Investment and Trade Initiatives

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. What was the result of the South Australian citrus industry's participation in the Premier's trade mission to China?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport, Minister for Racing) (14:47): There were some very fruitful discussions over in China with the citrus industry, and I want to congratulate the South Australian delegation who joined in the wider trip to China. We heard earlier today of some outstanding successes and some deals that were signed; other things are going to take a little bit longer to do. What we did with the citrus group, including Con Poulos, who is the South Australian regional head of Citrus Australia and does a great job in promoting the citrus industry, Andrew Harty, the manager of market development from Citrus Australia, Jeff Knispel, the Managing Director of Nippy's, and Steve Burdette, the Business Development Manager at the Costa Group, was to sit down with some really high-ranking Chinese officials to talk through South Australia's very special circumstances in terms of biosecurity.

We are the only mainland state that can go around the world and say, 'We are phylloxera free, we are fruit fly free and we are GM free.' When we say those things the Chinese sit up and take notice because, just four months after the Premier came in and listed premium food and wine from our clean environment as one of our economic priorities, we had the new Chinese President, President Xi, come in and lay out his plan and his vision for China for the next five years, and included in that was providing the Chinese people with safe food to eat. So it is a beautiful marriage of what China wants and what South Australia has.

We sat down with the China inspection and quarantine association—some of the senior people; not just the heads of those areas but also the people who are at the coalface; the people who are doing the testing and everything else—to explain our situation about how we spend millions of dollars each year keeping South Australia fruit fly free, how we spend lots of money marketing the fact that we have this terrific status and how hard we work to maintain that.

We spoke in the context of Australia being a very safe producer of food with strict national quarantine guidelines and regulations, but we broke it down to South Australia. We were asked the question why our citrus growers have to cold treat our produce for 16 days at 1º when we don't have fruit fly in South Australia—it is a cost to the industry here and it means that the fruit is at least 16 days older by the time it gets over there. The Chinese are interested and really keen to get fresh fruit, so we put all that to one of the senior agricultural people whom we met with, Mr Deng Guanglian, and Mr Deng advised us that they are quite happy to look at a special arrangement with South Australia.

While we haven't signed a deal yet, we did sit down and have a discussion and put our case and put it quite strongly. It was a really good example of seeing government and industry working side by side, and the Chinese loved seeing that. Obviously, the growers are going over there with their industry associations but to have government there telling the Chinese government and the leaders of their Chinese enterprises that the government is working side by side with the industry is a really important message as well. I have said it in here before but whenever anyone from either side of this chamber is heading to China or anywhere else in the world, we are happy to give—

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL: You knew we were going. You could have put your hand up and rung up—you have my mobile phone number—and asked for an invite. We can give you plenty of speaking notes whenever you want to go up there because this relationship has been going on for 29 years with Shandong.

The SPEAKER: Alas, the minister's time has expired.