it was a completed document, before it had any signatures on it. Would you comment on that? In my opinion, a document is not a document until it has a signature and someone owns the document. It seems to me that that document was never signed off on until after the IRA made their final report. Are you aware of that?

Dr Muirhead—I have heard words to that effect. I have not verified it myself but I have heard that is the case.

Senator BOSWELL—If that were the case, could you take seriously a document that did not have a signature on it?

Dr Muirhead—Only as an example of the kind of process that might be used.

Senator BOSWELL—But you could not decide whether you would bring in bananas or not bring in bananas on the basis of a document that was not owned by anyone?

Dr Muirhead—If there is one thing I have learned about Biosecurity in recent years it is that the processes need to be formalised, that they need to be scrutinised, analysed and so on. Just how they used that document I really do not know. I am also aware that it was a document relating to insect pests. I think some of the things we are talking about here are plant pathogens.

Senator McLUCAS—Mr Collins, I would like to go to the question of the level of infection of or the incidence of moko in the Philippines crops. Draft 2 relies on 1.3 cases per hectare per year. In your submission you talk about a non-attributable source—that is, on the basis of 4.39 cases per hectare per year. That is a very significant difference. You say the source is non-attributable. Can you tell me a bit more about that so that we can get some really hard evidence to support that claim? Where was it? Who was it told to? You said that it was over a four-year period; how significant is that compared with the 1.3 cases? Can you flesh out that part of your submission please?

Mr Collins—We have to protect the source who gave us this. We are very sure of it and it comes from a multinational.

Senator McLUCAS—You made the comment in your opening statement that you do not know whether the 1.3 cases—

Mr Collins—It was a Chiquita plantation in the Philippines.

Senator McLUCAS—A large one.

Mr Collins—Yes.

Senator McLUCAS—Why is that significant over a four-year period?



Mr Heidrich—The information that we forwarded was in relation to 2002-03, and it was a comparison between those two years. The moko incidence that was in the Chiquita plantations was for those two years.

Senator McLUCAS—So it is over a two-year period.

Mr Heidrich—Yes.

Senator CHERRY—At the bottom of page 12 of your submission you talk about the error in the IRA in the low pest prevalence regime. Has that error been fully corrected to your satisfaction by the changes identified by BA or, to your knowledge, is it still in the IRA?

Mr Pullar—The position at the moment is that we are looking at the revised draft IRA. The error is in there. The announcement which was made, and I cannot give you the exact date, was that the IRA was to be withdrawn, and we do not yet have a restatement of the model. In the case of moko, which I think you were referring to, we do not have a copy of the revised calculation yet.

Senator CHERRY—But your indication from your modelling—as a supplementary question, Chair—is that if it had been done correctly it would have exceeded Australia’s appropriate level of protection.

Mr Pullar—That is our belief, yes.

Mr Collins—Our models are showing that the people are doing it.

Senator FERRIS—Mr Pullar, I want to go back to how you define low risk. Would you agree or not agree that Australia is a country with very high standards of biosecurity and that our international reputation puts us in a category which is statistically low risk for the importation?

Mr Pullar—Yes, I would.

Senator FERRIS—So would that translate to being around five per cent? Is that where low risk sits statistically? I know you avoided this question before, but for us to compare the 50 per cent with what is low risk on a percentile basis we really need you to try to answer that question for us.

Mr Pullar—I apologise; I did not mean to avoid the question.

Senator FERRIS—I understand that.

Mr Pullar—The calculation of risk requires, first of all, that we know the annual likelihood of outbreak, establishment and spread and, second, that we know the consequences. We have a unit of measure for the likelihood: it is expressed as a probability. The nice thing about probabilities is that we can give them all sorts of fancy statistical statements, such as the 50th percentile or the 95th percentile. The problem with consequence is that it is just a term. We do not have a scale for that. So when we multiply those two together it is not possible to use the same terms or the same scale. It might be used for probability because we are now talking about risk. The correct way to look at risk is expected loss. The dollar sign does not appear in these calculations.

Senator FERRIS—The reason I ask this question is that in his opening statement Mr Collins said:

... the ... draft IRA report is based on wrong assumptions, wrong science and wrong statistics.

You are the statistical consultant. I am trying to understand why Mr Collins would make that remark and yet I have not heard anything from you that suggests that there is an error in the statistical analysis.

Mr Pullar—We established that there was an error in the statistical analysis.

Senator FERRIS—Yes, but that one has been corrected. This is current; this was this morning.

Mr Pullar—We have also established that there is a departure from procedure. The set of guidelines was established in 2001. It is apparent that in the revised draft IRA there has been a departure from the guidelines, and there is no explanation about why that departure has occurred. It is disappointing to see that every time there has been a departure it seems to have opted for a calculation of the risk at the lower level.

Senator BOSWELL—I will ask Dr Muirhead this question—it is very important. We were told there were 130 new pieces of science. That has been refuted. How many new pieces of science were given by BA or by any other source that changed the no import to fully imported? How many new pieces of science were made available to BA?

Dr Muirhead—I do not see that there are any pieces of new information that would lead you to that conclusion. Of the two studies where there was experimental work conducted after agreement between Australia and the Philippines, one actually demonstrated the validity of the argument for latent infection—so that did not decrease the likelihood—and the second one in my view has very little relevance—



Senator BOSWELL—So there were only two pieces of science: one was irrelevant and—

Dr Muirhead—Two new experiments conducted. It depends then on whether you mean ‘new science’ includes discussion of pre-existing work. My overall view is that there has been almost no new science—certainly not sufficient new science—to justify the kinds of decreases in the assessments between draft 1 and draft 2.

Senator BOSWELL—So we get it down in Hansard: how many pieces of science were there that were presented—two?

Dr Muirhead—Two new experiments were conducted, yes. That is what I am aware of. There were several others conducted that were not reported on.

Senator McLUCAS—Mr Collins, you said that you would provide up to 25 pieces of new evidence. I wonder whether, rather than just give us a bibliography, you could give a little explanation of the essence of those ‘new’ pieces of work—we are not scientists—so that we can get an analysis of what they really are.

Mr Collins—I will get our consultant to do that.

Senator McLUCAS—Thank you very much.

Mr Collins—I do not think they are new bits of work; they are—

CHAIR—Thank you very much for that. Finally, could you describe for me what a random field inspection would be in the eyes of an ordinary Australian?

Mr Collins—If I can describe what we had with the black sigatoka: we had field inspections by the DPI, not by the farmers. The DPI went through our plantations every drill, row by row, every second week.

CHAIR—They did not tell you when they were coming?

Mr Collins—No, but we were all in the Tully Valley and there were eight inspectors working in the valley.

CHAIR—So it was like flicking the lights when the highway patrol is out. You did get a little bit of notice.

Mr Collins—They would turn up at your place on two quad bikes and walk into your office and say, ‘We are here to do it.’

CHAIR—And you say that would not be possible in the Philippines?

Mr Collins—I do not believe so.

CHAIR—Thanks very much, gentlemen, for your appearance this morning and patience with us. We are very grateful for your evidence.

Proceedings suspended from 11.08 a.m. to 11.23 a.m.



FEGAN, Dr Mark, Lecturer, Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Protection

IRWIN, Professor John Alan Gibson, Chief Executive Officer, Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Protection

CHAIR—Welcome. I invite you to make an opening statement and then we will ask you some hopefully meaningful questions.

Prof. Irwin—Thank you for giving us the opportunity to come and share some views with you. Obviously I would like the conversation to focus on the science. I sat in on the previous discussion but I would certainly like this conversation to focus on science, in particular the science of moko disease. I think you have been given a handout that our communication officer, Sue McKell, prepared. I hope it will answer any questions you have about moko and how many new references there are about moko et cetera. It is a public document except for two references that I had written for Dr Mark Fegan. These are by Dr Luis Sequeira, a luminary of world plant pathology, and Professor John Randles from the University of Adelaide. I asked them to write these references re Mark’s professional standing as a plant bacteriologist. That is why those references are there.

CHAIR—Would you like us to make them public documents?

Prof. Irwin—No, I would like them to remain confidential, but the rest is a public document.

CHAIR—Okay, thank you very much.

Prof. Irwin—We have focused on moko disease. I was the CEO of the predecessor to this CRC, which was the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Pathology, which commenced in 1992. Mark was appointed in 1993. The causal agent of moko, Ralstonia solanacearum, Mark has researched since 1993. We believed we had some worthwhile contributions to make to the discussion here, so that is why we engaged in the debate.

Senator McLUCAS—I respect that you want to talk about the science but I think we should get over this matter first. Can you explain to the committee your understanding of what occurred at the board meeting or of any other actions taken by the federal government or any of its agencies in response to the press release that was issued?

Prof. Irwin—There are 13 members on the board of the CRC for Tropical Plant Protection. To be quite frank, I would prefer my board chair to answer any questions about what might have happened at board meetings of my centre. I will tell you why. There are nine participants in this centre. The smallest participant is DAFF, and they represent 0.8 per cent of the CRC but I do not know what proportion of that 0.8 per cent is represented by BA. An important part of running a CRC is bringing everyone along with you. I am disappointed that, as I think you can see from the submission we have made today, it is representative of the views of eight of the participants but it is not representative of the views of DAFF. That is known publicly. Even though they represent 0.8 per cent of my CRC, I still feel disappointed that I have not brought them along with me on this issue. To answer your question, Senator McLucas, I would prefer my board chair to answer that question.

Senator McLUCAS—I will leave questions around that matter and maybe we can correspond with your chair.

Prof. Irwin—That is Mr John Herbert.

Senator McLUCAS—We will find his address, Professor Irwin.

Prof. Irwin—Thank you.

Senator McLUCAS—Let us go, then, to your submission. In section 1.1 you say that BA relies on a 12-week period before symptoms appear on the fruit. You then say that there is research that suggests at least 13 weeks may pass before symptoms appear. Can you give us a practical understanding of why that is so relevant?

Prof. Irwin—I will leave Mark to answer this in detail, but in plant pathology we talk about a latent or an incubation period. For example, Senator Boswell has the flu. If we pick up some germs from him—

Senator FERRIS—We don’t want to.



Prof. Irwin—We don’t want to but if we do the time period between when we pick up those germs and when the symptoms manifest themselves is known as a latent period or an incubation period—that is, where the disease is hidden: we feel okay but we are infected. That is what we are talking about here. Plant diseases are really no different from human diseases. Bacteria cause plant disease and they cause human disease, but Mark will talk further on the significance of this issue.

Dr Fegan—The significance is that we are talking about symptomless infection, which is the whole crux of this. There is only one way this bacterium is going to get into the country and that is on infected bananas without symptoms. So the time taken for the symptoms to appear is obviously very important in that importation pathway.

Senator McLUCAS—How long would it take, then, from the point where it leaves the Philippines to the point that it arrives in Australia? Is it a two-week period? I am trying to get a practical understanding of where in the food chain we would identify the bacteria.

Dr Fegan—The importance here is not the transport step. It is in the field: how long it takes for a banana plant to show symptoms in the field.

Senator McLUCAS—But I understand that moko can travel on fruit.

Dr Fegan—It can travel on fruit, but if the symptoms were visible on the plant prior to its being picked then that banana bunch would not be transported to Australia.

Senator McLUCAS—What I am trying to understand is that if the fruit is picked from a symptomless plant, at the point where it is infected, are you saying there are 13 weeks until we actually see the disease?

Dr Fegan—Biosecurity Australia suggests that it is a 12-week period. The information coming out of the Philippines suggests that the time period is greater than 13 weeks. So really they should be using a figure greater than 12 weeks.

Prof. Irwin—The trouble is that, on a lot of these issues, no-one knows. I think the extra Soguilon evidence that has come forward is equivocal. It has not resolved a lot of these issues raised in the first IRA.

CHAIR—Does this give you an understanding of why there is an appreciation that because of the symptomless period there will be entry?

Prof. Irwin—Yes, that is right. There will be entry. That leads to the next issue: this Imp 2 step of the likelihood that a tonne of fruit will be infected. I do not think we need argue the point that there will be entry. This bacterium is a vascular disease, so anywhere there is vascular tissue in the plant—for example, in the skin—that bacterium can potentially be present.

Senator BOSWELL—So you are saying unequivocally that it will enter?

Prof. Irwin—Yes, I think that is correct.

CHAIR—Biosecurity Australia is saying that.

Prof. Irwin—Yes.

Senator FERRIS—Professor Irwin, can you give us an understanding of who else makes up the CRC? If the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is only nine per cent, who are the other people who make it up? Is there a funding contribution by every group? When you say nine per cent of DAFF, does that mean DAFF contributes nine per cent of your funds?

Prof. Irwin—What we talk about here is equity. That is contributions to the centre in dollars, which may be in kind or cash. DAFF actually has a 0.8 per cent equity in this CRC. The largest of the other participants is UQ, the University of Queensland, with about 38 per cent equity, followed by Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries with, I think, about 35 per cent equity. There are two other universities—ANU and Charles Darwin University—Northern Territory DBIRD, CSIRO, BSES, RhoBio and DAFF. So there are nine participants.

Senator FERRIS—Do any funds come from an industry group? CSIRO is able to carry out work for an individual group on a contract basis. Does the CRC do that sort of work?

Prof. Irwin—We have done no contract work for BA on this issue or, I believe, any other issue except when I was on the panel for the bulk maize import risk analysis. We do accept industry money from HAL, Horticulture Australia Ltd. The banana growers as well as all of the other horticultural industries contribute funding to Horticulture Australia Ltd.



Senator FERRIS—But that is arms-length; you do not take any direct funding there.

Prof. Irwin—No, we do not. That is certainly arms-length, but I think it is important to note that we have taken $1.8 million from HAL over a five-year period. This project is concerned with protecting Australia from incursions of exotic diseases. So the Northern Australian horticultural industries have been prepared to put their hands in their pockets to that extent to do pre-emptive research. This CRC is largely a strategic research centre—we are looking ahead, attempting to pre-empt these types of issues.

Senator FERRIS—That was a very valuable answer and I thank you for it. Dr Fegan, would the press release that you put out normally go through a board process? How do you put out press releases on things?

Prof. Irwin—I can answer that one too.

Senator FERRIS—It is not in your name. The press release is in Dr Fegan’s name, which is why I directed the question to him.

Prof. Irwin—That is fair enough, but I think it is a question about centre policy.

Senator FERRIS—Okay. You answer it and I may ask him some questions after that.

