Australia is outsourcing the exploitation of vulnerable people by allowing imports of products strongly linked to modern slavery – including child labour – into the country without effective border controls, the Federal Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter MP, has warned.
“Despite outlawing modern slavery on Australian soil and signing international conventions of condemnation, the Government washes its hands of cruelty beyond our coastline by continuing to import products made cheaper through exploitation of vulnerable workers including little children,” said Mr Katter after moving to close Government loopholes in the Parliament last month.
“That is not ‘ethical trade’. It is trading in human misery.”
With other developed economies having introduced or committed to forced labour import controls that in turn raise the risk of rejected goods being redirected into countries with weaker protections, the Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner has warned of a lack of effective mechanisms to identify and prevent the products of forced labour entering the country and acknowledged established child labour concerns in banana-growing regions such as the Philippines and other global supply chains.
“Goods linked to slavery can be stopped at the border in other countries but Australia leaves the gate open,” said Mr Katter.
He said the Australian Government “will examine if an imported banana carries a foreign bug but does not ask if a child was exploited to pick that fruit”.
“This leaves Australia in grave danger of becoming the global dumping ground for products that the rest of the developed world will no longer accept as the fruits of slave labour.”
Mr Katter said that for a long period of time, Australia has had ample access to multiple sources of information that have indicated specific concerns for a number of foreign agricultural products.
In Canberra last month, the veteran North Queensland MP suspended Parliament to demand the Australian Government introduce stronger laws banning the importation of goods that are produced or otherwise obtained through slave labour wages and/or child labour (see attached).
He said that where such evidence exists, Australia is obliged to take a precautionary presumption that the imported goods in question may have been produced under working conditions that violate many international agreements to which Australia is a signatory and enshrined in domestic laws.
“If a product comes from an industry or region with a credible risk of child or forced labour, it should not cross the Australian border until all work conditions within the entire supply chain have been independently verified,” he said.
“And whilst I am not alleging every imported consignment is made from slave labour wages or child workers, what I am saying is that the importer must be required to prove that is not the case.
“And if they can’t prove it, the goods don’t come in – just as the major Australian retailers demand of domestic suppliers.”
Mr Katter said Australia’s food producers carried some of the world’s highest regulatory and production costs by paying fair wages and meeting strict health and safety requirements.
“We send our farmers into battle without a helmet or shield, then force them to fight products made
cheaper by human and environmental exploitation,” he said.
“How can an Australian family farm be expected to compete against poverty wages or children being forced to labour in plantations? Whilst Canberra’s double-degree bureaucrats virtue-signal in their vegan shoe-leather that has never set foot off pavement, to lecture us about environmental standards and human rights that they refuse to enforce at our border.
“So we have strangled our farmers and fishers with burdensome paperwork and restrictions born of city-based ideology – and then replaced the fresh fruits of our rural and regional communities with cheap imports, without even questioning who has produced them and under what conditions.
“The integrity of the system is rotten to the core and Australia simply cannot continue to claim the moral high ground whilst failing to prevent the importation of products of human misery.”
IMAGE: Humping bananas in Far North Queensland, Bob Katter MP is a long-and-loud fighter for the success and survival of farmers in the Federal Kennedy electorate. PHOTO: BRIAN CASSEY