Senator Bob Brown, leader of Australia’s Greens plans to introduce a private members bill on food labelling standards when the senate reconvenes on Tuesday, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
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Brown said he was confident a campaign by farmers will be enough to bring about change in food labelling standards in Australia.
“Isn’t it interesting that it takes a protest from the farmers to get Labor and Liberal to start thinking about the obvious need for truth in labelling, not just for farmers but also for the consumers, for shoppers,” he said.
The federal opposition said it will increase the pressure on the Australian government to introduce better food labelling arrangements once parliament resumes.
Opposition leader Kim Beazley said the “Fair Dinkum Food” campaign run by Tasmanian vegetable growers had shown how concerned Australian farmers are about proper labelling.
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By GlobalDataBeazley said Labor supports the mandatory country-of-origin labelling for fresh, packaged and processed foods.
He says vegetable growers have been demanding a decent food labelling regime for nine years and the government should act on its 1996 promise to fix the problem.
The campaign so far has seen eight tractors from Tasmania travelling around Victoria for a series of rallies against imported foods and poor labelling.
Federal agriculture minister Peter McGauran is confident the problem can be resolved. McGauran says members of the Food Labelling Ministerial Consultative Committee are mainly health ministers, which he says has to change.
“I am the only agriculture minister on that body and consequently they’re not especially commercially or industry-orientated,” he said.
“On top of that, their main concern is the health ingredients and the food standards that go towards labelling, rather than the agricultural concerns, but that will be fixed at an emergency meeting in late October.”