Prof. Irwin—We do have a centre agreement, which is really about how the participants relate to each other. Press releases are at the discretion of the CEO—I do not have to get the permission of any of the participants—but obviously you want to take everyone along with you. The reason we went public on this on the morning of Monday, 8 March—and it was just coincidental that it coincided with the opening of your hearings in Canberra—was that, let us face it, this is a very public issue. We had Ms Harwood speaking publicly on the ABC. I believe we had two QDPI officers from North Queensland making public comments at this point in time—that is, prior to 8 March—on moko disease. Because it was such a public issue we went public with our press release on the Monday morning. I believe it is a very scientifically based press release as well. It goes to the hub of issues such as Stover’s publication in 1972—this 15 per cent issue. It is one of the most scientifically based press releases I have seen.

Senator FERRIS—My question relates to the process by which it went out. Did Dr Fegan decide to write the press release and give it to you to clear? Did it go to the board? Did Dr Fegan make the decision that on Monday, 8 March he would put it out?

Prof. Irwin—No. That was all my decision. As I said, the centre agreement—

Senator FERRIS—Let us just get to the nub of this, because it was an extraordinary coincidence. Did you start talking about it in the previous week? Did you know that the Senate was starting its inquiry on that day?

Prof. Irwin—No.

Senator FERRIS—How did you come to put it out?

Prof. Irwin—I can help you on this one. When the second IRA was released I said: ‘We have to get involved in this. We have been researching this disease for longer than 10 years. We’ve got something to contribute.’ The chair of my board said: ‘The sooner you do it, the better. Get out there and get into the debate; don’t leave it to the end of the 60 days.’

Senator FERRIS—So it was the chair of the board and not the board?

Prof. Irwin—I communicate with the chair of my board. He fully endorsed us getting into the public debate. He has more time to listen to the radio than I do, and so he sent me emails of what Ms Harwood might have said and what the two QDPI officers said. Because I had to deal with a major 50-year review of the centre and other issues, I think we were about a week later than we hoped to be. Let me assure you that it was absolutely and totally coincidental that the press release went out on the Monday morning which coincided with the start of your hearing.

Senator FERRIS—So do I take it then that you asked Dr Fegan to prepare that press release?

Prof. Irwin—I certainly did, and he prepared it in consultation with me and my communication officer.

Senator FERRIS—What happened to the draft after he had prepared it? Did it go to the board?

Prof. Irwin—No, it did not. I have the authority to—

Senator FERRIS—Do such drafts normally go to the board?

Prof. Irwin—No, they do not.

Senator FERRIS—So it went out. How did you distribute the press release?



Prof. Irwin—I asked my communication officer sitting behind me to distribute it on the Monday morning, which was done. I think it was completed on the Monday morning by 9 or 9.15 Brisbane time, and it went to BA as well as the normal press outlets.

Senator FERRIS—Did it go to BA at the same time it went out to everybody else? Are you aware that the Banana Growers Council received that press release before BA received it?

Prof. Irwin—That issue I cannot comment on. I do know that it went to the ABC’s AM, but I do not know when it went there: either the Friday or the Saturday. They may have done some research on it over the weekend. We may have had contact with the Australian Banana Growers Council, but to no more effect than: what is the distribution list for press releases? Obviously they are making press releases all the time.

Senator FERRIS—That is why I am asking you the question.

Prof. Irwin—That is right. So we would have gone to them perhaps to get a list for the distribution of press releases.

Senator FERRIS—How did these motions make their way to the board? Can you take us through that process?

Prof. Irwin—No. I indicated to Senator McLucas earlier that I believe what happens in my board—and there are 13 board members—is an issue for the board. I would prefer those questions to be directed to the board chair, Mr John Herbert, please.

CHAIR—Perhaps we can move on from the press release, although I do have one question: did you get a lawyer to lawyer it for you, or are you a bush lawyer?

Prof. Irwin—I am a bush lawyer. We read it quite closely. I believe it is very science based.

Senator CHERRY—Just coming back to issues raised in the press release, one is that 50 per cent of fruit in the symptomless bunch will be infected and no more than 15 per cent of infected plants will develop symptomless infected fruit. They are rapidly becoming some of the keys issues this committee is looking at. Evidence from one of our later witnesses today suggests that 50 per cent figure itself is an overestimate of the likely risk.

Prof. Irwin—I think you are getting probabilities—and I am not a statistician—mixed up. But I would like to take you to this 15 per cent issue; I would like to bring that into the debate. This is some of the new evidence. Dr Muirhead spoke of new references. Stover in his book of 1972 makes a statement—and you have all this:

In Honduras plantations about 15% of the infected mats show symptoms of fruit infection.

Stover means there that 15 per cent of plants that look like this, showing wilting and whatever, then show symptoms of fruit infection, which look like this. That is a one-line throwaway statement. We do not know how many plants Stover looked at to make that determination. Did he have a cup of tea and wander around the plantation when looking? I do not know and nor does anyone else, and the gentleman is deceased. But that is the cornerstone of some of the new evidence that BA are presenting.

BA went on to say—you can check this—that, because of this statement, no more than 15 per cent of infected plants can have asymptomatic fruit. That asymptomatic fruit is the fruit that Len Collins had here earlier. There is no relationship between those two statements. There is no relationship between plants with these types of symptoms and those that are asymptomatic. They plugged in a figure of 0.15 for the proportion of fruit from infected plants showing asymptomatic bunches. I do not know what the answer is. You could say it is 0.85. We know it is between 0 per cent and 100 per cent. You could say: ‘Okay, if 15 per cent of these infected plants are showing diseased bunches, then maybe 0.85—85 per cent—are showing asymptomatic bunches.’ We do not know what the answer is, but to put in 0.15 was inappropriate—I will say no more than inappropriate.

Senator McLUCAS—Is it a guess?

Prof. Irwin—It is inappropriate. I would have plugged in, to be safe, 0.85 rather than 0.15, but I would even be unhappy about plugging in 0.85, because I do not know what the answer is.

Senator CHERRY—Is there a distinction in this area between cooking bananas and dessert bananas?

Prof. Irwin—In this one-line throwaway sentence of Stover’s, he is talking about a different strain of the bacterium. He is talking about the insect transmitted strain and he is talking about Honduras, and I do not know whether he is talking about cavendish or not. Do you know, Mark?



Dr Fegan—I do not know. It is not very obvious.

Prof. Irwin—It is not obvious. As I said, it is a one-line throwaway statement, but that was the cornerstone of the new evidence. This Imp 2 is a very important step. We know that they are going to be importing diseased fruit, but how much diseased fruit are we importing? That equation is quite critical to that statement.

Senator CHERRY—What about the 50 per cent figure? We talked about the 15 per cent figure on infected plants, but what about the issue of the 50 per cent of fruit in a symptomless infected bunch that will be an infected—do you have a response to that particular issue?

Prof. Irwin—That is Mark’s. I am sorry, I got mixed up with the 50 per cent—there was a 50 per cent earlier about likelihood.

Senator CHERRY—No, they are two different issues.

Dr Fegan—If you read the passage which that 50 per cent comes from, where they mention things like it is recognised that not all fruit are infected, moko symptoms, blah, blah, blah, there are terms such as ‘many’, ‘few’, ‘often’, and ‘some’. They are all very—

CHAIR—Scientific.

Dr Fegan—Or not. There is no figure there at all. There just does not seem to be a scientific basis to this 50 per cent figure. Whether it be an overestimate or not, there is no scientific basis to the use of that figure. They quote the work of Soguilon in 2003, but that really does not address the issue either.

Senator CHERRY—So that reference does not actually support this figure.

Dr Fegan—It does not directly address that issue, no.

Senator CHERRY—I am just reading some words from Dr Hayward’s submission to the inquiry. He refers to Soguilon and says:

On the basis of this evidence, it has been assumed in the draft IRA that the proportion of fruit that may be affected on a symptomless infected bunch is unlikely to exceed 50 per cent. This is more likely to be an overestimation than an underestimation. In the Philippines, the fruit is bagged at an early stage so that insect transmission is not a factor to be considered. If there is symptomless infection, it will be the result of infection from the root system or wound site upwards.

Does that support the principle that 50 per cent is a reasonable estimate?

Dr Fegan—Yes, given you accept that the infection is taking place from the root system and moving upwards. If you accept that there is a possibility that you are getting infection coming down through the fruit, then you will have a higher rate.

CHAIR—Is it the insect—

Prof. Irwin—The fruit infection comes from insect transmission; the root infection obviously comes up the other way. Maybe you would like to explain the strains.

Dr Fegan—You have got an ascending or a descending infection.

CHAIR—Does a mealy bug spread this disease?

Dr Fegan—Not to my knowledge. It is insects: they are going to be attracted to the banana flower, which will be oozing the bacterium, and they will move on to a cut surface, potentially, or a scar on an uninfected plant.

CHAIR—What sort of insects?

Dr Fegan—Good question—bees, wasps, anything that is going to be attracted to a banana flower.

CHAIR—If you have a container full of bananas and one bunch has these insects and this decease, could it go through the whole container?

Dr Fegan—It is not at that particular stage. We are looking prior to that stage of it being packed. So it is in the field that this is a problem.

Senator CHERRY—Is the point at which the fruit is bagged and packed significant?

Dr Fegan—Obviously it is significant that you would stop that descending infection, if we can call it that, movement through the fruit first—that is, not moving up from the root mat.

Senator CHERRY—Looking at the various pathways for infection in the draft IRA, are there any which in your view the panel has significantly understated the significance of?



Dr Fegan—No, I think they have covered all potential pathways.

Senator CHERRY—But in terms of the significance of them, have they understated the significance of any of them?

Dr Fegan—Potentially the insect transmission.

Prof. Irwin—Maybe you would like to explain the strain issue there with insect transmission.

Dr Fegan—Yes. The theory going around is that we have different strains which can be identified based on how they look on defined media, on a bacteriological plate. If you have a small colony form on a plate, the theory is that that is an insect transmitted form; if you get a larger colony form on a plate, it is non insect transmitted. Within the Philippines, the idea is that the strain there is the strain which is the larger colony form and therefore is not insect transmitted.

Personally, I have no doubt that this strain is insect transmitted, because on cooking bananas in the Philippines it is insect transmitted. That is the way bugtok disease in the Philippines is transmitted. So, definitely, these strains are insect transmitted. The level of insect transmission which occurs between the cooking bananas and the dessert bananas in the plantations is unknown. It seems to me, from some of the evidence that was presented in some of the responses by the Philippines to the original IRA, that there is some level of insect transmission going on. I point that out in the submission.

Senator CHERRY—Would that be one of the key areas you would need more research on to have more confidence about?

Dr Fegan—I believe you do need more research on the strains to prove whether there is insect transmission or not.

Senator CHERRY—Professor Irwin, I have a question about quarantine standards in the Philippines. Is there any evidence about the extent to which the Philippines run appropriate quarantine inspection services? Can we have confidence in their inspection services?

Prof. Irwin—I am not really qualified to answer that question. Mark may wish to comment, but I certainly would not feel qualified to comment.

Senator FERRIS—There actually is an answer in attachment 7 of the submission that you sent us.

Senator BOSWELL—My question is to Dr Mark Fegan. There was a document put out which the IRA used to define the risk of insects. It was a NAPPO document. Did you see that?

Dr Fegan—I have seen the document. I cannot say that I have read it in depth.

Senator BOSWELL—You have not read that document yet?

Dr Fegan—I have not read that document in depth, no.

Senator BOSWELL—You seem to be the person who has some knowledge of insects, and I understand that BA put a lot of weight on that document, but if you have not seen it I cannot ask my questions on it. I have questions on another issue. Dr Fegan, you are recognised as the expert on moko in Australia. Are there any other moko experts who have your level of recognition?

Dr Fegan—Within Australia?


Dr Fegan—Chris Hayward, who you are going to be hearing from soon, would certainly have equal experience.

Senator BOSWELL—And he was on the panel?

Dr Fegan—Yes, he was on the advisory—

Senator BOSWELL—But he was not on the panel?

Dr Fegan—He is not part of the team which would sign off on that. I think you should ask Chris Hayward.

Prof. Irwin—I think that is best directed to Dr Hayward. Chris Hayward retired from the University of Queensland on 30 June 1997. Chris has had no formal role in this CRC—the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Plant Protection. He did in the predecessor CRC, the CRC for Tropical Plant Pathology, up until his retirement in 1997.

Senator BOSWELL—So there were no moko experts on the panel.



Prof. Irwin—Not on the panel, but on the technical working group—

Senator BOSWELL—I am not talking about the technical working group; I am talking about the panel.

Dr Fegan—Not to my knowledge, no.

Senator BOSWELL—How do you disagree with the disease risk as assessed in the second draft on moko?

Dr Fegan—We talked about the idea of the 0.15 or the 15 per cent as it is used—and it is used inappropriately—to assess the likelihood of importation for the Imp 2 step, which is the most important importation step within that document. We have also talked a little bit about the 12-week issue with respect to symptomless infection, and I believe that that should be higher. There is very little knowledge on that figure of 50 per cent used to assess the proportion of fruit in a bunch which is likely infected. Again, it is all relating to Imp 2. The only other area that I have questioned is to do with the strain types and insect transmission which we have touched on with Senator Cherry.

Senator BOSWELL—On the insect transmission, what other documents did BA use to make the assessment of the risk on insects?

Dr Fegan—Most of the work to do with insect transmission and strain variation came out in the 1970s. There was a document which is cited—a document which I produced—which went to AQIS. It was research done with money we got from AQIS which dealt with strain variation and the development of a diagnostic test. Part of that, due to the nature of the strain variation versus the ecology of the organism, touches on this idea of insect transmission.

Senator BOSWELL—But if that document was used in the original IRA—

Dr Fegan—I believe that is a new reference. I think I can draw your attention to—

Senator BOSWELL—So BA was using your science on insects?

Dr Fegan—Not on insects; on strain variation and its relationship to the ecology of the organism, which then relates to insect transmission.

Senator BOSWELL—What input did you provide to the first and second drafts?

Dr Fegan—No direct input.

Senator BOSWELL—On either the first or the second draft?

Dr Fegan—No.

Senator BOSWELL—What about you, Professor?

Prof. Irwin—No, not on this IRA. I was certainly on the panel for the bulk maize one. We did not buy into the first IRA because I think the findings were quite responsible with respect to moko. I had no hesitation in buying into the second one because we had grave concerns. There was a lot of talk earlier today about likelihood and risk and about how, when you know the risk, you can work out how much insurance you want to take out and whatever. But you get a gut feeling about a pathogen. The luminaries of world pathology—Gowman in Indonesia in the 1920s with blood disease, Sequeira, Kelman—have worked on these bacterial, wilt diseases of banana. They are quite significant diseases. When you know you have got tonnes of banana skins and bananas coming into the country, these are serious diseases.

