In the budget this year was a fairly innocuous line item: $1.5 million over the next two years to improve “existing arrangements for the accurate and clear labelling of plant-based alternative protein products”.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, despite his party’s ostensible support for farmers and regional Australia, soon took to social media to post an excerpt of a News Corp story describing the commitment as “great news [for] tofu lovers”.
“The nation’s first Woke Budget…” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
However, the funding commitment was the result of the “fake meat inquiry”, as it was dubbed, which Canavan’s own party lobbied for after a National Party vote in 2019 that called for an overhaul of plant-based food packaging regulations. Then agriculture minister Bridget McKenzie said at the time: “If you want actual chicken, then that’s what it should be called. If you want plant-based protein that tastes like chicken, then that’s what it should be called.”
In a report amusingly titled “Don’t mince words: definitions of meat and other animal products”, the Senate inquiry eventually made a number of recommendations including tighter restrictions on the types of food products that can use terms like “beef” or “chicken” in their labelling.
This was welcomed by farmers and legacy agricultural industry bodies that claimed such terms could mislead consumers and pose a threat to traditional agricultural and meat production industries, despite the ACCC submitting to the inquiry that “the mere use of particular terms referencing animals or the use of animal images in and of themselves will be unlikely to mislead consumers”.
The Greens wrote a dissenting report, largely rejecting the recommendations of the inquiry in which Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson “significantly question[ed] its validity as an appropriate use of public service time, resource and money”.
“Trumpian-like in their endeavour, the Nationals have delivered an analysis of this inquiry with the eloquence and intellectual vacuity of John Belushi yelling ‘food fight’ in Animal House,” the Greens said.
Crikey asked Canavan several questions, including whether he was aware that the Senate inquiry leading to changes to alternative protein labelling was chaired by fellow Queensland Nationals Senator Susan McDonald, or that multiple submissions to the inquiry from farmers and agricultural bodies were in favour of the changes. We also asked whether he was in favour of the funding commitment and why, what he believed “woke” meant, and whether the funding commitments were in fact “woke”.
A spokesperson for Canavan told Crikey the senator said it was a headline from [News Corp] and that we should direct our questions to the publisher. Notwithstanding that it was Canavan who used the phrase “woke budget”, and that he hadn’t answered our questions on his position regarding the funding commitments, that’s what we did.
Crikey contacted Daily Telegraph editor Ben English, whose newsroom produced the original story, with similar questions, including what “woke” meant. English did not respond in time for publication.
We also contacted Senator McDonald for comment, who did not respond in time for publication.
