Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Minister for Emergency Management and National Recovery and Resilience) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Griff for his question and for his ongoing interest in this serious issue. My advice from the minister for agriculture is that there remains a high level of community interest in the safety of pet food following the pet food incidents in 2018 and more recently in Victoria.

A pet food working group was established with the agreement of all agriculture ministers, and they welcomed the Senate inquiry into the pet food industry in 2018. That working group has developed a range of regulatory and non-regulatory options for consideration, as you said, by state and territory governments.

ABARES has also updated its 2012 report on the economic assessment of policy options to manage pet food safety in Australia. The report includes options for self-regulation, co-regulation and full government regulation. The reports of the pet food working group and ABARES were considered by agriculture senior officials on 16 September 2021 and again on 30 September 2021. It was agreed that a cost-benefit analysis of all the policy options would be undertaken before making recommendations to ministers on which options should be pursued. As you would appreciate, decisions of this nature that do go to state and territory regulatory frameworks do need to be able to assess how much it will cost, what the unseen circumstances are going to be if we go for the full regulatory option, who is going to bear the cost for that and what the implications are for state and territory ministers as they consider adopting those regulatory frameworks.

Given your usual concern about the efficient use of taxpayer spending, I'm— (Time expired)