If this disease got into the Tully Valley, even if this strain is not insect transmitted, it could be disbursed very rapidly because that is a flood plain. As a plant pathologist, it would worry me as to how you would come in and clean up the mess. With 32 years of professional experience as a plant pathologist, I would feel uneasy unless you had really looked up all of the avenues. Let us face it: the science is not there to answer a lot of questions that you asking today. I do realise that we cannot have zero tolerance, but there is such a thing as acceptable risk. This is a major disease, and it is one that, as a plant pathologist, would worry me if we were to allow importation into the country.

Senator McLUCAS—Professor, can we go back to the issue of area freedom and low pest prevalence. If the formula went back to an area freedom regime—which, admittedly, the first draft said could not be delivered; but if you went back to that input—would that resolve the gut feeling that I am interested that a scientist has?

Prof. Irwin—It is how it is done, isn’t it, and who does it. I cannot answer those questions. It costs a lot money to do these area freedoms properly. It is sampling as well. How much sampling do you need to do? You cannot sample every banana plant. That is an issue for us, too, when we export. It is a major issue in plant



pathology today—area freedoms and how you establish them. A lot more science needs to come so we can have scientifically based sampling procedures.

CHAIR—Does moko have an IPPC rating?

Prof. Irwin—I do not know. It is a major disease of bananas. The industry did have a narrow escape in heliconias in Cairns in 1989. I can remember Ian Muirhead ringing me on the phone that morning. We got in touch with Luis Sequeira immediately and they were able to identify the strain as moko and it was eradicated.

CHAIR—How did it get in?

Prof. Irwin—It just shows you that these bacteria are hidden. These were heliconias—and I am talking of 15 years ago—that were imported through quarantine, legally, from Hawaii. They had gone through the quarantine inspections and been passed and found their way into a Cairns nursery. The plant started to wilt and look sick and a plant pathologist was brought in and it was moko. There has been one narrow escape already.

CHAIR—I am not too sure why we are arguing about whether it is 50 per cent of a bunch or five per cent of a bloody bunch; if it is there, it is there. And if it is there, there is a fair chance, in my view, that the bird will pick it up and drop it somewhere. It is a no-brainer. It does not have to be science.

Senator BOSWELL—Dr Fegan, you were here when the banana growers presented a hand of bananas. It was established that there would have to be 79 million wipings. What is the likelihood of insects brought in on those hands of bananas escaping the brushings and wiping?

Dr Fegan—You are asking what is the likelihood of an insect carrying the disease?


Dr Fegan—The disease is only going to be carried short distances for short periods of time by an insect. Really, the issue is on the ground in the Philippines. For moko disease it is prior to that hand being packed. Even if an insect was in there, the likelihood of survival of the bacterium in contact with that insect is very low.

CHAIR—He would have done the job if he had sat on a cut. He would have spread it to the banana.

Dr Fegan—Yes, that insect, potentially, would have spread the disease.

CHAIR—Thank you for your time and trouble today.



[11.59 p.m.]

HAYWARD, Dr Alan Christopher (Private capacity)

CHAIR—Welcome. Would you like to make an opening statement before we ask questions?

Dr Hayward—Thank you. I submitted two documents to the committee before this meeting. I wish it could have been in one hit; it is not a good thing to do. This is a very serious matter and I have given it a lot of thought over the last 10 days. Some new information has come up in the last 10 days.

It is very important that we understand the difference between cooking bananas and dessert bananas and the significance of things like fruit infraction and insect transmission on the two different species. We are not talking about cooking bananas in Australia. They are not grown here or eaten here. Where insect transmission occurs at an epidemic level, as in Brazil and Central America, you have large populations of cooking bananas. Unfortunately, the literature is confusing. When some authors talk about bananas they mean dessert and cooking bananas; others mean dessert.

CHAIR—Like sheep.

Dr Hayward—Exactly. It is confusing. In the last 10 days in particular I have looked at the historical record to try to find out whether there is anything in the history of what has happened that can help us here. Unfortunately, it does not help us very much because there are very few countries which produce bananas and also import them.

Moko bacterial wilt on dessert bananas has been carried around the world on the planting material. We know that this has happened. There is no record of the disease having been introduced on dessert bananas. However, if we look at cooking bananas the situation is totally different. In my opinion it is very likely that the disease has been distributed on cooking bananas in the Philippines and in the Amazon Basin.

There is no precedent for what is happening here. That is one of the problems. There may have been a previous import risk analysis by the New Zealanders but they are not concerned about importing bananas—insects, maybe, but not other things; they are not growing bananas. So the import risk analysis team has introduced a new concept and they have done this sensibly and wisely in order to make a complete analysis. They are suggesting that there could be a symptomless infection of the fruit.

I am talking here about hard green bananas. Nobody has mentioned the 25 minutes in the washing tank. They have talked about sponging. That is another matter. We are talking about hard green bananas at the wharf which are showing no signs of infection in terms of discoloured vasculars on the point at which the hands are taken away from the fruit stalk—no sign of vascular infection, no sign of vascular discolouration—and no sign of premature ripening. There is nothing in the literature, unfortunately, to help us. If I could find such information I would be its strongest advocate.

The third point is that, as I have said already, insect transmission is very much more important on cooking bananas than it is on dessert bananas. The insects involved are, particularly, the Morocco bee, Trigona corvine, other related insects and thrips. We know that from evidence from the Philippines. The later document I submitted to the Senate last week refers in paragraph 4 to the matter of fruit infection and insect transmission. In there I use the figure of 50 to 100 per cent of the fruit being infected in the case of cooking bananas where insect transmission occurs to a high level. I would like to correct that figure. I have looked at Molina’s paper. It is actually higher than that; it is 80 to 100 per cent. That is based on field surveys in the central Visayan Islands of the Philippines. It is a very high rate of infection. In paragraph 4 I have tried to contrast the situation on cooking bananas with what happens on dessert bananas. There is the emergence of the male bud or the bell. The cooking banana bell is attractive to insects. We are not entirely sure why but we think it is because the nectar is sweeter. Various authors have talked about insects visiting and revisiting that point. They are foraging around the bell.

In the actual studies that have been done, one shows that it is 2½ per cent and another shows that five per cent of the insects are actually carrying this bacterium. So if you have got 1,000 insects going to and fro one inflorescence and another in the plantation, between 25 and 50 of those are going to be carrying the infection. They are not inoculating the flower directly; they are inoculating the vascular tissue, which is exposed when the bracts and the male flowers break off. So it is a very potent form of infection. It leads, as Molina tells us, to 80 to 100 per cent of the fruit being clearly infected—when you cut them in half they are black or dark brown inside.



What is the situation with dessert bananas? They bag the inflorescence in the Philippines, and we can make the assumption that that is leading to a big reduction in the amount of insect transmission. We also know that insect transmission on dessert bananas is much less than it is on cooking bananas. We do not know the reason for sure, but it may be that the nectar is of a sourer taste and less attractive to insects. So if you bag the inflorescence then you have got to consider infection from the base of the plant upwards. That can be from the root or it can be from a wound. Now we have to ask ourselves: is that as efficient a mode of inoculation? Are you going to get as many vascular bundles infected as with that infection process on the inflorescence? I have referred in my document to multiple infection events. I have done that deliberately because insects by their very nature will come here and there and go back to the same point, carrying the ooze on their limbs. The ooze is a pus-like material which contains plant sap and in the order of hundreds of thousands of bacteria. That is a very efficient method of inoculation.

Now we have to look at what might happen in the case of dessert bananas. I would suggest that there might be fewer vascular bundles infected, that it might be a more prolonged process. Incidentally, again referring back to the necessity of making a distinction between cooking bananas and dessert bananas, all the illustrative material—including the one we just looked at from Stover’s book—all the material that is reviewed by authors in books and chapters in books and the industry leaflets which show longitudinal sections or transverse sections of fruit are of cooking banana. That is not dessert banana. So to some extent I think we are being slightly misled, I think, inadvertently, innocently. That is the way because the best illustrations of fruit infection are in fact of cooking bananas.

Senator McLUCAS—You were a member of the technical working group—is that correct?

Dr Hayward—Yes, from April 2001.

Senator McLUCAS—Until when? There is some discussion about when those technical working groups finished. I wonder if you could explain your view on that discussion.

Dr Hayward—Certainly my contract has been discontinuous during that time. I went back on contract earlier this year, I think. Maybe it was late last year. I was previously on contract—it ended surely before the first IRA, 1 July 2002. I would prefer to have exact figures to answer your question precisely, but certainly there has been a discontinuity. I have not been contracted on a continuous basis.

Senator McLUCAS—You might want to check your records, Dr Hayward. I think you know the discussion that is around about whether or not the technical working groups were actually allowed to complete their work according to the terms of reference they were given. Would you like to look back at a couple of the other submissions and, given that you were a member of the technical working group, give us your views about whether you did complete the work to your satisfaction? You are telling me, I think, that you have not been a member of that group in the development of the second draft report—is that significant?

Dr Hayward—My role throughout has been to provide information. There has been a lot of discussion about how much new literature there is. If I can go into that a little bit—

Senator McLUCAS—Please do.

Dr Hayward—A lot of the work has been done in countries like Brazil and Colombia—and these countries speak Spanish and Portuguese. The Brazilian work is still not entirely available to us, I regret to have to say, after all these years. It is in Portuguese but that should not be an obstruction. There was a symposium in 2000 or 2001 in Manaus in northern Brazil on moko disease. There is a paper listed there about the risks and consequences of moko transmission. In spite of the conscientious efforts of librarians at the University of Queensland and at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, we have got a lot of the Brazilian papers but not the full proceedings of the symposium in Manaus. That was organised by Embrapa, which is an organisation kind of equivalent to CSIRO.

New information dribbles in. In the last 10 days I found out, for example, that the Filipinos now believe that the disease moko was introduced during the Japanese occupation. They talk about circumstantial and anecdotal evidence from South America, where of course there is a large Japanese population. It dribbles in. It may be early work, but for various reasons it is very difficult to get hold of it. I believe the import risk analysis team has done a very thorough job in getting at the key literature.

Senator McLUCAS—Dr Hayward, could you tell the committee what involvement you had in seeking information from the Philippines concerning the incidence of moko which was provided, I understand, in March 2002?



Dr Hayward—None at all. I know the scientists in the Philippines. I have been there a number of times. I know the people in the industry less well. All of the research to try to get at the survey data was done by BA; I had no part in that at all.

Senator McLUCAS—I am hearing that BA did that work but at the time they did not have a specialist in moko contracted.

Dr Hayward—I believe there was Dr Rob Allen—

Senator McLUCAS—You are correct.

Dr Hayward—a distinguished plant pathologist of QDPI. He has worked all his life on banana diseases. He and I have communicated for 30 years.

Senator McLUCAS—I understand that BA requested data that was retrospective by between five and 10 years. Is that a reasonable request? Are you aware of the documentation that was actually provided?

Dr Hayward—Yes, I have seen that. That is all on the record.

Senator McLUCAS—Was it of that order?

Dr Hayward—I think it went back to about 10 years. They have records of their field surveys.

Senator McLUCAS—Is that an appropriate data set to inform the IRA?

Dr Hayward—It was the best they had available. It is always a good idea to have something that is retrospective over three or four decades. In fairness to the people in the Philippines, the industry itself is only just over 30 years old. They were not growing dessert bananas in Mindanao till about 1969.

Senator McLUCAS—In point 8 of your submission you say that moko can be controlled but control measures in Australia would be costly to implement. Can you explain to me what that means in a practical sense?

Dr Hayward—As I think Mr Collins explained fairly well, they are highly mechanised and this is a soilborne and also a waterborne disease. If the disease is established in your soils, by moving soil, by moving machinery and by using more and more equipment you will have a serious problem. The area at risk is the Tully Valley, which is 85 per cent of the industry. I believe it was explained well that there would be a greater risk. It would be more difficult to survey to eradicate because of the greater movement of soil and, of course, the prospect of flooding, which in one year in five occurs to a very serious extent in the Tully Valley.

Senator McLUCAS—That is why I asked the question. You say it can be controlled. I come from North Queensland and I have seen the floodwaters. How do you control that floodwater?

Dr Hayward—There is a contradiction there. The disease is controlled to a level of, say, one to five per cent of plants being lost in countries like the Philippines because they eradicate. They reduce the spread by eradication. You could argue that you could do the same in North Queensland.

Senator McLUCAS—With spraying?

Dr Hayward—There are no chemical sprays. You would have to dig out the plants and destroy them. You would have to dig out the soil to a radius of six metres around each plant. In the Philippines they fill in that area with rice husks and when the poles they use for propping have passed their working life they chop them up and burn the whole lot over a period of about 10 or 11 days. That effectively pasteurises the soil in that area. So they get rid of the infection in the soil.

CHAIR—How do you know how many metres to dig outward?

Dr Hayward—That is based on research done 40 or 50 years ago that showed there is a certain potential for spread from an infected plant to a certain—

CHAIR—Yes, but what about when a truck comes along and carries a bit of mud five feet outside of your zone? You are wasting your time.

Dr Hayward—That is the reason it would be more difficult.

CHAIR—It would be impossible. It is earthborne.

Dr Hayward—More importantly, too, it is waterborne, it is flood-borne. Nevertheless, in all of the countries that are the major exporters of bananas they have the disease, and I do not know whether any one of them is comparable to Australia. You have Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela—you would have to look at their systems. I do not know whether it is 100 per cent true that it cannot be controlled where you have



a degree of mechanisation, because all of these countries have a bigger problem with black sigatoka than they do with moko. They acknowledge moko as a problem, but it is controlled in these countries by the established methods, Sequeira’s work, of 50 years ago.

Senator BOSWELL—Dr Hayward, you say that you would have to dig a trench five metres around and then you would have to fill it with rice husks and you would have to chop up wood and then burn the whole lot. Would you agree that that is practically impossible?

Dr Hayward—Yes. I am describing what they do in the Philippines.

Senator BOSWELL—If you transferred that to Australia would you say that it was practically impossible to control?

Dr Hayward—I would agree with that. Up to about eight years ago the Philippines were using fumigation.

Senator BOSWELL—But I just want to get your view as to whether it is practically impossible, and you are saying that it would be practically impossible. Is that correct?

