THE CRUNCH time to decide the future of quarantine in Australia is near for
the Cabinet of Prime Minister Howard. The report of the Quarantine Review
Committee chaired by Malcolm Nairn has been weighing down the ministerial
in-tray since late last year. The government is set to make its decision before
the end of the month.
Quarantine is a hot political issue. Australia has banned fresh Canadian
salmon on quarantine grounds. Canada has cut the quota for Australian beef in
retaliation and is likely to take the case to the World Trade Organisation,
claiming that the Australian quarantine and Inspection Service is being used to
restrict trade. The recent decision to recommend allowing the import of cooked
Canadian pig-meat goods may appease Ottawa, but has angered local pork
farmers.
Arguably the most important recommendation of Nairn鈥檚 report addresses the
sensitive political issue of who should control quarantine services. Nairn, a
former vice-chancellor of the Northern Territory University, recommends setting
up a new body called Quarantine Australia, independent of the Department of
Primary Industries and Energy. He argues that the service needs to be free from
sectional interests. Locating it within DoPIE has tended to limit its focus to
financial impacts on agricultural activities, whereas introduced pests can affect
the natural environment or human health.
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The current arrangement also runs counter to the general wisdom that
regulation and promotion need to be clearly separated. No doubt the Sir
Humphreys of DoPIE will resist any whittling away of their empire. The outcome
will be a test of the mettle of primary industries minister John Anderson who is
handling the report at ministerial level. As a farmer from Gunnedah in New South
Wales, Anderson is well aware of the implications of quarantine for rural
Australia.
Former CSIRO scientist Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe has urged the minister to
implement Nairn鈥檚 recommendations in an article in this month鈥檚 issue of the
ANZAAS journal Search. Tyndale-Biscoe chairs the Academy of Science鈥檚
national committee on animal and veterinary sciences. He says there is 鈥渁 sense
that all is not well鈥� with the present system. As well as the well-known
problems like papaya fruit fly and northern Pacific starfish, he notes that 22
unwanted species of aphid have been identified in Australia in the last 30
years.
I agree with Tyndale-Biscoe that investing in quarantine measures gives good
value for money. The total cost of Australia鈥檚 quarantine service is $53
million, of which $45 million is recovered from users. So the cost to the
taxpayer is about $8 million. By contrast, the current campaign to try to
eradicate papaya fruit fly from north Queensland has a budget of $55
million. The financial cost of one problem alone is more than the total annual
allocation to quarantine services. And there are other costs as well. Reports
reaching me from north Queensland suggest that the insecticide being used to
control the invader is affecting local native wildlife.
The Nairn report compared the government鈥檚 spending on military defence with
the allocation for defence against exotic pests. The military gets about
$5300 million鈥攁 hundred times the total funding of quarantine
services. The threats from introduced pests are certainly more immediate than
any risk of military attack on Australia. A larger budget for quarantine could
be viewed as a worthwhile insurance policy for rural industries which have a
total value of about $29 billion.
A JOINT effort between a hospital and an electrical authority in Queensland
has led to a marked advance in energy efficiency. Brisbane鈥檚 St Andrew鈥檚 Hospital
has commissioned a new system to supply hot water for its laundry. The gear has
been designed by the Customer Technology Centre of local electrical authority
SEQEB, whose Norm Belzer proudly sent me the technical details. The key to the
system is a 60 kilowatt heat pump. This is an established technology that
reduces the fuel energy needed to supply heat by getting some from the
surrounding air.
A typical example delivers about three units of heat for every unit of
electrical energy. Using a reverse-cycle air conditioner for heating is an
everyday example of the principle. The new device heats water in batches of
about 500 litres to get maximum fuel efficiency. A clever touch is that the air
which is cooled in the process is not wasted, but used to augment the hospital鈥檚
air conditioning system. So the whole setup looks like recovering its $40
000 cost within three years.
SOUTHERN parts of Australia have experienced very hot
weather recently. Adelaide had the longest string of consecutive days above 40
degrees since 1939. And well into February, Melbourne鈥檚 average maximum
temperature for the month was two degrees above the 1898 record. So people were
asking for scientific explanations. Was it global warming, El Ni帽o, or
just a random fluctuation? The explanation attributed to the Bureau of
Meteorology by The Australian newspaper caught my eye: 鈥淭he bureau said
Melbourne was experiencing its hottest February in almost 100 years due to a
prolonged spell of unusually warm weather鈥�. Well, yes, that would explain it!
Another hot contender for this year鈥檚 Lowe-point award was a typographical
glitch in the Hobart Mercury, highlighted by the ABC鈥檚 Media Watch
programme: 鈥渃olono-rectal screening has caused a 33 per cent fall in morality.鈥�
Something to do with bottoms, perhaps.