Barnaby Joyce (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)
Barnaby Joyce (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), as the name suggests, is supposed to regulate agricultural chemicals and vet medicines in Australia. Instead, it’s been a hotbed of regulatory failure, incompetence, industry capture and extensive allegations of staff misconduct. And its failures are down to one man: Barnaby Joyce.

After allegations of serious misconduct — including a senior staff member urinating on colleagues — were aired last year, Agriculture Minister Murray Watt demanded the APVMA conduct an independent review of what was going on inside the organisation. The damning review was released on Friday.

Among the findings:

  • The APVMA was too supine in its use of enforcement powers for fear of upsetting the industry and too inclined to see its role as helping industry, not regulating it;
  • Its review program was so poorly resourced and conducted that some chemicals had been under “review” for two decades;
  • It can’t do the public service’s basics in areas such as procurement and financial management;
  • It has an extraordinarily high volume of complaints from staff, ranging across all areas, including allegations of nepotism, mental health concerns, failures of complaints-handling and inappropriate behaviour.

The chair and CEO have both resigned. Environment and agriculture division head Melissa McEwen is acting CEO while a governance review by former secretary Ken Matthews is carried out.

Time and again the independent report identifies Joyce’s decision to move the APVMA from Canberra to his own electorate in 2016 as a key reason for many of the problems.

Another review, by big four consultant Ernst & Young in 2016, spelled out just how ill-advised the move was. Despite the report being commissioned by Joyce’s department, at Joyce’s request, it still found “the economic benefits for the Australian economy associated with moving the APVMA from Canberra to Armidale are modest. This is because the strategic and operational benefits of having the APVMA operate out of Armidale appear to be limited”.

The move would be a net cost to the Commonwealth, and the “risks associated with moving the APVMA are significant”.

For consultants being paid to give Joyce a reason to move the agency, it was a remarkable report — they told him it was a terrible idea instead. And the biggest risk was that “the APVMA may be unable to relocate, or recruit and replace, key APVMA executive, management and technical assessment staff”.

That’s exactly what happened, according to the report last week, which found “less than 15 of approximately 140 full-time employees stayed with the APVMA”. 

“Only a small proportion of previous APVMA staff moved from Canberra to Armidale,” the report found, “and it may be inferred that the new staff and lack of previous APS [Australian Public Service] knowledge and experience impacted the operations of the APVMA.” Overall:

The relocation of the APVMA’s main office to Armidale perhaps also fundamentally changed the APVMA — if for no other reason than the APVMA had a very significant turnover of staff, including a change in CEO, associated with the relocation.

This turnover of staff would have inevitably resulted in a loss of corporate knowledge, a loss of corporate culture and a loss of experience and knowledge of what it is to work within the APS. This may include practical awareness of foundational public service principles, such as the need to adhere to the APS values.

So exactly what Joyce was told would happen if he moved APVMA to his electorate happened, and it trashed the agency.

The Nationals are renowned for shameless pork-barrelling. Usually the only victims are taxpayers and the public interest. But the victim here is an agency with the important task of regulating the chemicals that enter Australia’s food chain at the source, an agency that was used as a pork plaything by Joyce, despite clearly knowing what would result.

It’s not a patch on the outrageous abuses of robodebt, but in its way it’s every bit as rotten a piece of public policy. Many of his colleagues wonder why Joyce continues to soil public life with his presence. After this, voters ought to wonder why Joyce remains in Parliament at all.