Yes, we could have bananas - if only the Government would let us

Yet on closer scrutiny (something to which this self-interested scare-mongering is rarely if ever subjected), these arguments have about as much merit as the suggestion sometimes made by Japanese rice-growers that Japan should continue to impose tariffs of up to 700% on rice imports because Japanese people have ‘longer intestines’ and therefore can’t digest ‘foreign’ rice.

Australian farmers - and their political representatives - don’t buy that nonsense when it is served up by foreign farmers and their mouthpieces in other countries’ Agriculture or Trade Ministries. Yet they expect their fellow citizens to swallow it when they spruik it themselves.

It is true that banana plantations in places like the Philippines and Central America are prone to diseases such as Tropical Race Four Panama or black Sigatoka (yes, I have done my homework). But these are soil-borne diseases. They are not carried in or by the fruit themselves. No-one is suggesting that we import banana trees into Australia.

If bananas and other fruit or vegetables are imported into southern ports, such as Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney, and subject upon arrival to appropriate inspections, they are no more likely to spread diseases damaging to Australia’s own banana industry than the importation of cooked and packaged Canadian salmon has done to Tasmania’s salmon industry (another example of protectionism masquerading as ‘biosecurity’ where, unusually, commonsense and the interests of consumers ultimately prevailed).

Another disconcerting turn of events in the aftermath of Cyclone Yasi has been the unilateral decision by the major supermarket chains to charge consumers higher prices for bananas that were bought wholesale before the cyclone, and (so they say) ‘back pay’ the resulting higher proceeds to growers whose crops have been damaged or destroyed by the cruel winds. I am not suggesting that Woolworths and Coles aren’t acting with the best of intentions. But it’s not the job of large corporations to impose de facto excise taxes on consumers in order to provide disaster relief. That’s the job of governments, and the supermarket chains are usurping it.

At least households aren’t going to be slugged with another tax increase to pay for the costs associated with repairing the damage caused by Cyclone Yasi, as they have been for part of the costs arising from the earlier floods in central and south-eastern Queensland. The challenge for the Gillard Government is to make inroads into what they, when in Opposition, described (rightly) as wasteful and extravagant spending on the part of the Howard Government, but about which they’ve done remarkably little since coming to office.