Dr Hayward—I think it would be, but Australians are a very ingenious lot.

Senator BOSWELL—No. Is it practically impossible or not?

Dr Hayward—It has not really been tested, has it?

CHAIR—You do not really have to answer that question here.

Senator McLUCAS—I would like to finish off that point. Dr Hayward, when you say that moko can be controlled, in a strict scientific sense I think I agree with you, but—and this is the point that Senator Boswell is making—in a sensible, practical agricultural sense, given the normal climatic conditions of the Tully Valley, I think it is impossible.

Dr Hayward—In responding to that I would say that we have had moko in Australia already. That was a pest incursion and the disease was not established, but they were plants in the soil.

Senator McLUCAS—In a nursery in Cairns.

Dr Hayward—There were five plants.

Senator BOSWELL—They were not out in the field; they were in a nursery.

Dr Hayward—That is correct.

Senator BOSWELL—That is not farming.

Dr Hayward—You are making the assumption that in some way you have the disease established. Let us take the most recent example: Jamaica in January this year—and this is only the stuff we have on the Internet. Jamaica now has moko disease. It is the first country in the western Caribbean to find it. They believe it was brought in on planting material three years earlier. It is too late; you are not going to eradicate that.

Senator BOSWELL—Exactly. Dr Hayward, from the evidence you are giving you seem to be an advocate of not bringing bananas in. Since you have been here you have given us every reason not to bring them in.

CHAIR—Don’t let him put words in your mouth!

Senator BOSWELL—I am not. You are expanding on the risk and yet you have advocated that we should be able to bring them in. You have sat there for the last 15 minutes telling us every reason why we should not bring them in.

Dr Hayward—In responding to that, I want to go back to something I said at the beginning. The import risk analysis team in my opinion has done a very sound and a very conservative job. An illustration of their conservative approach is that they have brought forward this concept of symptomless infection—that is to say, hard green bananas, washed and packed with all the procedures, at the wharf ready for export with no sign of infection. There is nothing in the literature, unfortunately, to support that idea. It is a new concept; you will not find that. As I said, this is an unprecedented process. My experience overseas—and I have some now in this type of arena—is that Australia’s quarantine services and Biosecurity Australia are held in awe because of the fact that they are so systematic, so scientific. The objection is that they take too long over it.

CHAIR—So why are we inviting mealy bugs into Australia?

Dr Hayward—Mealy bugs have no relevance to the transmission of moko disease. That is a separate problem entirely.

CHAIR—They have a lot of implications for cotton and tomatoes and other things. So why are we—



Dr Hayward—I was interested in the discussion earlier—if I may venture into that part of it—when they were talking about sponging and so on. They seemed to forget that there is a 25-minute washing process in chlorine and alum. I would like to know what the effect is of chlorine and alum solution on the mealy bugs.

Senator BOSWELL—Not very much, if you listen to the New Zealanders.

CHAIR—They have got into New Zealand—that was the point.

Dr Hayward—Yes, that is so. Now they are fumigating.

Senator CHERRY—Can we just come back to the issue which Senator McLucas and I are still struggling with about the fact that you are arguing that the panel is breaking new ground with the notion of hard green dessert bananas. Going to one issue about insect transmission, you would have heard the evidence from our previous witnesses about their view that the panel has understated the significance of insect transmission, and you are saying that all the evidence to date is on cooking bananas rather than dessert bananas. Is that about the incidence of moko in the Philippines or is that about incidence of possible moko transmission here? We have no cooking bananas being grown here so isn’t that largely irrelevant because the insects will in fact be flocking around the banana trees in the banana plantations?

Dr Hayward—First of all, I agree we do not have enough information about insect transmission on dessert bananas. If in fact the inflorescence, the nectar, is less attractive because it has a lower sugar content, then that is something that we need more research on.

Senator CHERRY—That is if they have a choice between a cooking banana plantation and a dessert banana plantation.

Dr Hayward—Yes.

Senator CHERRY—If they do not have a choice, isn’t that issue irrelevant or less relevant?

Dr Hayward—All we can say is: look at the historical record. Wherever you have had rampant insect transmission it has always been associated with cooking bananas, not necessarily exactly the same as the ones they have in the Philippines but of the same genetic background, which are grown in Central America and the West Indies—all of the epidemics. There was a mention earlier this morning of 90 kilometres. That is 90 kilometres on cooking bananas, not in one hit, so to speak, but thousands of insects visiting and revisiting contaminated male buds and then being blown by the wind perhaps, and that is another factor. It is a series of contact points and getting distribution over a 90-kilometre distance—that has been described.

Senator CHERRY—But even if you say that the number of insects around cooking bananas is more significant than the number around dessert bananas, there are still insects around dessert bananas, aren’t there?

Dr Hayward—Of course.

Senator CHERRY—And it would still be that 2½ to five per cent incidence that you were talking about, wouldn’t it?

Dr Hayward—I am being led into speculation, which I would prefer not to do.

Senator CHERRY—Science is all about speculation.

Dr Hayward—It is, to begin with at least.

Senator CHERRY—I am just wondering whether the risk assessment panel has downplayed the potential significance of insect transmission.

Dr Hayward—Yes, I know, and you are right—it did have to look at this. What we need is a country which has dessert bananas only and has moko, so that that would be your control. But, of course, no-one would be stupid enough to attempt to test this out.

Senator CHERRY—We might be stupid enough yet!

Dr Hayward—We cannot make that comparison. All that we can say is that wherever insect transmission is very important it is where you have large populations of cooking bananas. That is what the literature tells us.

Senator CHERRY—Right. Because of the fact that, as you say, we are breaking new ground with this—

Dr Hayward—I think so, yes.

Senator CHERRY—shouldn’t the precautionary principle come into play through a conservative quarantine regime, and if there is no science to support something then shouldn’t we just say that there is no science to support this position one way or the other?



Dr Hayward—I do not think you can opt out. I think Australia has its obligations under the SPS agreement to do this. Of course, people overseas—and I have to say this—

Senator BOSWELL—Hang on, you’re not a—

Senator CHERRY—Let him answer this.

Dr Hayward—I am sorry, am I going off the point?

Senator BOSWELL—You are a scientist. You are getting into politics.

Senator FERRIS—You’re a politician and you have been into science!

Dr Hayward—I think Senator Boswell is right—I was straying onto a political point, and I think I will stop there. It is just that I have had a little bit of experience of what people outside Australia are saying.

Senator CHERRY—You have been on a WTO arbitration panel. So it is very relevant, Senator Boswell.

Dr Hayward—Yes, I did hear what people are saying. As you know, there is an EU protest about the way Australia does its import risk analysis, and then of course there is the Philippines one as well. It does not really help, does it? What was your question again, Senator Cherry?

Senator CHERRY—It was about the precautionary principle, about the extent to which we can apply that principle when there is a total absence of science—as there is in a lot of these areas, from what you are saying.

Dr Hayward—There is some science. I have tried to put forward the idea in making a comparison with what happens on cooking bananas with the situation in dessert bananas where you are getting infection, we can think, exclusively from the bottom up. I am suggesting maybe a late root infection or a late wound—that is to say, during the period of maturation of the fruit but so late in the period of time in which the fruit maturates that no symptoms are going to show up in the fruit at inspection, when the fruit stalks are dehanded. Actually we do have some evidence because Soguilon, whose work has been quoted, is a Philippines scientist of good standing, not employed by the banana industry but by the Bureau of Plant Industry, and she has done experiments very relevant to the question you are asking. It is said that her work has proved symptomless infection. It has not, because if you look at the summary of her first paper she says, ‘Vascular discolourations were observed on all the inoculated plants at the end of the observation period.’ She saw discoloured vascular tissue in the fruit stalk when it was cut and also at the point where the hands were broken off from the fruit stalk—so: externally symptomless, but internally symptomatic. So I think Soguilon’s work needs to be looked at very carefully.

Senator CHERRY—Has the panel done that?

Dr Hayward—Perhaps I was addressing that point to some other organisation. I think the panel have done a very good job. I think the questions they asked of the Philippines scientists two years ago were sensible ones.

Senator CHERRY—And they have not been answered by the Philippines to date?

Dr Hayward—They did the experiments which were suggested. There were two sets of experiments. One was concerned with the chlorine alum treatment—whether that would disinfest the surface. We are not talking about whether the bacterium is on the surface. We know from the experiments that they will be eliminated by the chlorine alum treatment. It is very unlikely in any case that the bacteria are on the surface of the fruit. What we are concerned about is inside. The postulation is that these fruit have been harvested so late that they are not showing any sign of infection. That is where we still have doubt.

Senator BOSWELL—What piece of new scientific evidence made you change your direction from not allowing bananas in to bringing bananas in? We were told there were 130 pieces of new science. We have determined that that is not true; there were two pieces of new science. We have also been told that they have not been answered properly. But what particularly made you change your mind to allow bananas to come in? What piece of science can you point this committee to and say, ‘I changed my mind because of that’?

Dr Hayward—I had no role in that process whatsoever. I did not change my decision.

Senator BOSWELL—But you were on the technical working group for the original draft—

Dr Hayward—Yes, I was.

Senator BOSWELL—and you were on the technical working group for the—

Dr Hayward—It does not exist anymore, but I was—

Senator BOSWELL—You were on both.



Senator McLUCAS—There was none for the second.

Senator BOSWELL—There was.

CHAIR—Senator Boswell, with great respect, you are asking an inappropriate question. As far as I know, Dr Hayward is not in a position to answer it.

Senator FERRIS—He is not on the panel.

Dr Hayward—I did not make any submission to anybody that this is too high or too low. That is not my role. That is the role of the risk analysis panel. The terms of reference of the risk analysis panel and the technical working groups—I have them in my briefcase somewhere—are quite clear. The role of the technical working groups is to provide relevant scientific information, keep on searching for it, give it and comment on it.

Senator BOSWELL—Did you support the first IRA that restricted entry?

Dr Hayward—I am a loyal Australian—

Senator BOSWELL—No-one is questioning your loyalty.

Dr Hayward—No, but I try to stand aside from these issues.

CHAIR—You do not have to answer the question.

Senator FERRIS—It is not an appropriate question.

CHAIR—Do you know anything about the buffer zone?

Dr Hayward—Yes. As you probably know, there were, I think, 26 companies producing dessert bananas commercially in Southern Mindanao. They are now cutting out their cooking bananas to a point where they believe certain categories of insect, at least, would not be able to fly through the buffer zone to the dessert bananas. They make an exception with the bees, which are possibly the most significant carrier of infection, particularly the Morocco bee, Trigona corvina. I know they are doing it. They are doing it now. They have been doing it for 18 months or more as a result of this process, because of the scientific information.

That is an interesting story in itself. Dr Fegan’s work, Professor Raymundo’s work and the work of others has shown significant information that the disease on cooking bananas and the disease on dessert bananas are caused by one and the same agent. The Philippines did not believe that at all 10 years ago. The leading Philippines scientist, Professor Raymundo, actually refused any funding support from the banana industry so that she could maintain her independence. She showed clearly and finally that the two different diseases had the same agent. Therefore, if you want to get an area of freedom you have got to remove that infection source. They are working on that now.

CHAIR—In the areas of bananas in the Philippines that are eligible for export, we under our new IRA have said, ‘We’re not going to have to worry about a buffer zone.’ Even though someone has a 10-metre or 10-yard buffer zone, we have decided we do not want one. Why would that be?

Dr Hayward—I think a buffer zone is important if you have got cooking bananas in apposition to your dessert bananas.

CHAIR—Do you think that if the wind blew a bit more strongly they might just go that extra yard?

Dr Hayward—You could get wind dispersal of insects, but there is no evidence that actual aerial dispersion of the disease—as bacteria, ooze or droplets of ooze—is of any importance at all, except in a very localised area. So you could get rain splash from an inflorescence down to the soil and down to a wound. That is a possibility.

CHAIR—But if the insect picked it up and flew through the buffer zone do you think that he could land on a plant outside the zone?

Dr Hayward—I think it is quite possible if the buffer zone were very narrow.

CHAIR—It always looks better on the other side of the river. The insect might think, ‘They look like better bananas over there so I will hop over there and have a look.’

Dr Hayward—I am at a loss, Mr Chair. I am not an expert on insect behaviour.

Senator FERRIS—Neither is he.

CHAIR—No, neither am I. I was just curious as to why they cut the buffer zone out.



Senator BOSWELL—The technical working group was disbanded prior to the issue of the first draft. Why were they not consulted for the second draft when it contained a large shift in the conclusions and why did you give a report to Dr McRae in February when no others were required to do so?

Dr Hayward—That was not in February; it was in March. I keep a diary. I think the email file is available to everybody—they archive all the emails. I was asked to comment on a near final draft of the IRA we are now considering in March last year. I was asked to comment basically on the scientific reasoning used in arriving at this. So I made comments on that, and that should be available.

Senator BOSWELL—I am just wondering why you were the only one that was asked out of the panel.

Dr Hayward—The first IRA came out on 1 July 2002. The message from that was that the disease the banana growers were most concerned about was moko. As I was the person who had some experience with that disease in the West Indies and indeed in the Philippines I was consulted.

Senator BOSWELL—What did you conclude in your report about the risk of the introduction of moko? What was your assessment of the risk of bringing in moko disease with the importation of bananas?

Dr Hayward—I have thought about that, and I have also thought about what a totally disinterested panel entirely outside this arena would consider. I would think that the probability of the disease being brought in on dessert bananas was extremely low. What also concerns me is that I believe that if our colleagues overseas were asked to make a similar judgment then they would probably say, ‘Oh, well, it is not only extremely unlikely, it is almost negligible.’

In support of that statement, if we look at the import risk analysis we see that the import risk analysis team has done a systematic step-by-step examination of the probability of entry, establishment and spread. They looked at all the components. They have arrived at a certain decision. I believe that they have always tended to be conservative in their judgments—for example, the 50 per cent symptomless fruit figure. I think that figure is a little on the high side, and I have said so.

Senator McLUCAS—Has any research been conducted on Australian native bananas? Do they transmit moko? Do they work in the same way as the cooking bananas in the Philippines? Given the proximity of the rainforest to the Tully Valley, is that something that was considered in the development of the IRA?

Dr Hayward—I am not really qualified to speak on that. That is a very worthwhile question. From what I have read, there are only three species that are native and they are not present in great amount. As to the question of whether they could serve as a focus for insect transmitted disease, I do not think there is any information.

Senator McLUCAS—Has anyone done any work on that question?

