Victorian Agriculture Minister Jaala Pulford has said the failure to introduce electronic tagging of sheep and goats from January would have meant pushing the project back another year.
Sheep and goats born in Victoria after January 1 next year will require an electronic identification tag.
From mid-2017, all saleyards, abattoirs and knackeries will be required to scan electronic tags of sheep and goats and upload the information to the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) database.
Ms Pulford said there were a number of reasons why the January 1 start date had been announced.
“My technical advisers say the start date on newborns is most practical, so the decision really was a question of 2017 or 2018 or 2019 – and I didn't want us all to live with the risk for another 12 months,” Ms Pulford said.
“We needed to give people maximum time to adapt - every day the reasons to do it became stronger and the reasons not too became weaker.”
She said the decision followed a unanimous recommendation of the Victorian Sheep and Goat Identification Advisory Committee and the Victorian Auditor General’s Biosecurity-Livestock Report.
“Some of the concerns about people’s preparedness to make the change had abated somewhat, from earlier in the year,” she said.
“Price are good, people are feeling more able to contemplate change and there is a general level of optimism around, which wasn’t there in January or February.”
Ms Pulford said a four week consultation process on the draft standards and transition package was now underway.
Ms Pulford said she made no apologies for Victoria implementing electronic tagging, before a national system was put in place.
“I will not be deterred from this, the decision is made - the trade benefits, production benefits and biosecurity benefits are immense.
“It would be good to have a national approach but my first responsibility is to the Victorian industry and Victorian farmers.”
Last month, Victoria’s chief veterinary officer Dr Charles Milne told an annual saleyards conference, sheep traceability was “really poor.”
He said a recent exercise to trace sheep movements had shown up defects in the system.
“We had 14 sheep and 14 days later, we will didn’t have the same traceability in those 14 sheep, we had in an hour for cattle,” Dr Milne said.
The draft electronic NLIS sheep and goat standards and transition package details can be found at
