Australian Livestock Exporters Cautiously Welcome Reform

AUSTRALIA - The Australian Livestock Exporters’ Council (ALEC) has welcomed government confirmation of streamlining the export approval process, but cautioned against suggestions of massive cost savings for industry.
calendar icon 11 April 2016
clock icon 3 minute read

ALEC CEO Alison Penfold said the move to systems approvals better reflects the consistent nature of export consignments.

“An Approved Arrangements sets out the procedures an exporter will follow to ensure the Australian Government requirements for the certification of livestock for export are met.

"This includes meeting the Australian Standards for the Export of Livestock (ASEL – standards for the welfare of livestock from on-farm to on-board) and importing country requirements,” Ms Penfold said.

“The Government will maintain control and oversight over exporters but the process will be more efficient and better aligned to the regularity of the export process and by way of auditing and a performance management framework. For exporters this means less avoidable delays due to removal of repetitive tasks and paperwork hold ups, mainly in Canberra.

“This is a reform that has been on our industry’s regulatory agenda for a long time, so we welcome today’s announcement.”

Nonetheless, Ms Penfold said that industry would monitor the implementation with caution. She said the extent of savings to eventuate from the reform remained unclear and that there were doubts about the accuracy of predictions of a 30 per cent fall in government charges.

“Livestock exporters would hope to enjoy a reduction in government charges on that scale, but the jury is out on whether it will ever materialise across the board,” Ms Penfold said.

“We were pushed into negotiating a new framework for fees and charges at the same time as working through arrangements for the implementation of Approved Arrangements.

“In our view, any figures on reductions in government charges are still only estimates which, as we already know from modelling, are not fairly distributed across all exporters, markets or species. In addition, there are still fundamental problems with the framework, particularly around the contribution to corporate overheads and an absence of departmental productivity improvements.

“The only way through this is for the Minister to agree to a full independent review of the fees and charges framework for live animal exports which he has agreed to for the meat and grains sectors.

“We support Minister Joyce’s previously stated commitment to make sure government fees and charges are fair, equitable, transparent and relative to the services being provided,” Ms Penfold said.

“We agree with Minister Joyce that while it’s reasonable that industry pay for the services we receive, it’s also reasonable for industry to expect that the costs being recovered are legitimate costs for industry to bear, and not costs reasonably borne by government.

“As Minister Joyce has said, a fairer and more transparent system is important because it gives Australian exporters more confidence about the way the government recovers the cost of export, and better visibility of how costs are calculated and passed on.”

A recent economic analysis undertaken by consulting firm EY and funded by LiveCorp to inform industry submissions to the Government’s Productivity Commission into the Regulation of Agriculture found that Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS) costs alone create an additional $22.3 million per annum in regulatory burden on exporters.

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