Dr Hayward—Not that I know of. We do have a paper from Stover. He actually had a variety collection, and he did not get rid of a colony of Morocco bees. Within that variety collection, he found he could get a massive outbreak of insect transmitted moko because he had not got rid off the Morocco bee colony and because he had not taken off the male bud. The male bud is the focus of insect transmission. We do have some data of that kind, but these are all commercial bananas. They were not the species you referred to.

Senator McLUCAS—There has been no research on whether or not Australian native bananas would work in the same way that cooking bananas work in terms of insect transmission, as a vector—a vector is probably not the right word, but in a manner in which moko could be transmitted. I do not know whether they have a sweeter flower than the cavendish. Is that something that was considered by the technical working group? If so, how did it inform the IRA?

Dr Hayward—I think these questions were probably discussed. It is going back three years to when the federal working groups met in joint session with what was then called the risk analysis panel and what is now called the risk analysis team. The genotypes of those three species should be known. We know that it is the Musa balbisiana heritage or genotype which determines the sweetness—the B gene. The cooking bananas in the Philippines are ABB; the dessert bananas are AAA. Wherever you have that B genotype, it is going to be a sweeter and therefore more attractive banana—but not in every case, because not all cooking bananas are attractive to insects. It is not a simple situation. You have got the spectrum of plant types and only some of them are very susceptible. It just happens that the ones in the Philippines, which we call saba and cardaba, are highly susceptible to insect transmission. There is no question about that—they are highly insect transmissible. On dessert bananas the Filipino authorities say, ‘We don’t see it, but we do not have enough information.’

CHAIR—You were on the original panel.



Dr Hayward—On the original technical working group.

CHAIR—Part of the logic of the import risk analysis is the acceptance of entry. You understand that.

Dr Hayward—Yes.

CHAIR—How do you then resolve in your mind, being a good Australian, that there will not be establishment?

Dr Hayward—We cannot say zero tolerance. There will always be a certain risk. I think Mary Harwood in her submission on 10 March made the point that there are a whole range of products which are not meeting as high a standard as this. And this goes on all the time: ‘We will make a special case here.’ I am influenced by my experience in the WTO and in what has happened with apples in the USA-Japan dispute and the kind of process they went through, which I hope would not happen in this case.

CHAIR—But, if you accept there is entry, how do you resolve that there will not be establishment and how are you able to sleep at night?

Dr Hayward—You can look at the distribution chain, the importation chain, as a number of steps—

CHAIR—Have you done that?

Dr Hayward—No, I have not been involved in that. I think they have done a very thorough job. As our statistician said earlier, the risk assessment is an evolving process. The SPS agreement has been modified—

CHAIR—How many places in the world are there that grow bananas and do not have all these diseases?

Dr Hayward—There is no evidence of moko at all in Africa.

CHAIR—Do they import bananas?

Dr Hayward—I could not answer that.

Senator CHERRY—I have a couple of questions on numbers as well. In the modelling of probability distributions, what justifies choosing the 50th percentile or the 95th percentile as the more relevant figure?

Dr Hayward—I am not a statistician and I would humbly decline to even attempt to answer that.

Senator CHERRY—Coming back to the debate we had with the previous witnesses about the 15 per cent issue, do you have any comment to make on the appropriateness of using that figure based on Stover’s research?

Dr Hayward—As Professor Irwin said, the gentleman is unfortunately deceased and we cannot ask him now what he felt about that. Let us put Stover in context. The late Harry Stover wrote what was for 30 years, until the Jones book came out, the authoritative book on banana disease. He worked for 40 years in the banana industry for the United Fruit Company in Honduras and other places. He would have walked through moko infected dessert banana plots on probably hundreds of occasions. That 15 per cent is not supported by any paper that he wrote. It is probably something he had in one of his laboratory records. Is it a reasonable figure? I believe that the import risk analysis team have been conservative. They have taken the 15 per cent figure because it is what Stover said, recognising his responsibility and eminence. That is based on a highly transmissible strain of the disease which we call the SFR strain which, as Buddenhagen describes it, progresses through the plant more rapidly and tends to ooze out from the other end. The risk analysis team have used that because it is actually the only data they have, but in a way you could argue that it is also the worst case.

Senator CHERRY—They were mixing that up with symptomless infections, though, weren’t they?

Dr Hayward—This discussion of symptomless infections is very interesting.

Senator CHERRY—We thought so.

Dr Hayward—There is the point of infection and there is the point at which symptoms express, and that takes a certain time. If you have 15 per cent which are going to show symptoms, there would be a point when the same 15 per cent were symptomless. That is the way I understand it. Does that make sense?

Senator CHERRY—To some extent. Coming back to our discussion earlier about whether absence of science is an excuse, and the precautionary principle, you intimated that the WTO processes have some restrictions on that. I have read the Japanese apple decision and I am acutely aware of what you are saying. Are we overcompensating under the SPS agreement by trying to avoid that arbitration on a report like this?



Dr Hayward—That is a very interesting question. I did think a bit about that. The import risk analysis, the draft IRA, has suggested two scenarios. One is the area of low pest prevalence. That is where you make sure you have an area which is sufficiently disease free from which you can export. A figure has been put up. In my opinion it is going to be very difficult. We cannot answer precisely, but in my opinion it is likely to be very stringent and they may not be able to reach it. The other scenario is that you restrict importation to certain parts of Australia. What would worry me is if the Philippines were to say, ‘Okay, you have set these limits but there isn’t enough to support it.’ In the Japan-USA dispute, the USA said to Japan: ‘Your prescription for our apples to be exported is too onerous. Buffer zones have to be so large. You have to treat with chlorine’—all sorts of prescriptions. Is that similar to what could happen here? I do not know. If we have given them a certain area of low pest prevalence requirement they could perhaps say, ‘But you do not have sufficient science to support that.’ That is what might happen.

Senator BOSWELL—I want to follow on from Senator Cherry’s question. In response to Senator Heffernan’s question you said that your assessment was based on and influenced by the World Trade Organisation. Then you repeated it to Senator Cherry. My question to you is: how does that concern you? You are a scientist. You are asked to make an assessment on science. You are not asked to delve into how the World Trade Organisation works and what response we should be making to it. You are there to be asked your expertise is as a scientist not as a political interpreter. Your response to questions on two occasions has led me to understand that you are being influenced by what the World Trade Organisation wants of you.

CHAIR—You do not necessarily have to answer that.

Senator BOSWELL—I thought it was a pretty reasonable question.

Dr Hayward—Perhaps I should not have been drawn into this. If you have been through a process, Senator Boswell, it is very difficult not to be influenced in your thinking to some extent. It is a fear I have as a private citizen.

Senator FERRIS—You touched on a point that has occurred to me previously, and I have not asked anybody about this so I am going to ask you. Would there be any circumstances under which bananas from the Philippines could be brought into states which do not grow bananas with a greater deal of safety than if they were to be brought into, for example, New South Wales and Queensland. What would happen if bananas from the Philippines were only brought into Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria?

Dr Hayward—There is an assumption that some of those fruit are going to be infected, which is a low likelihood. There is an even lower likelihood that one of those fruit would then be transported to an area at risk, which would be North Queensland.

Senator FERRIS—Is that an answer to our problem?

Dr Hayward—Who would want to risk imprisonment for 10 years by dropping a banana skin in Tully? In the scenario you postulate, where you import only in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria, for there to be any risk at all you would have to have a situation whereby some of the fruit found its way to North Queensland. For anybody who did that, I know the laws would have to be—

CHAIR—Human error, they call it. Scientists do not think about human error!

Senator FERRIS—You raised it, so I just thought I would ask the question.

Dr Hayward—That is part of the draft IRA. That is what they are recommending, isn’t it?

CHAIR—Thank you very much for your time.

Proceedings suspended from 12.53 p.m. to 1.29 p.m.



DALE, Professor James Langham (Private capacity)

CHAIR—Welcome. I invite you to make an opening statement, and then the committee will ask you some questions.

Prof. Dale—I am the Director of the Science Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology—so I have not had to come very far; I am just next door. I have been working in plant virology for 32 years—that is since the commencement of my PhD—particularly in the area of plant viruses, and I have been working with viruses of bananas for about 22 years.

CHAIR—It has not taken you that long to get your PhD!

Prof. Dale—No, it has not. I managed to struggle through before the end of the seventies. My research group’s major interest in plant viruses and particularly viruses of bananas has been in generating disease resistance; so we primarily work on the genetic modification of bananas. We have been working with banana bunchy top virus and banana bract mosaic virus. They have both been considered within the IRA, the most important being the banana bract mosaic virus, which I would like to discuss today.

Let me go back to the beginning of last century. It is a very good parallel of what we are looking at right now. I will go back even further than 1913 to 1879 when there was a disease in Fiji described as banana bunchy top. Fiji was then a colony, and it was mentioned in dispatches from the governor of Fiji back to the UK. That disease was quite serious in Fiji. In 1913 Australia imported some banana planting material from Fiji. Unfortunately, some of that planting material was infected with banana bunchy top. At that time the south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales region was the biggest banana growing region. Between 1913 and about 1925 the number of plantations went from over 500 down to four, purely as a consequence of the introduction of that disease.

Banana bunchy top is caused by a virus and transmitted by aphids, but it is also transmitted through planting materials. So it can be moved quite significant distances in planting material and from plant to plant by aphid. A guy called Magee, a New South Wales plant pathologist, figured out how it was transmitted. That was really groundbreaking work. Following that, the New South Wales and the Queensland governments instituted unbelievably strict legislation that covered the licensing of the planting, the growing and the cessation of the growing of bananas; the movement of all banana material; and the number of plants and cultivars that were allowed to be grown domestically in backyards. They also instituted a very strict regime of inspection of plantations and eradication of infected plants. We got the disease under control, bananas continued to be grown and the industry recovered; however, we have never been able to eradicate the virus. Those very costly measures are still in place, and probably those conditions are the only reason bananas can be grown in this region. There is a perfect example of what happens when a banana virus disease avoids quarantine and rapidly becomes established in an industry.

Leading on from there, bunchy top is quite widespread in the Philippines but we still have it here, and chances of its reintroduction from the Philippines into Australia would not be great. I agree with the IRA that bunchy top is not a significant problem. However, the Philippines have a disease called banana bract mosaic. Again, it is a virus disease, it is transmitted by aphids and it is transmitted in planting material. Importantly with virus diseases, the symptoms are often very indistinct. It requires considerable expertise to be able to identify those virus diseases, particularly from symptoms.

I have two major concerns with the IRA regarding banana bract mosaic. The first one is that we know that at the beginning of the nineties this disease was widespread and in really epidemic proportions in Mindanao. It could be found in most banana growing areas and in most plantations. That information is contained in this document. No new information has come out of the Philippines. I have not been to the Philippines since about 1995, so I certainly have not carried out any surveys. But I have been able to find absolutely no evidence that anybody else has carried out any surveys of banana bract mosaic, other than the comments within the draft IRA report. Let me just refer to a couple of these because they are pretty important.

Senator McLUCAS—Excuse me, Professor, what page are you on?

Prof. Dale—We are on page 119. It was known to occur on commercial plantations—that was Thomas 1993. It says:

In 1988, the disease reached epidemic proportions around the General Santos City, where 25,000 mats were destroyed.

This is the interesting bit—



Commercial companies note a strong correlation between a high incidence of BBrMV and a high rejection rate for malformed bunches ...

That suggests very strongly that this virus occurs or occurred at very high levels in these plantations. You do not get a high correlation without there being a significant proportion of infected plants.

On page 120 it says the rating for Imp 1 is high. My concern is with Imp 2—‘the likelihood that a tonne of harvested fruit will be infected and infested with the pest’. We are saying that 10 years ago this virus was widespread. Without any new information, we are now saying that we believe the single quote from the Philippines department of agriculture 2002 that it is now rarely encountered. That goes against all of the scientific information about similar viruses in similar crops. Normally—and I can give you a number of examples: we are talking perennial crops that go from season to season—once these viruses get in, they usually get worse and worse. If the Philippines were able to do this, this would essentially be one of the big eradication programs of the world in these sorts of viruses, and I doubt it.

As far as I can see, the eradication program would have been based on symptoms. We know that this virus causes variable symptoms and probably can occur symptomlessly so that any eradication program based on visual inspection of these plants is an unsafe practice. From this point of view, we can say that rather than the likelihood of infection within a tonne of exported fruit being very low, in the absence of any other information—because there is none for bananas—but with the knowledge of similar viruses in other crops, the chances are probably moderate. That changes everything. Suddenly we are saying that the chances that a tonne of fruit have had this infection are moderate and perhaps even high, unless it can be proven otherwise.

That is one of the first difficulties I have. The second one relates to work that we were doing in the mid-1990s through a grant from the World Bank. We were developing transgenic bananas with resistance to both bunchy top virus and banana bract mosaic virus. We generated those plants. To prove whether they were resistant or not, we had to challenge the plants. We did not have bract mosaic in Australia, so our initial plan was to challenge those transgenic plants in the Philippines. Unfortunately, we were unable to do that for a number of reasons, one of which was that they really were not technically sufficiently adept and did not have the facilities to do to that.

We then applied to AQIS—that would have been around the end of 1997, early 1998—to do the test in Australia. We proposed to do the tests in a quarantined glasshouse in Melbourne carried out by a qualified plant virologist. So we had the plants, and they were derived from our lab in Queensland. We were going to transfer the plants to this quarantined glasshouse in Melbourne, import infected planting material from the Philippines and do the tests there. That application was rejected by AQIS. They said it was far too high risk because we did not have sufficient information about the host range of the virus—whether it would only infect bananas or whether it would infect other plants as well.

I was interested to note in here that, despite there being no new information on the host range of the virus, they have made statements such as on page 123:

Thus, for pests such as BBrMV that are known to be specific to bananas, Prop2 is considered moderate.

But only six years previously they said it was too high a risk to conduct this sort of experiment in a quarantined glasshouse in Melbourne with a qualified plant virologist. For those reasons I consider that, at the present time, the assessment by the draft IRA is an extremely unsafe assessment on the basis of banana bract mosaic virus.

Senator McLUCAS—We have heard a lot about moko and black sigatoka and how devastating incursions of either of those would be for the Tully Valley, which is the area I know. Can you give us an understanding of what banana bract mosaic virus would do to the Tully Valley?

