Triccy:
So some of this stuff might sound like what we could be labelled with "conspiracy theorist" for stating, right. So what we've done today guys, is we've brought in Dr. Conny Turni from the Queensland Alliance of Agriculture and Food Innovation. She's going to speak to you from the science side of things. See, you can't wear the "conspiracy" hat when you've got a doctor talking about the science. Let's go, Connie. Welcome.

Dr Conny Turni:
Hi. I want to just aliterate some of the points Sarah made. So we have this fire ants control programme now for 23 years. It started off with one fire ant in 2001, one fire ant nest in 2001 being reported at the Port of Brisbane. We now have over 15,000 fire ant nests after 23 years of spraying. We are now going in the second part: we are going to spray for five years and then we are going to monitor.

So I mean if you ask somebody doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome seems quite stupid. But let's go on from that. So the permits that are mentioned for S-methoprene. It's basically like she said, If there's no fire ant evident, no longer evident, then you should not spray the whole property.

Now they sprayed my property in 2022. I complained to the Australian Pesticide Veterinary Medicine Authority, the APVMA, and they said 'oh we're taking this very seriously that they go against the permit'. I didn't hear from them for a year.

Then they came back, they sent the complaint to DAFF, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and they are in charge of the fire ant programme. So they're investigating themselves. Obviously the outcome was, "there's nothing to see here". I got a letter from Dr. Rachel Shay, the Deputy Director General and Chief Biosecurity Officer and she had advised me that they would abide by their permit. Well they are not abiding by their permit.

They can do a survey. They're telling us they will do a survey after, on ground and via helicopter. Now how on earth are they going to (be) finding it via a helicopter and why can they not do a survey beforehand and then spray the nest and abide by their permit? They have threatened me with the $13,600 (fine) that it was back then in 2022 and I just told them, "I'm not breaching this permit. I'm a scientist. I have to work under these permits by APVMA and I'm not breaching it." They have never sprayed my place again. The first time I didn't know that they was spraying.

So let's look at distributing a broad spectrum insecticide over this large area, 800,000 hectares, and for the purpose of fire ants, It's doing tremendous environmental damage and affects not only the target species but including humans negatively. According to scientific papers, and I have just read scientific papers, Pyriproxyfen is thought to adversely affect all living beings feeding on plants that are exposed to these chemicals, and also negatively affect the environment factors such as soil, air, and water.

Pyriproxyfen degrades into six metabolites. Three of them are toxic to soil enzymes. Four are suggested to be very toxic, with one counted under the extreme toxic category. So when they're degrading, they're actually worse. When this Pyriproxyfen degrades, it's actually worse than the chemical itself.

It affects bees through contaminating the nectar sources. If you spray anything from a helicopter, it will fly anywhere including on flowers. So it will affect them. They keep telling us it only affects fire ants. Well there's a study already out and they looked at five native ant species and they were all affected by this. So we're killing our native ants as well. Poor echidna, we are just killing its food source.

So it also has a half-life in plants and up to three weeks. Hence it affects non-target species. S-methoprene which is released against the permit, the pellet will be present in [vicidial?] levels during and sometimes beyond the operational release period, 30 to 150 days. Now, when they came to my place and they were in front of the road spraying because I didn't let them in, they told me that it is organically approved. They can spray when it's organic.

Before 2022, there was a 12 months period where you could not call yourself "organic" If you have sprayed S-methoprene. In 2022, in mid '22, they changed this permit and all of a sudden it is three weeks withholding period and you can call yourself organic again. Now I have no idea whether studies are that say you can go from 12 months to three weeks, but apparently you can when you're the government.

Triccy:
So what you're saying is they can spray these chemicals three weeks prior to harvest. They can harvest the crop and they still be qualified as organic.

Dr Conny Turni:
Yep.

Triccy:
Bullshit. So what's happening is that some of these farmers that have these crops that China will now send them overseas, but overseas it's still 12 months at least. So they can't provide their crops overseas anymore because it's not organic. So it's screwing a lot of people over in different avenues here.

Dr Conny Turni:
Well the worst part is on the permit it says you have to wash your vegetables twice. They don't tell the farmers so they don't know. So that's not happening. So when you're thinking that you're getting organic food, it might not be organic. It gets worse.

So besides being toxic to aquatic animals, if you have a grazing land and you have cattle on there, it can be released. They have done a study and found that it had been released in the milk of cattle and it also gets retained and they adipose tissue, which means it is accumulative and that's what is the danger to animals higher up.

They might eat one insect, but then it gets stored in the adipose tissue and it gets accumulative and eventually it will affect them as well. It is also found in the tissue and in the eggs when chicken get exposed to S-methoprene. So it's, there are lots of studies that it is not absolutely 'not safe' and the studies they have quoted are all for S-methoprene are all from mosquitoes. But mosquitoes, well at least in the studies I have been reading, are used at much, much lower rates (of dosage) than we are using this S-methoprene spraying in pellets. So yeah, I just wanted to sum that up. Thank you.