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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

M’sia wooing Aussie lawmakers over ‘labelling’ issue

'The Truth in Labelling – Palm Oil' Bill is on its way to the Australian Parliament and the Malaysian government is desperately trying to deflect a negative decision.

MELBOURNE: A worried Malaysian delegation is in Australia to actively lobby against a parliamentary bid that could threaten Malaysia’s palm oil industry and cause thousands of industrial lay-offs.

Independent Australian senator Nick Xenophon has pushed for his Parliament to pass a bill compelling the palm oil producers, including Malaysia, to inform consumers if the food they consume contained palm oil.

Currently, palm oil comes under the label “vegetable oil”.

Xenophon’s campaign is supported by several groups including Greens, Zoos Victoria, the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.

Last month, the Australian Senate passed the bill titled “The Truth in Labelling – Palm Oil”. The bill requires products containing palm oil to be explicitly labelled as such.

Environmental campaigners lobbying for the bill have linked their call to widespread deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia, which the Malaysian industry has strongly denied.

Backing the call, Xenophon, with votes from the Liberal-National Party Coalition, has been successful in having the bill passed while the ruling Labor party opposed it.

The bill is now on its way to the House of Representatives where it is expected to be well received by the coalition and Green parties.

But Malaysia is aiming to deflect this.

In Australia, if three pro-government independents vote with the Julia Gillard government, then the bill will be defeated in the House of Representatives, preventing it from becoming law.

Wooing Aussie MPs

On Monday, a Malaysian delegation led by Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Bernard Dompok and officials from the Malaysian timber and palm oil industries met with several Australian lawmakers in Canberra over the issue.

Bernama reported that Dompok also met Xenophon in Parliament on Monday.

Dompok was said to have given the senator a detailed explanation as to why palm oil was safe and that orang-utans were protected in Sabah and Sarawak.

He also invited Xenophon to visit Malaysia to get first-hand information.

“I have invited Senator Xenophon and other concerned legislators to visit Malaysia to see first-hand that oil cultivation had not endangered the orang-utans,” Dompok told Bernama.

“I told them the orang-utan is a far more protected species now than before because our government and the palm oil industry have done a great deal of work to ensure their welfare and existence.

“Wildlife and Green groups have fed a lot of misconception and misinformation to the Australian public about oil palm and the orang-utan,” Dompok said.

He said he had met several state and federal ministers and parliamentarians and they understood Malaysia’s concerns about the allegations against an industry that employed 570,000 people in plantations and a further 290,000 in downstream industries.

The minister also said the Greens and wildlife welfare people have deliberately mixed the health and environment issues to win public support for their campaign against palm oil.

“I explained to the Australian MPs and leaders that research had been done in the US, Europe and other parts of the world that palm oil is a safe and healthy product and they accepted the research available,” he said.

Dompok is hopeful his visit will be a success and the House of Representatives will throw out Xenophon’s ill-conceived bill.

“But before this happens more work has to be done to settle the issue,” he added.

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