Prof. Dale—Almost certainly the vectors, the aphids which transmit this virus, are present in Australia. So, once it is established, there would be no difficulty for it in getting around. Looking at parallel situations in other crops, almost certainly it would move very rapidly. Most plant viruses do not kill their hosts; they needed living cells to multiply in so they do not kill their hosts. I should say that very little is known about this virus. The only report that we have is that it reduces yield by up to 40 per cent—so that is probably the maximum. You would expect that, without very stringent eradication or roguing regimes, you would get close to 100 per cent infection within a really relatively short period—say, five years. On average, you would probably lose between 20 and 30 per cent of yield.

Senator McLUCAS—With no chance of eradication?

Prof. Dale—The chance of eradication, I would say, would be extremely low.



CHAIR—There is a symptomless period?

Prof. Dale—Yes. Once the aphid transmits the virus—and it will only inject the virus into the first couple of cells—the virus will multiply within surrounding cells, get into the vascular tissue and then move out into the surrounding tissue. Usually the period before you see symptoms is a minimum of around three weeks in bananas.

CHAIR—So the chlorine dip and all the other business will not get it?

Prof. Dale—No. There are no viricides for plant viruses. Once the plant is infected, it is infected.

Senator McLUCAS—Professor Dale, you drew our attention to page 120 where the reference is ‘Philippines Dept Agriculture, 2002a’.

Prof. Dale—That is right.

Senator McLUCAS—Have you seen that source document?

Prof. Dale—No. I think it was an answer to a question. In all the documents I have seen there are no figures on the incidence of banana bract mosaic virus particularly looking at the reduction of incidence over a time period. Normally in a successful eradication program the first thing you would do is determine how widespread the virus was initially and then track your success in eradicating it. We have not seen any of those figures.

Senator McLUCAS—Is the reason you have not seen that document simply that you have not seen it or that it has not been made public?

Prof. Dale—I would have assumed that if that information was available then it would have been provided by the Philippines Department of Agriculture. Certainly in all the documents I have seen it has not been provided.

Senator McLUCAS—We will have to follow that up.

CHAIR—What will kill this thing?

Prof. Dale—Nothing—except killing the plant.

Senator FERRIS—So gassing the fruit will not work?

Prof. Dale—No, it will not touch it.

Senator BOSWELL—Were there any bract mosaic experts on either the IRA or the groups advising the IRA?

Prof. Dale—Yes, Dr John Thomas, who was on one of the technical panels, has also worked with banana bract mosaic.

Senator BOSWELL—I understand that panel did not meet for the second IRA. Is that your understanding?

Prof. Dale—I would not like to comment. I do not know that.

Senator BOSWELL—Would there be anything in the science that would indicate to you that, if bananas were not allowed in two years ago, they should be allowed in now?

Prof. Dale—No. Nothing really has changed over the last five to 10 years. There has been no significant new information available on banana bract mosaic that has been published in that time period.

Senator BOSWELL—You are an expert on bract mosaic. Do you follow moko?

Prof. Dale—No, I am a virologist, Senator, so I stick to my speciality.

Senator FERRIS—Can I clarify the earlier comment you made a minute or so ago? Did you say that you do not believe there were sufficient changes in the science, as far as you were concerned, between the first and the second drafts to have changed the draft in the way that it has changed?

Prof. Dale—I did not read the first draft in any great detail. In fact, I did not—

Senator FERRIS—No, the first IRA, the 2001 IRA.

Prof. Dale—I have not seen that, sorry.

Senator FERRIS—It was the one that recommended that bananas not come in, whereas this one does.

Prof. Dale—I was well aware of that, yes.



Senator FERRIS—I am trying to clarify whether you believe within your area of expertise there has been insufficient change to have justified a change in the recommendation based on the area that you know alone.

Prof. Dale—For bract mosaic virus there is certainly insufficient information available now or that would have been available then to suggest that there is not a significant risk to importing bract mosaic by importing Philippines bananas.

Senator BOSWELL—Could you explain the difference that BA present in their risk analysis model as compared to your conclusion based on a conservative estimate that, if there is a 10 per cent infection rate, the risk that the virus is present in a tonne of hard green fruit is around 72 per cent?

Prof. Dale—They were saying that virtually the chance of there being any plants infected that would contribute to a tonne of green fruit was very low. If we go back to the last information we had, which was 1993, where if between four and 14 per cent of plants were infected then you would say almost certainly that every tonne of fruit would have some infected fruit. The virus is going to be present in the fruit. That is if the virus has not increased in its incidence. I will give you an example of another virus, papaya ring spot virus, in papaya which is a perennial tropical crop. The virus is in exactly the same genus of this family and in the same time period it has gone from being a relatively low-level virus to causing between 80 and 90 per cent infection across Asia. What is being suggested here is that in that same time period the same sort of virus in a perennial crop transmitted in exactly the same way has been nearly eradicated.

Senator BOSWELL—If it were eradicated, scientists being what they are, some scientist would be screaming it from the rooftop demanding peer review, I would imagine, if he came up with a find like that. It would go out for peer review, it would be broadcast in every banana magazine and it would get a fair bit of publicity if some way of eradicating a very significant disease like bract were found.

Prof. Dale—Yes, it would be. Again, looking at the parallel, the banana bunchy top story in Australia which has been a major success story, even though the disease has never been eradicated, of what is known as phytosanitary measures to control a virus disease. That has been used over and over again in plant virology textbooks because it has been such a success story. If the same sort of eradication campaign had been used for bract mosaic virus for bananas in the Philippines I would expect it would have been published because it is a pretty good news story.

Senator BOSWELL—Once the bract virus is there, does it come and go?

Prof. Dale—Once it has infected a plant, the plant remains infected for life and all the suckers that will come from that plant will be infected.

Senator BOSWELL—So there is very little chance of it being eradicated?

Prof. Dale—That is right.

Senator McLUCAS—Coming back to this document that is referred to as the source document of the proposition that essentially, all of a sudden, the virus is being eradicated: from what you are saying, you seem to be suggesting that the IRA review panel has been misled.

Prof. Dale—I think that it has believed one piece of information, which has not been backed by scientific rigour.

Senator McLUCAS—That is a fairly major mistake.

Prof. Dale—If you look up the reference ‘Philippines Dept Agriculture 2002a’, you will see that it says:

Importation of fresh bananas from the Philippines (Draft IRA Report): Comments, response and further technical submissions by stakeholders in the Philippines banana industry. 30 August 2002. Bureau of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture, Republic of the Philippines.

So this is not a published report; this is in response to the initial IRA.

Senator McLUCAS—It is essentially private correspondence?

Prof. Dale—I would expect so, yes.

Senator McLUCAS—We will follow that up.

Senator CHERRY—Is there any process that you are aware of whereby the Australian government would check a submission like that?

Prof. Dale—What should be done is an independent survey, and these things are not difficult to do. There are very well defined protocols for surveying for virus diseases. Firstly, you would not do it by visual



inspection; you would collect random samples through plantations, you would randomise a number of plantations and you would use advanced diagnostic techniques.

Senator CHERRY—Coming back to the probability of importation, if the Imp 2 was shifted from very low to moderate, do you know what impact that would have on the overall risk assessment matrix?

Prof. Dale—Firstly, it says that the bract mosaic virus can be imported into Australia in bananas. The next step is to determine whether it gets transmitted from the fruit into a banana plant. That is known to occur. Aphids will feed on fruit of infected plants and will transmit to the whole plant. So that step is known scientifically to occur and it has been documented—not with bract mosaic virus because nothing has been done with bract mosaic virus—firstly, in the case of plum pox virus in Prunus species, which is a very similar virus. Again, it is the same genus. So we know that the aphids can do it. Then it becomes a numbers game. The virus will still be quite viable in the infected peel for a considerable period. When will an aphid land on it and go from there, having had a quick feed? The feed is very short; it can be 10 to 15 seconds. Aphids are attracted to yellow. They will be attracted to the yellow peel and if there is a banana there, they can transmit the virus in another 10 to 15 seconds, so it is a very short period. It is a numbers game and no-one can guess when that will happen.

Senator BOSWELL—The second IRA states that it is very difficult to identify symptoms of the BBrMV—banana bract mosaic virus—and there is every likelihood of harvesting Philippine bananas which are harbouring the virus without showing it. Can you explain the difference between what BA present in their risk analysis model and your conclusions based on a conservative estimate?

Prof. Dale—I cannot understand how they have come to that decision. Essentially, that is why I am here: I cannot understand how they have come to the conclusion, based on a single report from the Philippines Department of Agriculture, almost certainly using visual inspections, that this virus has been eradicated. They say themselves that the symptoms of this virus in bananas are very variable. We know that from the work we have done ourselves. To be able to pick an infected plant is very difficult in the field.

CHAIR—Have you been to the Philippines?

Prof. Dale—Yes.

CHAIR—Is it possible to just wander around and look about or does someone come with you and direct you?

Prof. Dale—I have not been there for more than a decade, but whenever we have been there we have always had our collaborators accompany us, who were plant virologists in the Philippines.

CHAIR—So you would have a guided tour?

Prof. Dale—Yes.

Senator BOSWELL—Who is the expert on the panel? I know you have told me.

Prof. Dale—John Thomas.

Senator BOSWELL—I cannot see him on the panel list.

Prof. Dale—He was on one of the technical panels; he was not on the panel itself.

Senator BOSWELL—And that panel never made any recommendations on the second IRA?

Prof. Dale—I do not know.

CHAIR—Thank you very much, Professor. You may now go back to work! We are very grateful for your evidence.



[1.57 p.m.]

PEASLEY, Mr David Lawrence (Private capacity)

CHAIR—I now welcome Mr David Peasley. Do you have any comments to make on the capacity in which you appear?

Mr Peasley—I am a private horticultural consultant and member of the risk analysis panel for the Philippines IRA. I would like to tender some changes to my submission. My written submission, which was forwarded to you last week, included extracts of my diary entries. Following your receipt of the submission I was told that some of the diary entries should be treated as confidential. I then went through the list, which is attachment M in my submission, and advised your office which entries I thought were confidential. I was then advised that time constraints prevented separating the entries before the submission was sent to members of the inquiry. I have now sorted them into two lists, which I now tender, and ask that they be included in my submission as attachments N and O. Only one change has been made since then, and that is the entry for 28 June 2002, which I have taken from the tentative confidential list and put onto the non-confidential list as attachment O.

CHAIR—You would be aware that we have not published the material you wanted to be kept confidential. It is still confidential.

Mr Peasley—Okay.

CHAIR—The committee has it but has not published it. There is a document out there which excludes what you wanted to have excluded.

Mr Peasley—I may be drawing on some of those comments today.

CHAIR—You can do what you like. I now invite you to make an opening statement.

Mr Peasley—Thank you. You will be familiar with the content of my submission which was forwarded to your office last week. The submission indicates that I have some serious concerns about the second draft IRA. At various times during the IRA process I raised my concerns in discussions and in writing with the panel and with BA. I also recorded events in my diary as they occurred. You will have noted that on 1 July last year I tendered a minority report which detailed my concerns with the IRA’s methodology, conclusions and recommendations. The report highlighted some key areas of concern. The first of those is related to the scientific methodology. There are a few points here.

The first point is that in relation to moko disease there is a lack of sound scientific information on a number of questions. These include details on the incidence of infection in the Philippines, the epidemiology of asymptomatic infection, the importance of insect transmission, the incubation period of the disease and the role of asymptomatic weed hosts in the potential for spread within Australia.

The second point is in relation to introduction of moko. The time period set for calculating likelihood and consequences of introduction is only 12 months. This is an unrealistic period, given firstly the data gaps that exist concerning the disease itself; and, secondly, the need to allow for a reasonable time in which the disease may arrive and start to spread not just on commercial banana farms but in wild banana plants, in the wider environment, in domestic backyard plants and in other plants that can host the disease.

Thirdly, scientific and other information supplied by the Philippines as part of the IRA process has not been verified or ground truthed. Fourthly, conditions in Australia’s major growing area, Far North Queensland, are ideal for the infection and spread of moko. They include a large flood plain, high temperatures, heavy soils, high rainfall, frequent and extensive flooding and a high degree of mechanisation. The typography of the area would make it virtually impossible to contain or quarantine a moko outbreak under these conditions. This point has not been satisfactorily addressed.

The fifth point is that symptoms of moko disease are easily confused with other diseases such as Erwinia corm rot and Fusarium wilt. To complicate matters further, symptoms of these diseases vary according to prevailing environmental conditions. If an infection were to occur in Far North Queensland it is at least possible and more than likely that, by the time symptoms were visible and positively identified, it would be too late to contain or eradicate moko. This point has not been adequately addressed. The sixth point is that questions exist concerning the rationale by which the individual risk of four pests—moko, freckle, bract mosaic virus and mealy bugs—which are above or near the appropriate level of protection, the ALOP, are equated with the risk of a single disease.



The seventh point is that the Biosecurity Australia computer modelling, which evolved during the IRA, is extremely complex. I understand the biology and the technical and practical aspects of the assessment, but the complexity of computer calculations and their application leave me uneasy about there actual relation to and effect on the risk assessment process. I am not reassured by any explanation I have heard to date.

The eighth point is that scientific data applied by the panel to the risk assessment and risk mitigation should at least be peer reviewed and preferably published in an internationally recognised journal. Some of the information used in the process did not meet this standard—for example, the Stover factor, which is used in calculating the risk attached to moko.

There are other issues which may have affected the quality of the science. Firstly, at the beginning of every stakeholder meeting in Australia, Australia’s trade position and WTO obligations were stressed at length. While everyone involved in the process acknowledges that Australia has to meet international obligations, this emphasis on non-scientific issues had an adverse effect on the panel’s ability to effectively communicate with stakeholders. This was demonstrated at every stakeholder meeting and subsequently by stakeholder reaction.

The issue of trade also consistently permeated risk analysis panel discussions. Given the subject matter and the seriousness of the IRA outcomes, together with the need to maintain effective consultation and transparency, all members of the risk analysis panel should have been involved in all discussions concerning the preparation of key areas of the IRA, particularly those relating to risk management measures. Not all members were invited to participate in all proceedings. Finally, from the beginning and throughout, the IRA was held up to be purely science based. By the time the second draft was released, it was apparent to me that serious questions existed about the integrity of the science upon which the IRA was based and that, consequently, serious questions needed to be asked about the outcomes of the IRA. To date, I am not satisfied that these questions have been addressed or answered.

CHAIR—Mr Peasley, when you became part of the panel, did you have to sign a confidentiality clause?

Mr Peasley—Yes, I did.

Senator FERRIS—If you were as unhappy with it as your statement this afternoon suggests, why did you not resign? Or, at least, why did you not release your confidential dissenting report as a public document?

