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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 3160 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

I would ask, in terms of certainty and in terms of process to make sure that one application is judged against another: why wouldn't you have it done in a standard application and why wouldn't you take risk assessment and management plans as part of that assessment? I think it just defies logic. Surely it would make it easier if we were doing all this up front instead of fixing up mistakes at the wrong end. It defies logic that we wouldn't see this as something that a government might undertake.

Again, at the easiest and simplest level, it's a matter of the government writing a letter to the gene technology regulator, saying, "Why don't we do it in a standard way?"I assume there are audits done of the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator and we compare how some applications get through and some applications don't. Later on, when we compare these thing, if you don't have a standard process and they're all not judged against the same criteria, then I think clearly there's a flaw in the process.

The committee was very pleased when we went out to various locations and were given some briefings on the GENHAZ process. GENHAZ stands for genetic hazard. It's one of the risk assessment processes that were suggested to us that seem to be a good process. Again, we suggested that everyone undertake a GENHAZ process as a basic requirement to all licence applications.

The government says no, they don't agree, because, according to their response, they think that there's a rigorous licensing system; it's based on scientific risk assessment consultation; and therefore it's okay. They say that, in preparing the information for the application, a licence applicant may undertake the completion of a risk assessment process such as GENHAZ, and GENHAZ is only one of the types.

But I think there must be, again, some way of comparing all of these applications on the same basis, Mr Speaker. There must be some sort of standard assessment that can be brought into place that can be made to work so that we know that we're comparing everybody in the same way; otherwise we run the risk, I think, of making mistakes.

Mr Speaker, it goes on. The next one I'd like to look at is recommendation 13. It says:

The government doesn't agree, and the advice is that, if the clause were replaced with reference to the Commonwealth act, the ACT would not be able to impose its own annual licence charges on holders of GMO licences, unlike the other states. I'm not sure that that's true, and I'd like to know how that might be so.

I note that the government's response refers to the scrutiny of bills report and raises concerns about 72A. But is there another way that we could do it, or did the government just say, "No, investigate that option"?

There are so many recommendations here, and time is running out, Mr Speaker. The other important one is recommendation 19:

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