Review of National Gene Technology Scheme - Online Submissions

Response 469769753

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Introduction

Are you providing a submission as a representative of an organisation?

If yes, what is the name of your organisation?
Law Students for Social Justice

Theme 1 - Technical Issues

What are the potential impacts of the capability to make small edits in the DNA of an organism using no foreign DNA?

Response
The ability to make small edits using no foreign DNA need not affect the Scheme’s remit at all, since the Scheme is based on process rather than on end products.

Any claim that any present or future end product of certain genetic-modification (GM) techniques is and will always be indistinguishable from evolved organisms and their products is (a) irrelevant to a Scheme whose central remit is protection of people and environment through control of GM processes; (b) unlikely in the extreme. One such claim regularly occurs in relation to GM canola oil, which has been found to be contaminated with engineered DNA and engineered proteins.

Risk management is not possible on a basis of risk assessment consisting in ideologically founded guesswork favouring business “streamlining” over health and safety. The wiser approach in such a circumstance is use of the Precautionary Principle as carefully described by the World Health Organization book Marco Martuzzi and Joel A. Tickner (eds.), The Precautionary Principle: Protecting Public Health, The Environment and the Future of Our Children (World Health Organization, 2004), of which the first eleven chapters are available via <http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/91173> and the twelfth chapter is available via <http://academic.oup.com/ije/article/32/4/489/666933>.

Under what circumstances might it be practical, efficient or appropriate to regulate gene editing under the GT Act when, from an enforcement perspective, it may not be possible to distinguish the products of gene editing from the products of conventional methods?

Response

Please see previous response.

Theme 2 - Regulatory Issues

Phase one consultations identified a number of functional efficiencies that could be applied to the Scheme. The Review is exploring these issues from perspective of the existing process-based regulatory scheme:

How would you streamline the existing scheme?
Attempts to “streamline” the Scheme must always conflict with the Scheme’s fundamental purpose of protecting people and the environment, and pressures by vested interests to “streamline” it should be viewed in the cold hard light of commercial interests’ consistent preference to conveniently overlook the negative externalities of their operations.

Theme 3 - Governance Issues

The Review is exploring how the Scheme can harness the emerging benefits of gene technology, that were not anticipated at the establishment of the Scheme:

Are existing mechanisms, when used effectively, sufficient to ensure the emerging health, environmental and manufacturing benefits of gene technology that were not anticipated at the establishment of the Scheme, can be harnessed for Australians?
Commercial interests have no role in the Scheme’s purposes and must play no part in its operation.

Theme 4 - Social and Ethical Issues

How do we help the community to best understand the benefits and risks of a complex, science-based technology?

Response
The community has no commercial impetus, no commercial links or “partnerships”, and no profit motive to distort and corrupt its avoidance of unnecessary harm. The same cannot be said of every researcher who presumes to re-educate the community according to his or her own beliefs, however sincerely held. There is therefore no place for commercial interests or their partners to “educate” uncorrupted community members in commercially convenient uncertainties posing as scientifically sound assurances of benefit and safety.

The Review is seeking to explore and better understand factors relating to choice and the potential impacts on trade, alternate farming techniques and the broader environment:

Is the Scheme putting up barriers to research and development and commercialisation of agricultural applications?
Commercial interests have no role in the Scheme’s purposes and must play no part in its operation.