Mr Peasley—I seriously considered resigning from the panel, but I honestly believed that my influence on the panel was to bring a perspective and knowledge of the banana industry to the panel. I thought I could help the process, not impede it.

Senator FERRIS—But, in the end, because you did not release your dissenting report, it could be construed that you agreed with the final report because you have not said publicly that you did not.

Mr Peasley—No, and obviously I was concerned about my confidentiality agreement. I took that very seriously. The other point is that, in the end, I felt that I had exhausted my arguments. The panel were not going to convince me that I was wrong, nor was I going to convince them that they were wrong. In the end I thought, ‘Let’s get the final report, this draft, out and let stakeholders comment.’

CHAIR—We heard some evidence earlier from Biosecurity Australia. When they were asked a question about the report being unanimous—I think it was Mary Harwood who gave the evidence—it was said that ‘this panel genuinely agreed as a group of seven scientists that this report represented their judgment’. That is not true, is it?

Mr Peasley—I agreed to the release of the report for the reasons that I have explained—that is, that I thought the panel had exhausted all argument. We obviously had differences of opinion, which you get on any panel.

CHAIR—But the words were that ‘this panel genuinely agreed as a group of seven scientists that this report represented their judgment’. Did that report represent your judgment?

Mr Peasley—No, it did not. I made clear to the panel.

CHAIR—Thank you.

Senator FERRIS—If you felt then as strongly as you have conveyed to us today that you did, why did you decide to just leave it to the post-report consultative process and hope, because the confidentiality agreement presumably still stood, that some of your concerns would be released and discussed?

Mr Peasley—I am not the king of all wisdom.

CHAIR—None of us are.



Mr Peasley—But I do respect other people’s opinions, and mine was one of seven. When you are a member of a team you have to respect other people’s opinions. We had been working together on it for three years, and I do respect the other members of the panel.

Senator FERRIS—Have you ever received any funding from the Banana Growers Council or from banana growers for any work done?

Mr Peasley—No, not from the Australian Banana Growers Council.

Senator FERRIS—Not from the industry?

Mr Peasley—As part of an ongoing consultancy for the New South Wales Banana Industry Committee, I participated in a study looking at a production and marketing plan for the New South Wales industry. That was well under way and nearing its conclusion when I took my position on the panel, and I disclosed that to Biosecurity Australia.

Senator FERRIS—With regard to the way the Biosecurity arrangements apply to people on the panel, are you paid a contract fee for the complete length of time from start to finish of an inquiry such as this or is it a pro rata, per diem type of arrangement?

Mr Peasley—It is on a pro rata basis on an hourly or daily basis.

Senator FERRIS—So when you started off, you could have resigned at any time without jeopardising what you had already negotiated to be paid?

Mr Peasley—By mutual agreement, it could have been terminated.

Senator FERRIS—Did you consider doing that?

Mr Peasley—I did. It was not a financial reason to stay on the panel. In fact, it would have cost me money. But I did not seriously consider resigning from the panel for the reason that I wanted to stick with it to the end.

Senator FERRIS—Even though it has subsequently meant that the appearance has been given by Biosecurity that, as Senator Heffernan read out a few minutes ago, you are one of the seven scientists who are satisfied and genuinely in agreement with the outcome?

Mr Peasley—I cannot have control over that. It comes with the game.

CHAIR—Is it fair to say that to take up this position on this panel you had to forgo other career opportunities?

Mr Peasley—I did.

Senator FERRIS—Are you an expert in moko? What is your professional qualification that had you appointed to the panel?

Mr Peasley—As stated in my submission, the reason for being on the panel is my knowledge of the horticultural aspects of the Australian banana industry—I have been working with the banana industry in New South Wales and have been doing some work in Queensland for over 30 years—and probably more significantly, my being chairman of the national banana plant health improvement project, which was a five-year project funded by the Horticultural Research and Development Corporation. That was a $3½ million project. I chaired that for five years. We had some pretty major successes.

Senator FERRIS—Does that mean you are an expert in moko? Are you a virologist?

Mr Peasley—No, I am not.

Senator FERRIS—What is your particular scientific expertise?

Mr Peasley—I am trained in horticulture, which is just knowledge of plants, how they grow and management systems.

Senator McLUCAS—Following on from Professor Dale’s evidence, which was quite astonishing in terms of the banana bract mosaic virus, I was reminded of your letter of 9 June to Dr McRae, the chair of the risk analysis panel. At point 7 of that document you said:

While realising the diplomatic difficulties in ‘validating’ or ‘ground-truthing’ the information supplied by the Philippines, it has been a concern that the Panel has had to accept the data and answers supplied by the Philippines.

It is very similar to the evidence we have just had from Professor Dale. The letter continued:



On several occasions, the information supplied to questions was not consistent, or not forthcoming, despite repeated requests. I am therefore concerned that the compliance over conditions, which may be required by Australia to reduce the risk, may also not be strictly applied despite the proposed ‘audit’ process.

There are a lot of issues in that point. Who did you hold discussions with about the diplomatic problems associated with questioning data from the Philippines?

Mr Peasley—Specifically it was Dr Sharan Singh, who was the initial chair of the panel. I had to direct all my inquiries regarding questions to the Philippines through him. We got several replies from the Philippines. Some of them were very inadequate. If I were not happy with a reply I repeated that question or added a question of clarification to the Philippines. I made a list of those and they were forwarded to the Philippines. Some of those replies were still not adequate. I persisted in trying to get those answers and was informed that the Philippines have been very cooperative in their provision of answers to the questions, that the panel should be grateful for that and that if I kept persisting and asking a question it might be offensive.

Senator McLUCAS—Who gave you that advice?

Mr Peasley—That was the chair of the panel.

Senator McLUCAS—So essentially you were encouraged to desist from asking questions because you might offend the applicant?

Mr Peasley—I was not encouraged to ask repeated questions of that nature.

Senator McLUCAS—Was the lack of response to specific questions a concern that other panel members had?

Mr Peasley—I cannot speak for them, but it certainly was for me.

CHAIR—Did you feel a bit intimidated by all of that?

Mr Peasley—I thought Biosecurity Australia obviously understand the broader picture better than I do and they control the IRA.

Senator McLUCAS—In the last part of that quote you talk about the potential for argument to occur over the compliance process. Can you elaborate on that.

Mr Peasley—I went to the Philippines and I saw how the plantations operate. I know that in Australia the Queensland Department of Primary Industries is operating a very efficient inspection system. If a request or a requirement were made of the Philippines to do something, I did not feel comfortable that we could be guaranteed that it would be carried out in the way we had stated that we wanted it to be.

Senator McLUCAS—And that is on the basis that you were not able to get information to direct questions.

Mr Peasley—That is right. I felt uncomfortable about the base information we were being given on a few things, particularly moko. If I do not have that accurate, basic information then I feel very uncomfortable.

Senator McLUCAS—Did you raise this with Biosecurity Australia?

Mr Peasley—Yes, I did.

Senator McLUCAS—Is that in the letter that I am quoting from?

Mr Peasley—That is one of the letters.

Senator McLUCAS—In that same letter you say on the last page:

The RAP has, I believe, exhausted its analysis of the information available and there remain areas of disagreement within the panel.

What were the areas of disagreement?

Mr Peasley—I did not believe—and I have outlined this—that a one-year period was relevant. I also thought that we did not have enough sound scientific information on moko in those areas I have specified. I also did not believe that the introduction of the Stover factor was legitimate science.

Senator McLUCAS—You heard the evidence from Professor Dale earlier and his concerns about bract mosaic virus. Do you think those are valid concerns?

Mr Peasley—I take the advice of experts. I do not know a lot about bract mosaic virus at all, but I did have discussions with Dr John Thomas, who was on the technical working group—not very intensely—on bract mosaic virus. At that stage I just thought that moko was the major disease that we should be concerned about, and that directed most of my attention.



Senator McLUCAS—Do you recollect the Philippines Department of Agriculture document 2002a that Professor Dale referred to? I am sure this is testing your memory.

Mr Peasley—I think that refers to the Philippines scientific delegation that came out here in April 2002. A team of their science and industry people came out and our panel met with them in Canberra. We had discussions with them and there were minutes kept of that meeting.

CHAIR—Could I go to the minutes for a second? We had a curious description of the way you blokes used to convene. We were told that you were given tasks you would go away and do and that no minutes were kept of who was to do the tasks. If you got killed on the way home, I asked how the hell anyone would know what you were supposed to do. Were there minutes? We were told there were no minutes of these meetings.

Mr Peasley—Of that meeting?

CHAIR—No, of the meetings of the panel.

Mr Peasley—There were some meetings of the panel.

CHAIR—Were they minuted?

Mr Peasley—Yes, they were; some were.

CHAIR—We were told there was a curious system where there was no minute taker, where you just had individual tasks. We were told they were all great scientific minds and that they built their own jobs and so on.

Mr Peasley—There were minutes kept of some of the early meetings. I do not think there were minutes kept of meetings in recent times, but there were minutes.

CHAIR—Why were there no minutes of meetings in recent times?

Mr Peasley—You would have to ask the chair that.

CHAIR—How long would a typical meeting go on for?

Mr Peasley—Some meetings lasted for two days. Others lasted for a whole day. Some were teleconferences.

Senator BOSWELL—Did you have agendas?

Mr Peasley—Sometimes there was an agenda, but everyone was advised verbally of the topic. In some cases there was no written agenda.

CHAIR—So there used to be minutes?

Mr Peasley—Yes.

CHAIR—When did that change? Was it when the chairman changed?

Mr Peasley—I think it was around about that time, yes.

Senator FERRIS—Were you ever told why it changed? Was it for security reasons?

Mr Peasley—No. There was no comment about it.

Senator FERRIS—Didn’t it concern you that there were no minutes?

Mr Peasley—I kept my own record of minutes of the meetings.

Senator FERRIS—But, if you were disagreeing on so many quite important issues, I would have thought you would be concerned that without minutes being kept officially your positions could be misrepresented.

Mr Peasley—I did ask on at least two or three occasions that my disagreement with the panel’s decision on risk assessment be recorded.

CHAIR—Was it?

Mr Peasley—I saw it being written down but I did not ever see anything published.

Senator BOSWELL—If there were no minutes, presumably it could not be recorded.

CHAIR—So you go to a meeting and it could take a day.

Senator FERRIS—Two days.

CHAIR—Two days. How long would it be until the next meeting?

Mr Peasley—That varied according to how much business there was to come.

CHAIR—Could it be two months?



Mr Peasley—It could be two months or three months.

CHAIR—Among other things you would have to do for the next meeting would be remembering what the bloody hell happened at the last meeting, without any minutes.

Mr Peasley—That is why I kept my own diary.

CHAIR—It is a very curious system.

Senator McLUCAS—When the minutes were being kept, in the early part, did you open meetings by agreeing to the minutes of the previous meeting?

Mr Peasley—No.

Senator McLUCAS—Whilst there were minutes being taken, they were never actually brought back to the group to be agreed to?

Mr Peasley—Not at the next meeting, no.

Senator BOSWELL—There were no agendas? They wouldn’t ring you up and say, ‘We’re going to discuss this’? It wasn’t, ‘Fred Bloggs will do this, Peasley will do this and we’ll all do something’? There was no agenda? You just rocked up?

Mr Peasley—There were agendas on some occasions but not regularly.

Senator FERRIS—Did anyone complain about it?

Mr Peasley—I think the general feeling was that, as there was a lot of robust and very exhaustive discussion, to record all of that would have been very time consuming, and I do not know whether anyone would have read the minutes in the end. There was certainly a lot of toing and froing of professional opinion between members. There was very frank discussion. I do not think there was any attempt to try and hide that. It is just that it would have been an enormous task.

CHAIR—It was a bit like a footy match, where you go out and belt the hell out of each other and when the whistle blows—

Senator FERRIS—Yes, but you still have the score at the end of it!

CHAIR—They did have the score at the end of it.

Mr Peasley—Unless you bring on 14 players!

Senator FERRIS—I can understand that for security reasons and so on there may have been a decision made not to keep minutes, but at the end of the meetings were records made of action plans, decisions on actions and follow-ups?

Mr Peasley—Decisions were made but they were not put on paper. Everyone knew what they had to do for the next meeting.

CHAIR—That is my point: if you got killed on the way home, how were the rest of them going to know what your job was with no minutes?

Senator FERRIS—You would be banking on the memory of your colleagues.

Mr Peasley—Or their diary recollections.

Senator McLUCAS—At our hearing on 8 March, Ms Harwood and Dr McRae gave us a mental image of a group of scientists sitting around a laptop computer and inserting changes into the draft IRA. I do not think I am misconstruing what the evidence was. Is that your recollection? I have this picture of very clever people sitting around—

Senator CHERRY—Arguing about apostrophes.

Senator McLUCAS—and arguing about an apostrophe, for example. It does not sound like a very good use of time. Is that how you recall it?

Mr Peasley—No.

Senator McLUCAS—Can you explain your recollection of how the IRA was actually written?

Mr Peasley—How it was written, or how the discussions went?

Senator BOSWELL—How you got to the conclusion?

Senator McLUCAS—How do you get to the point where a sentence is agreed on to go into the document?



Mr Peasley—A lot of the writing of the document was left to Biosecurity Australia.

Senator McLUCAS—As secretariat type support to the group?

Mr Peasley—I understand that they had secretaries working, but basically it was the chair and a couple of the members of the panel who were responsible for putting together the report.

Senator McLUCAS—Would you review that every time you came back?

Mr Peasley—The drafts were circulated to members of the panel for comment. We would send our comments back to the chair and the next draft would include or not include those comments.

Senator McLUCAS—Just on the question of timing—and this goes back to your letter that I referred to earlier—something else that troubled me about that letter was that you referred to the meeting which I think was on 5 and 6 June and then you say, ‘It has been very difficult for me to read the 378-page document’ and your document is dated 9 June, I think. You were requested to respond to 378 pages are very technical information in three days.

Mr Peasley—Less than that. We were asked to review it overnight and give our comments the next day.

Senator McLUCAS—In part of your submission you say how difficult that was.

Mr Peasley—It was very difficult to do that.

Senator McLUCAS—I can understand that.

CHAIR—How many pages?

Mr Peasley—There were 378. I did request that I take a few days at least to review the document, and I would get back to the chair, which I did. After that I decided that I had sufficient concern to do a minority report, which I produced by the end of that month.

Senator McLUCAS—You may not be able to answer this, but do you know if your views were shared by other panel members? If you were asked to review the document overnight, were other panel members given the same task?

