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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-02-28 Daily Xml
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FOOD LABELLING LAWS

The Hon. R.B. SUCH (Fisher) (12:09): I move:

That this house calls on the state government to support, via Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, more comprehensive food labelling laws.

This has been a passion of mine for a while because in Australia, sadly, in my view, we have inadequate food labelling laws, which work to the disadvantage of primary producers and consumers. I will refer to a few examples. Trans fats (trans fatty acids) are usually palm oil or coconut oil which has been hydrogenated, zapped and turned into a solidified form.

In the United States, from 1 January 2006 food manufacturers must list trans fats on their food products. In Australia, it is not mandatory, not comprehensive, to provide that labelling. Many of our vegetable shortenings, margarines, biscuits, cookies, crackers, muffins, lollies, crisps, and the deep fried take-away food industry use trans fats extensively.

The answer that often comes back when I have written about this is, 'Well, most people don't eat a lot of foods containing trans fats.' The reality is that people on low incomes do, whereas more affluent people will buy the more expensive margarines and are probably less likely to eat take-away food.

The fundamental point about food labelling is that consumers are entitled to know what they are eating and what they are purchasing, and that is not the case at the moment. In fact, we have various labels: Product of Australia, Manufactured in Australia, Australian-made. The reality of those labels is that the manufacturer can claim the container as part of the Australian component. For instance, if you buy jam, it might be that the ingredients, including the strawberries that made the jam, probably came from Denmark or somewhere like that. However it can be claimed that the jam originated in large part from Australia because the glass jar and the lid and so on were made in Australia.

We had a case recently where pork meat imported from overseas was actually pressed onto Australian ham bones to be sold to people as ham on the bone. I suppose it is ham on the bone but it is imported ham on an Australian ham bone. The company doing that has been requested to desist. What it was doing is probably not technically illegal but it is quite inappropriate and a great disadvantage to our pork producers who are under a lot of pressure anyhow.

It might not surprise members to know that companies involved in the process of manufacturing pork products here have put in an application to the food authority to get rid of labelling which tells people that the pork meat has come from overseas. Their argument is that it is expensive and difficult and that consumers do not really want to know whether the pork that they are eating is from Canada, the United States, Denmark or Australia. I totally disagree with that. In fact, I have made a submission to the Australian-New Zealand Food Authority arguing against that request to take away the labelling requirement for pork, and pork producers have put forward a similar argument.

There is a move afoot to allow food products to carry health claims on the basis that they have less salt, sugar and fat. I do not support that. What we need is proper labelling that tells people how much sugar, salt, fat and so on is in a product and let the consumer decide. I do not think manufacturers should be able to say that a food is healthy simply because they may have cut back on the salt, sugar or fat levels.

At the moment, baked beans sold by one manufacturer have the Heart Foundation's tick of approval for being desirable in terms of low salt and so on, when they actually have more salt than a competitor's brand which does not have the tick of approval. So, what we have in relation to food labelling in Australia is, in my view, unsatisfactory.

It is claimed that food in supermarkets is 'fresh daily', or 'super fresh', or 'natural'. No-one has been able to define any of those terms. I have asked for a definition and cannot get one. When you buy something that says 'fresh daily', it does not mean that you are buying something that came in that day; it just means that they receive additional supplies each day. It does not mean that you are buying the fresh one; you might be buying an old product.

I have made a suggestion to the minister regarding the takeaway food industry. I must say that our Minister for Health is very progressive in his thinking, but he has not agreed with my suggestion, which is to encourage fast food outlets to make their products healthier by reducing the fat, salt and sugar content, because I think people are still going to eat them whether or not we want them to. As with all these things, in moderation there is probably no great harm in doing so, but if you buy from a fast food outlet you have no idea what is in the product. You do not know whether it is cooked in trans fat or whether it contains particular ingredients sourced from overseas. Recently I have seen so-called butterfish—which people here associate with mulloway—actually coming in from China, but they do not have to tell you that in a fast food outlet; they do not have to tell you where it came from.

When people talk about 'organic production', in China that often means using human waste as a fertiliser, but people do not know that and they are not told that. Recently, 300 tonnes of prawns from overseas were returned because they did not meet the quarantine standards. To some extent that demonstrates that AQIS is doing its job as the quarantine service. I come back to the fundamental point that, as consumers, we are entitled to know what we are consuming. In fast food outlets there should at least be information on the wall, on a noticeboard or somewhere, to tell you what is in your hamburger or yiros, or whatever.

As I said previously, the current system works against primary producers. I was in the supermarket recently—because I do the grocery shopping; I always have—and this lady said, 'Oh, I'm going to buy this brand, it's an Australian brand of dried fruit', and she said, 'I always buy Australian.' And I said 'As a matter of fact, that brand imports a lot of their dried fruit from South Africa.' 'Oh, no', she said, but that is the reality and sometimes that may be unavoidable. If people want to buy something that is purely Australian, they should be able to.

I am aware that the local Rotary group was selling dried fruit from the Riverland. I tell you what, it is a thousand times better than any of the imported material, and there is a baker in the Adelaide Hills who uses Riverland dried fruit and his products are fantastic. But the average person shopping in a supermarket would not realise that companies using traditional names here (that people have associated with local production) are not actually locally produced at all. In fact, as I said earlier, they can claim the container as part of their Australian product, and I think that is a nonsense.

