November 18, 2005
Australian High Court rejects pork industry's appeal on imports
The High Court has dismissed an application by Australian Pork Ltd. for special leave to appeal against the government's new quarantine protocols for imported pork, the company said in a statement issued Friday.
Rejection of the application would appear to bring to an end any legal process that APL, an industry services concern, could use to change the quarantine protocols.
Tom Brennan, APL's lawyer, said the court based its decision to reject the application on legal technicalities and did not consider any of the evidence relating to the quarantine risk posed by imported pork.
The court decision did not reflect the merits of the quarantine protocols or the strength of APL's evidence, he said in a statement.
Applications for special leave to appeal were rarely granted, with only five of the 105 applications made since October approved, he said.
APL went to the High Court to appeal a ruling of the Federal Court that backed a 2004 decision by the government's director of animal and plant quarantine, to allow conditional entry of imports from countries whose herds had Post Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome, or PMWS.
Andrew Spencer, APL's chief executive, said the industry's focus would remain on keeping diseases that Australia did not have out of the country, including keeping out PMWS, a devastating pig disease.
"We are now the only country in the world free of the disease and we would like to remain that way," he said in a statement.
Major sources of pork imports included Denmark and the US.
The industry would now focus research on PMWS, aiming to discover the causative agents of the disease and possibly find some way to devise control measures and an inoculation, he said.
A PMWS outbreak in Australia was estimated to add US$55 million a year to production costs and result in a US$200 million loss in gross domestic product.
PMWS has killed more than 8 million pigs in the European Union since 2000, the company said.
