Industries still waiting on levy responses

However, NSW Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm says the government still has time to respond appropriately and implement positive reforms that can improve the levy system’s accountability and transparency.

The Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee inquiry was instigated in September last year and made seven recommendations in the report tabled in June.

One leading recommendation was to make legislative changes to enable agricultural levy-payer information to be collected and distributed, to help generate databases on all agricultural levies, within two years of the legislative amendment.

The Committee also recommended that the data held by the Department of Agriculture’s levy collection unit should be “limited to information sufficient to enable organisations responsible for spending or allocating levy funds to communicate with levy payers and enable votes to be allocated on a production basis”.

“Data should include location, contact details, crop or enterprise type and production volume and/or value,” it said.

However, stakeholder faith in the government’s ability to respond effectively to the broad levy inquiry was severely dented by Agriculture and Water Resources Minister Barnaby Joyce’s lack of action on the grass-fed beef levy inquiry and rejection of calls to strengthen funding for the ailing Cattle Council of Australia.

Senator Leyonhjelm helped instigate the agricultural levies inquiry and told Fairfax Agricultural Media he was now waiting and hoping for the government’s response.

“I’m not at the stage of declaring that this is unsatisfactory but I’d like to think we’d get some progress on it soon,” he said.

“If I don’t get anything soon I will take action but at this stage still hoping something will turn up.”