GRIEVANCE DEBATE
Mr VENNING (Grey) (12:50): I rise today to raise a serious concern for the South Australian grain industry and, frankly, to ask how on earth this regulation has been allowed to get this far. From 1 December this year, the workplace exposure limit for phosphine is due to fall from 0.3 parts per million to just 0.05 parts per million. That isn't just a minor adjustment.
That is an 83 per cent reduction, a sixfold tightening of the allowable exposure level, and the consequences for grain handling, storage and exports could be enormous. Phosphine is not some obscure chemical used in a niche industry. It is the primary fumigant used to protect stored grain from insects.
Industry estimates that it is used in around 90 per cent of Australia's stored grain. In South Australia, where grain is one of our largest export industries, this matters immensely. It matters to farmers, it matters to bulk handlers, it matters to truck drivers, it matters to our ports and, ultimately, it matters to the price and reliability of getting Australian grain from the farm gate to an international customer.
Yet we are imposing a new standard which industry says may not even be practically measurable with the equipment currently available. We are imposing a standard that could require longer alteration times, longer delays at ports, larger exclusion zones and significant changes to the way grain is handled—and for what? Where is the evidence that the existing 0.3 parts per million standard is unsafe?
Where is the evidence that moving to 0.05 parts per million will materially improve worker safety? The grain industry has been asking these questions, and it has not received satisfactory answers. What is particularly extraordinary is that this proposed Australian limit would be the lowest of its kind globally.
Why is Australia going further than virtually everyone else in the world? This is exactly what happens when bureaucratic regulation gets divorced from the practical realities of an industry. I have absolutely no problem with protecting workers.
Worker safety must come first. But worker safety does not mean blindly imposing the lowest possible number. It means using evidence.
It means understanding how the chemical is actually used. It means having reliable monitoring equipment, and it means understanding what happens when you apply a regulation across an entire supply chain. Unfortunately, this is another example of the incompetent Albanese Labor government allowing a major regulatory change to slip through under its watch without properly understanding the consequences to regional Australia.
The bureaucrats have made the decision; now governments are being left to deal with the consequences. Of all places, the Victorian Labor government has recognised this problem and deferred implementation. The South Australian government has said it is considering doing the same.
Well, I would urge Kyam Maher to stop considering and act. This decision must be deferred, and our governments need to start listening to our grain growers, because harvest is just around the corner. I've recently shared the story of Kate Edwards, a registered midwife who was recruited from the United Kingdom to help restore maternity services in Whyalla.
For her trouble, Kate was hit with over $70,000 of state and federal taxes. A couple of weeks ago, I caught up with Kate in Whyalla. I am pleased to inform the House that the South Australian government have come to their senses and refunded her $27,000 for that issue.
But the question remains: when will Treasurer Chalmers follow suit and give Kate her $44,000 back? This bungle sends the wrong message to any health professional considering answering Australia's call. I recently had the privilege of meeting with the Coalition of Veteran Voices.
I thank the veteran service providers and advocates who gave me their time. They have formed so the experiences of veterans are heard by decision-makers in this very place. They came to Canberra to ask three simple things of this parliament: scrap the $5,000 allied health cap, end the lowballing of veterans compensation claims and fix the systematic failures inside the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
The coalition strongly opposed the allied health cuts. It is a cost-cutting decision, and it falls on the men and women who carry the physical and psychological cost of their service to this great country. For veterans with complex or chronic conditions, $5,000 will not come close to the care that they need and deserve.
So the treatment stops, the condition worsens, and the cost lands back on the veteran and their family. My office has never received such a high volume of DVA correspondence. None whatsoever is positive.
Dennis McLear is a veteran in my electorate. He has written to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs on 15 separate occasions. Not once has he received a reply from the minister or the minister's office.
The Australian Defence Veterans' Covenant ends with nine words: For what they have done, this we will do. This cruel cap is a limit on that promise. Our commitment to those who serve cannot end when they take the uniform off.
I call on the government to reverse this decision. Veterans must not be asked to pay for Labor's budget repair. Roughly half of the 30 councils in my electorate are unsustainable or heading that way.
People in country South Australia pay some of the highest rates in the nation. A constituent showed me their rates notice. For the same value of their property, they were paying 12 times what they would pay in Adelaide.
While residents and businesses across my electorate are struggling with the increasing rates, all the renewable energy projects popping up in my electorate are not rated. They do not pay a cent of council rates. These international companies can waltz in and contribute nothing while ratepayers cover the roads and the services their infrastructure depends on.
These councils have very small rate bases and lack the benefits of economies of scale. They also run services metropolitan councils never have to, childcare centres, doctors clinics and airports among them. There are a number of small commercial airports in my electorate, the largest of which are Whyalla and Port Lincoln.
The cost of regional air travel is far too high. Just last week, someone called in. It's cheaper to fly from Adelaide to Bali than it is from Adelaide to Port Lincoln, and my office has been inundated with complaints about the cost and the reliability.
Whyalla City Council made a submission to the Senate inquiry into regional aviation, and the numbers were stark. The cost per passenger departing Whyalla is $74. Security screening makes up nearly $60 of that $74.
It's less than a dollar in a capital city. And, of course, this cost gets passed onto the passengers and onto the ratepayers. It is the core reason a 30-minute flight from Adelaide to Whyalla costs an arm and a leg.
I once again reiterate my calls for this government to get on board with a national screening levy and to bring equity back to air travel. The coalition will smash the tobacco black market. If you once told me we could bring in a policy of reducing the excise by 80 per cent, smashing organised crime and improving the budget by $8 billion, I'd have told you that you were dreaming.
But dream no more, because that's exactly what the coalition plans to do. That reduces the tax on a packet of 20 smokes from $30 to around $6, stripping criminal gangs of the price advantage their business relies on. The merry-go-round of enforcement has only created a whac-a-mole game—shut one and another one opens.
Right across the country, gangs are making billions from illicit tobacco, funding drugs, violence, arson and homicide from their proceedings. The only way to put them out of business is to ruin them economically.