All in all, I am encouraging the minister (Hon. John Hill) to really push this issue. I know he is trying to do a lot in conjunction with the Minister for Education in terms of healthy eating in schools, but through the ministerial council and Food Standards Australia New Zealand, to which he is entitled to have significant input, I am urging him to really push hard on this issue and to have things like trans fats properly labelled, and to have proper information available through fast food outlets, so that people can make an informed choice. Likewise, I do not have a problem with eating genetically modified food, I am quite relaxed about it, but if people do not want to eat it they should be able to know what is in the product they are buying.

I commend the bill to the house and I urge the minister, in particular, to push this issue through Food Standards Australia New Zealand, so that as part of our democracy we can know what we are purchasing and ultimately what we are eating.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (12:19): I commend the motion of the member for Fisher. I believe it is vital that we understand where our food comes from. It is difficult when you are purchasing food anywhere (whether it be from a small shop or a large retail chain) to know what you are buying. We recently had the issue of GM food and GM crops not being permitted to be grown in South Australia. I believe this will cause issues down the track when the Eastern States will be able to produce canola that has gone through genetic modification breeding, which essentially is just fast-track breeding processes. So, it will cause upsets in the export of food.

Be that as it may, the issue is that people can be very emotional about genetically modified food, but I think they would be horrified to think that up to 80 per cent of canned food in stores is already genetically modified. I can think of soy products, but there would be countless other products and you cannot readily identify them in stores. That is an issue in itself, so it makes a bit of a farce of the whole GM canola debate, as far as I am concerned.

As far as using food labelling to show that you support your state or country of origin is concerned, I think that is also vitally important. There have been too many confusing ideas and labelling laws on whether a product is produced in Australia, made in Australia, or packaged in Australia, and the consumer really does not know where it has come from. On the Sunrise program this morning they were saying that the kangaroo (I think) inside the green triangle means that the food is produced and packaged in Australia. It may be owned by an overseas corporation, for example, Vegemite, which used to be totally Australian owned but not any more. At least the money in the first instance goes to workers in Australia who then pay taxes, and the money goes around. I commend the bill of the member for Fisher. I think it is an excellent bill to bring to the house.

Mr RAU (Enfield) (12:22): I want to say a few words about this. I know the member for Fisher has been very passionate about this issue for some time and, indeed, I have heard him addressing this issue more than once on the radio and in this place. It seems to me that the fundamental underlying issue here is giving the consumer choice, and choice is not simply a factor of having multiple products sitting on a shelf and your being able to pick out one product from a number, because if all those products were identically packaged in a brown paper bag, you would still have a choice. You would have a choice of which identical brown paper bag to lift from the shelf, without having any idea whatsoever about the consequences of the choice that you were making.

Choice of itself is meaningless, utterly meaningless. What is not meaningless is informed choice, and informed choice involves the consumer who takes the trouble to inform themselves being placed in a position to make an informed choice. The question that follows from that is: if a consumer wishes to be an informed consumer, do the present laws enable them to be an informed consumer by reading the labelling on most packages? The answer to that question, I think, as the member for Fisher suggests, is almost invariably no. If we as members of this parliament think that it would be a good thing to empower South Australian consumers to make informed choices should they have the wit or inclination to do so, then there is quite a bit of merit in the proposal being put forward by the member for Fisher.

We have to remember, of course, that not all consumers wish to be informed. Many consumers find packaging more interesting than the information on it. I have three children who fit into that category. I can assure members (who I am sure have had this experience themselves) that, as you walk through the supermarket, if a product has Shrek, Ronald McDonald, or something else on it, that is a more attractive product than one which might have a slightly blander presentation but one which might be far more nutritious. Without wishing to compare all consumers with my children, I have to say that there are people who really do not care about these issues.

I think the member for Fisher needs to bear in mind that, even if all the information in the world was on these packages, some people will take no advantage of that situation whatsoever and will continue to buy rubbish containing transfats and various other obnoxious things, and continue to buy products from overseas completely ignorant of what they are doing and with no concern whatsoever for what they are doing. We are really talking about that group in the middle, not the ignorant person who does not care, the person who is too busy to care, or the person who just does not care for whatever reason—they are a happy person and nothing worries them.

We are not talking about those people. We are talking about the person who is prepared to make the effort and the inquiry and do something about the product. Again, when is information too much information? If the prescription is too detailed, the whole packet will contain print that will require a magnifying glass and a great deal of time to understand what is in a packet of biscuits—and that is not very helpful either, because the information though there is in a form that is completely indigestible. I personally favour something which has food labelling standards that are accompanied by a logo of some description which necessarily must contain some degree of latitude. For instance, if it is 100 per cent Australian owned and 100 per cent Australian product, then you have one logo.

If it is packed in Australia, maybe you have another logo. Maybe at the entrance to the supermarket there should be a big sign with a glossary explaining what all the logos mean, so that, as you walk down the aisles and pick up a product, if it has a green logo, a red logo and a blue logo, you can see what they means—made here, grown here, no GM.

Mr Bignell: Eat it here!

Mr RAU: Then you eat it here. That may be the way to go. The point the member for Fisher makes is a good point. I think the translation of his point into a practical solution which will work in a supermarket is not without its difficulties. I think that those who will benefit from this are not necessarily the people to whom the member for Fisher referred and who presently are the high consumers of trans fats, for example. But all that said, I think the idea does warrant some further consideration and I will be very interested to see what other members think of it.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mrs Geraghty.

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