Mr. Paul Smyth:

I thank the Chair. To reply to a question posed by the Senator, the charter was rolled over in 2021 and 2022, so there has been a charter and obviously that was in agreement with the farm organisations. It is only 2023 where we have not had a charter, but there have been ten or 12 months of negotiations on it and it will come to a close pretty soon.

The thing we are attending today for is the review panel. It is important it comes across that there is good support for the appeals in general, but the appeals review panel will be independent and will make decisions based on farming practicalities. We have seen this in other panels even on the TB side, so we have farmer representatives there and we have a farmer representative body there. It is very important that element of farmer representation is brought forward in this. It is something that is obviously in the proposal, but we feel the need for more representation from farming and more should be applied. We are also looking at something which was not captured in the current draft, which is this idea of the amount of time people spend on the review panel. It is three years, I think, up to a maximum of six. We have noticed that if everybody is at a fixed term length and they all go at the one time we lose that knowledge. We are proposing a staggered term for that, because it takes time to get the feel for being on a review panel and that is just the way it is. It is important that when a term comes to a close it is not a full new review body and we keep some of the knowledge within the review board. There are lots of other suggestions there as well and I am hopeful members will taken them all into consideration.