Dr Chris Parker, Cattle Australia, Media Release, 31 July 2025

The recent decision by the Federal Government to accept that the United States has met our biosecurity standards has created immense anxiety within our beef industry, given our strong belief in rules-based trading and science-based protections.

The US remains a vital and trusted trading partner to the Australian beef industry, and our federal Department of Agriculture does a great job on behalf of all Australians in providing a world-leading biosecurity system.

It is with these things in mind that we believe an independent scientific review must be conducted to ensure that the best science has been used, and to investigate some specific areas of concern the industry has identified with the expanded access that has been granted for US beef.

Our call for an independent review is neither unreasonable nor without precedent. We note that the independent Inspector General of Biosecurity, in a recent report, recommended independent scientific reviews to improve the process of import risk assessments. Further, we are not aware of any significant risk assessment in the last 20 odd years that did not have a set of independent eyes run over it.

There are five key areas that we believe need further explanation or review:

1. The lack of equivalence between the way Australian exports to the US are treated vs the treatment of US imports.
2. A high-level reliance on US systems, including ante and postmortem inspections, to mitigate serious risks, without facility audits by the Australian Government.
3. There is a lack of evidence of equivalence in traceability of animals in the US compared to Australia, with scant detail on how their systems will be audited or even verified.
4. The lack of clarity and detail around testing requirements for US beef at the Australian border for animal health and human health concerns.
5. A lack of detail around the Competent Authority assessment by Australian officials, and the apparent absence of an assessment of the cattle import process from Mexico into the US.

The final point is a major concern. The Government’s report lacks any detail or evidence of Australian government officials having observed the process of Mexican live cattle imports into the US. It seems the department officials only inspected Canadian procedures but not Mexican. If this is the case, it is completely unacceptable.

It has been the choices made by the Federal Government in this matter that has resulted in this call for an independent scientific inquiry. It chose not to provide details to industry; it chose to provide notice to industry of its plans to release its report less than 24 hours before it occurring; and it chose to then amplify the announcement in the media with confused messaging and the lack of certainty in the risk assessment itself.

This issue and our industry are too important to just be lost in a bureaucratic fog.