Grass-fed cattle levy payers could soon have a transparent voting system with MLA as the government expects to introduce legislation early this year.
A spokesperson for Minister of Agriculture Barnaby Joyce said government was currently drafting legislation that would make it possible for a voting register to be created.
Grass-fed cattle producers see their levies make up more than half MLA’s funding - $61 million of MLA’s $106 million total in 2014 - and have been critical at the lack of transparency when it comes to membership and voting rights.
Currently, MLA determines how much levy has been paid by its members through a self-declaration system.
MLA commissioned company Adrossi to investigate its process for identifying levy payers and calculate their voting entitlements, and it proposed three models for a more transparent and accurate system.
In September, the report recommended a legislated pathway as it would provide greater accuracy and transparency, leading to increased producer confidence in the voting process.
Cattle Council of Australia, along with other peak councils, agreed on this approach and put it to government.
“There has been a view that processors have too much power, and it has never been 100 per cent proven. But once we do know who the levy payers are and how much they pay, we will know who we represent,” Cattle Council chief executive Jed Matz said.
“We can move forward quickly.”
Under this system, there will be a legislative change requiring levy collection agents to pass levy-payer data to the Department of Agriculture’s levy division and on to third parties, such as MLA.
“It is the most cost-effective method, but it might take longer to implement,” Mr Matz said.
The report said it could take four years to set up a workable service and the onus was on the Department of Agriculture’s levy division to provide complex data cleansing and assembly that were outside its current scope.
The report noted the time-line as conservative and depended on the Ministerial response to the recommendation.
The two other options included using the existing National Livestock Identification System and National Vendor Declaration as a source of data to remove the current need for producer self-declarations; or having a commercial arrangement to access levy collection agent data that is passed to a commercial services organisation.
The issue came out of the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee senate inquiry into the grass-fed industry.