Announcement date
26 June 2023
Link to announcement
Biosecurity cost recovery implementation statements - DAFF (agriculture.gov.au)
Problem being addressed
Biosecurity activities manage the risk of pests and diseases that threaten Australia’s economy and environment. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) undertakes a range of regulatory activity and recovers the costs associated with this activity to ensure that the Australian biosecurity system remains robust, responsive to emerging risks and enables market access for Australian products.
The biosecurity cost recovery arrangement was last reviewed in 2015, prior to the commencement of the Biosecurity Act 2015 and Biosecurity Regulations 2016. Since the 2015 review, both the Australian and global economy have changed significantly and Australia’s biosecurity system has become more complex. These changes have placed pressure on DAFF’s resources and ability to continue to deliver biosecurity activities effectively.
As fees and charges have not kept pace with inflationary pressures, there is now a large gap between the cost of the regulatory activity and recovered revenue. This increasing gap is unsustainable and will impact delivery of existing regulatory activities and DAFF’s ability to manage the risk of pests and diseases entering the country.
Proposal
From July 2021 to December 2022, DAFF undertook a comprehensive review of the biosecurity cost recovery arrangement to determine the adjustments needed to stabilise the cost base. This included surveying current regulatory effort and biosecurity and imported food activities, validating data (cost and effort) and modelling the impacts on prices across all charge points.
The outcome of the review proposed changes to existing regulatory charging to align fees and charges with the actual cost to deliver biosecurity and imported food activities. The review process ensured the proposed price changes were set to recover only the minimum efficient costs of delivering DAFF’s regulatory activities, in keeping with the Australian Government Charging Framework. In addition, minor changes to charging legislation were identified and proposed for amendment, providing greater clarity and consistency in the application of certain charges.
The proposed price changes are needed to stabilise the biosecurity cost recovery arrangement and will close the forecast $35 million gap between cost and recovered revenue in 2023-24 and in the out years. Without these changes, the gap is expected to increase to around $53 million by 2026-27.
Assessed Impact Analysis outcome
Good Practice
Assessment comments
To be considered ‘exemplary” within the Government’s Impact Analysis (IA) framework, the IA would have benefitted from:
- More detail on evaluation planning, including key metrics and approaches for tracking unintended consequences; and
- Further evidence of likely impacts of the policy on the defined stakeholders, and flow-on impacts to consumers and the general Australian community.
OIA notes that the IA is quite short, but that this is appropriate given a) the detail is proportional to the likely scale of the impacts and b) the inclusion of the detail in the attached Consultation Paper.
Regulatory burden
DAFF has estimated the average annual regulatory costs to be nil. This is because the new prices are increases to existing fees and charges that impacted stakeholders already pay when they participate in the biosecurity system – no additional time cost is expected.
Please note that this webpost was updated on 4 July 2023 to correct a minor typographic error.