Mr Peasley—I think anyone would find it difficult, but we had varying levels of involvement in the preparation of that draft.

Senator BOSWELL—You said in your submission that Biosecurity wrote the executive summary ‘before all technical information had been submitted’. Am I quoting you accurately?

Mr Peasley—That was on the preparation of the pathogens report, which was the technical working group on pathogens. I felt it was a bit out of order to do an executive summary before the technical information was—

Senator BOSWELL—Who wrote the executive summary?

Mr Peasley—It was the chair at that time, Dr Sharan Singh.

Senator BOSWELL—And there was no technical information in it before the summary was written.

Mr Peasley—There would have been technical information, but not all of it.

Senator BOSWELL—What did she say? Did you raise that with her as a point?

Mr Peasley—I raised that in a memo.

Senator BOSWELL—What was her response?

Mr Peasley—I do not think I got a response to that.

Senator BOSWELL—In your summary, you refer to technical information that was presented by the Australian officials ‘to their Philippino counterparts and industry experts’. To your knowledge, has this information been provided as yet?

Mr Peasley—Not all of it, no.

Senator BOSWELL—It still has not been provided.

Mr Peasley—No.

Senator BOSWELL—You were on the panel, and you are the only one on the panel that we are interviewing. When was your last consultation? When was the last time you were included in any decision making? How many meetings did you miss, in other words?



Mr Peasley—I attended every official meeting and teleconference of the panel.

Senator BOSWELL—I was under the impression that you were not invited to make submissions to the last couple of meetings—is that correct? Were you not asked to attend?

Mr Peasley—No. There was one workshop that was held in December 2001 on the methodology of risk assessment, risk analysis. I was not asked to attend. When the email came around, I thought, ‘Well, I’m the chairman of the technical working group on environment, pathogens and operations.’ I thought that to have a consistent IRA perhaps I should have been there, so I asked the chair if he wanted a consistent IRA. He said that my presence was not required in that area because it was a pathogens working group.

Senator BOSWELL—In the previous Hansard, Dr McRae said that you agreed with the IRA. Obviously that is an incorrect statement.

Mr Peasley—I agreed with the release of the IRA.

Senator BOSWELL—No, the chair put to her then that that was not what he was asking.

Mr Peasley—I understand that there could have been confusion. I think Ms Harwood was the one making that statement.

Senator BOSWELL—No, Dr McRae made the statement:

There were seven members of that team and, as I said, I chaired it. The report was unanimous. In other words, every one of those seven people agreed that we should release the document ...

The chair, Senator Heffernan, said:

Yes, but that is not saying they agree with it.

Dr McRae —Every single word of that text should be released.

CHAIR —You are still evading the question. What you just said does not mean that they all agreed with everything that was in it. They agreed to release the text as it was, but that does not necessarily say that they as individuals agreed with everything in it.

Senator BOSWELL —Did they sign off as agreeing with the report?

Dr McRae —Yes.

Ms Harwood said:

Yes. They agreed with this report and they agreed with its release.

… … …

Everyone agreed with the report and with its release.

Mr Peasley—My recollection is that we were asked to agree on the substance of the report. At that time I said, ‘I’d like time to review it before I make comment.’ That may have been taken that I agreed with it, but I certainly asked for time to review the document.

Senator BOSWELL—But you did not agree with it and you said you did not agree with it.

Mr Peasley—No, I did not agree with it.

CHAIR—In your dissenting report—

Mr Peasley—Minority report, I think it is called.

CHAIR—Whatever it is. Your report of 1 July 2003 at point 16 quotes from the report:

“the direct effects of Moko on Australian banana production may not be as great as its effect on small farms in other countries”

What the hell does that mean?

Mr Peasley—That comment was made by whom?

CHAIR—Allegedly it is in the final draft.

Mr Peasley—Yes, and I disagreed with that comment.

CHAIR—You then go on to say, after that quote:

Managing a soil borne disease under the highly favourable conditions for establishment and spread in Far North Queensland is not a valid comparison to make against Bunchy Top and Panama disease, which are largely diseases of the sub-tropics.



So what you are saying there is that the quote from the draft report—

“the direct effects of Moko on Australian banana production may not be as great as its effect on small farms in other countries”—

is meaningless.

Mr Peasley—Yes. I did not agree with that statement.

Senator BOSWELL—Did any of the other panel members disagree with the IRA or have any reservations?

CHAIR—You do not have to comment on that.

Mr Peasley—I was not going to, but I was going to make the point that no-one on the panel completely agrees on everything. Every item is discussed vigorously and we all have different opinions.

CHAIR—That is what you call ‘human vagaries’.

Mr Peasley—No. We have different fields of expertise. If a scientist told me that two plus two equals 4.1, I would believe them. If they said that two plus two equals 37, I would say no it does not.

Senator BOSWELL—Do you know why you were not invited to participate in the preparation of the documents and why for six months you were not kept informed of developments in the evolving document? Were you sent to the sin-bin?

Mr Peasley—I do not know, Senator Boswell. We were told that BA was going to work on the document and get back to us with the next draft.

Senator BOSWELL—Were any other members of the panel involved in it?

Mr Peasley—I do not know.

Senator CHERRY—I have a few questions that are based, unfortunately, on what you have said are your confidential diary notes. I propose to ask the questions without referring to the diary. Should you choose not to answer, that will be perfectly fine. We may have to go in camera to discuss it if need be, but that will be up to you. I want to get an idea of what you thought about relying very heavily on data being provided by the Philippines for the entire IRA, rather than getting it independently verified.

Mr Peasley—On one occasion we were given a summary table on moko infection. I wanted to know what the basic information was that went into the calculations, such as the number of infected plantations and the distribution of spread—all the details that go into a summary table. I wanted to know how comprehensive that was.

Senator CHERRY—Are you aware of whether those questions were put to the Philippines?

Mr Peasley—Yes. We asked for the background data for a period of five years.

Senator CHERRY—Has that material been provided yet?

Mr Peasley—No, it has not.

Senator CHERRY—Do you think it needs to be provided before a final IRA is prepared?

Mr Peasley—I think we should know what we have already heard from previous speakers today, that there is a potential discrepancy in the detection levels within the Philippines. I would like to have that confirmed. I think the way to do that is to get that background data.

Senator CHERRY—Should we look at the likely incidence of moko coming in over a one-year period or over a longer period of, say, three or five years? My understanding is that the final draft IRA uses a fairly short time frame, that it looks over a one-year incidence. Do you think it should have used a longer period?

Mr Peasley—Yes, I do. Again, I am a member of the panel and I do not make the policy, but it just seems unfair or unsound to assess the impact of a disease such as moko over a 12-month period when the effect on the environment may not be felt for many years. There is also the cumulative effect of five years of imports. If we are getting 83,000 tonnes in over five years, that is 400,000 tonnes. It seems to understate the risk if you are doing it over a 12-month period.

Senator CHERRY—When I was reading through your submission I got the very strong view that the revision of the IRA was driven very hard by Biosecurity Australia itself rather than by the science coming through the panel. Would that be your final conclusion about what happened?

Mr Peasley—That is a question that I will not answer.



Senator CHERRY—That is perfectly fine. I have a question about the mathematical probability issues and the Stover percentages. We had a lot of debate about that this morning, and I hope you had the opportunity to listen. Do you think the use of the 15 per cent probability figure in the Stover research was appropriate in the final IRA report?

Mr Peasley—I do not think that that figure should have been used without verification or without having the scientists review it more intensively.

Senator CHERRY—I took up with Dr Hayward earlier today the notion of when the science is not there, when there is a big gap in the science. What is your understanding, under the SPS agreement and the role of a risk assessment panel, of how you deal with a big fat gap in the science? Does the precautionary principle come into play, or is that something we cannot defend on a WTO panel?

Mr Peasley—Mr Truss, the minister for primary industries, made it very clear that the decision of the panel or the government would be based on sound science. I and the panel have taken that to be that where there were significant gaps in information we were to adopt a highly conservative approach. In my opinion, if there is not enough science, it is not a risk—it is an uncertainty. You cannot attribute a score of risk to uncertainty.

Senator CHERRY—But there are huge gaps in the science in some of the stuff the panel was asked to look at, aren’t there?

Mr Peasley—That is why we requested that the Philippines conduct these experiments, particularly on moko.

Senator CHERRY—Looking at the time line, I got the impression that the Soguilon research document arrived in late 2003. Is that right?

Mr Peasley—Yes.

Senator CHERRY—That was after you had already submitted your first draft minority report.

Mr Peasley—Yes.

Senator CHERRY—So essentially the decisions on changing the risk assessment had been made even before that material arrived from the Philippines. Would that be correct?

Mr Peasley—I think that the Soguilon information came about towards the end of last year.

Senator CHERRY—It was late July. I was reading through it a few minutes ago. It struck me as passing odd because the discussion about the final change to risk assessments appeared to have occurred in the early part of 2003 and then the justification for it appeared to have arrived from the Philippines months later. It struck me as passing strange. I will leave it there.

Senator McLUCAS—I will pick up on a point that Senator Cherry was making. Mr Peasley, you said that the minister had said very plainly that the decision had to be made on science. Yet at the third paragraph in your summary document, you say:

At an early stage I became concerned that issues other than science could be influencing proceedings.

You go on to talk about a presentation that discussed Australia’s international trade position and obligations. Could you give the committee an understanding of the weighting that you got as a committee member from that presentation and if possible who gave you the presentation?

Mr Peasley—The position was that we were to make our decision based on sound science and that trade was not to come into the discussions. I insisted on that on a number of occasions when the subject of a trade retaliation or our export position was brought up. I said: ‘We don’t want to know about that. That’s not our job at all. We stick to the science.’ I was concerned about the effect that that may have had when we had the stakeholder meetings. Those discussions could have given the stakeholders the impression that trade was going to be taken into consideration or was a higher issue than the science. Understanding trade obligations is different to our trade position. That is the distinction I brought up with the panel.

Senator McLUCAS—You just said a moment ago that trade issues were brought up. In what context did those trade issues come into the deliberations of the group?

Mr Peasley—I think I have pretty well reported in the press—

Senator McLUCAS—It is important to have it on the record.

Mr Peasley—that there were potential trade retaliations regarding Australia’s other industries like dairy and beef, but the panel did not take them into consideration at all.



Senator BOSWELL—When was the last meeting of the panel?

Mr Peasley—It is in my notes.

Senator CHERRY—It is in the written submission.

Senator BOSWELL—Can you assist me, Senator Cherry?

Mr Peasley—It was last week, actually—last Monday.

Senator BOSWELL—No, the last panel meeting before they brought the IRA down.

CHAIR—Senator Boswell, is this where you are going to argue that the report was out before the panel—

Senator BOSWELL—You follow your line of questions; I will follow mine.

CHAIR—But this is an old line of questioning. You are revisiting the paddock; you are ploughing it again.

Senator BOSWELL—It is a pretty good paddock, too.

CHAIR—We do not have time. We do not need to fallow; we just need to get on.

Mr Peasley—I know that the last meeting before the IRA came out was a teleconference.

Senator BOSWELL—What date?

Mr Peasley—It is in the notes.

Senator BOSWELL—Senator Cherry will assist me. Were you aware of this NAPPO document on insects?

Mr Peasley—No, I was not.

Senator CHERRY—Senator Boswell, the date was 24 November.

Senator BOSWELL—The last meeting was on 24 November. The NAPPO document which the panel depended on was signed off on 5 December. So the NAPPO document did not have an owner till 5 December, and yet it was used with some weight by the panel on 24 November.

Senator CHERRY—I want to plough the paddock next to Senator Boswell’s.

Senator BOSWELL—That is my paddock.

Senator CHERRY—This is the paddock next door. Returning to the question I was asking earlier about when the Philippines results arrived, your notes say they arrived on 24 July—‘Re Philippines results, Soguilon’s April 2003 paper’. It suggests that the first discussion about the downgrading of the moko risk assessment was in December 2002, which was some eight months before that paper arrived. Was the panel sitting on any new science before December 2002—any that arrived between August and December 2002?

Mr Peasley—I do not think so.

Senator CHERRY—It is fascinating.

Senator BOSWELL—Is it possible to deduce that, because there is a 15 per cent infection rate, the maximum rate for asymptomatic disease is no higher than 15 per cent?

Mr Peasley—I do not think there is a correlation.

Senator BOSWELL—You cannot correlate it?

Mr Peasley—I am not a scientist but I do not think you can.

Senator CHERRY—Who would you regard as the main expert on moko disease on the panel?

Mr Peasley—Rob Allen and Dr Sharan Singh on the panel. In the technical working group it was Dr Chris Hayward.

Senator McLUCAS—Is attachment E a public document?

Mr Peasley—It is confidential.

Senator McLUCAS—I will not ask questions about it then.

Senator CHERRY—Chair, do we need to go in camera to ask any questions?

CHAIR—We can. We will conclude this session. We may go in camera in a minute. We were expecting to have a submission and an appearance from the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, but they have decided they do not want to turn up. We are waiting for a letter of explanation to arrive—it may



be coming through the door now. It is a great disappointment to us, but hopefully they have a reasonable explanation.

Senator BOSWELL—Could you read it into the record?

CHAIR—The letter is from Mr Varghese, the Director-General. Unfortunately, the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries is unable to appear in Brisbane today before the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee’s inquiry into the revised draft import risk analysis for bananas from the Philippines. It is the department’s intention at this time to provide a formal written submission to assist the committee in its inquiry. The delay in reissuing the revised draft IRA has meant that the department is unable to complete its final submission and it apologises for any inconvenience.

Well, there you go. They probably could not come to an agreement on their submission—that is a speculation. I thank everybody very much for their attendance. Obviously we have been given plenty of food for thought today. This is a serious inquiry, which has raised some thorny issues and we will deal with them in due course.

Senator McLUCAS—Chair, before we close the open session, earlier today I asked some questions about the impact on the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. During the break, Mr Jackson from the Banana Growers Council suggested that he may have some information which may be useful to the committee. Could we invite Mr Jackson to write to us on that matter, because we have not had much information about that.

CHAIR—We can communicate with Mr Jackson.

Senator McLUCAS—I am just giving Mr Jackson the heads-up that this is going to occur.

CHAIR—It might be best if Mr Jackson assembled his thoughts and wrote to us.

Evidence was then taken in camera—

Committee adjourned at 3.17 p.m.

Documents

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Official …...The administration of Biosecurity Australia with particular reference to the revised draft import risk analysis report released in February