ALEC CEO Mark Harvey-Sutton

THE Australian National Audit Office’s (ANAO) damning audit of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s (DAFF) biosecurity cost recovery program has severely eroded industry confidence in the department’s ability to deliver a fair, transparent and credible outcome through its current review of export cost recovery arrangements.

The core issue is no longer just whether DAFF’s charges are too high. It is whether exporters can trust the department to calculate, explain and administer those charges fairly at all.

At the same time, DAFF is asking industry to consider a pathway to full cost recovery for export certification, the ANAO has found that the department repeatedly overcharged industry for biosecurity services.

The audit found DAFF recovered $52.7 million more than it cost to run the program over three years from 2022 to 2026. Despite that finding, there has been no commitment to refund the industries that paid more than the services cost.

Even more concerning, none of this should have come as a surprise. DAFF had already reviewed its biosecurity cost recovery arrangements in 2021–22 before conducting three further reviews of its charging model in 2024. Those reviews identified concerns about the accuracy of cost estimates, a lack of transparency in the department’s cost base and the risk of cross-subsidisation, where industries are charged to cover unrelated activities. Despite recognising these flaws, the overcharging continued. That is why many in the private sector now believe they are being let down by public sector departments.

The behaviour outlined in the ANAO audit has undermined confidence in DAFF’s assurances that exporters should accept its current review of export cost recovery at face value. If the department has been unable to accurately calculate and administer one cost recovery scheme, why should exporters believe it will get another one right, particularly when the government’s stated objective is to move to full cost recovery?

Many comparable exporting nations do not impose the same regulatory charges on exporters, nor do they subject industries to the same cumulative burden of regulation and cost. Considering the ANAO’s damning performance audit, the government’s first response should be to abandon its push towards full cost recovery for regulatory charges.

Given DAFF has been found to have overcharged under biosecurity cost recovery, trust can only be restored through an independent audit of export cost recovery, as previously called for by the Australian Meat Industry Council.

Agricultural exporters need to see exactly what they are being charged for, how those charges are calculated and whether the costs are justified. This lack of transparency and accountability is eroding trust in the government’s ability to give exporters the tools they need to compete in price-sensitive markets. Those markets are already being hit by stop-start tariffs, war-related uncertainty and shipping disruptions.

Adding poorly explained regulatory charges to those pressures is a recipe for weaker productivity and lower resilience, even though the government has rightly identified both as essential to higher living standards and broader opportunity.