Since February 2000, my Department has published on a weekly basis, prices paid by individual named meat plants for all grades and categories of cattle. This initiative introduced a new degree of price transparency into the market which has been extremely useful to farmers in their decisions relating to the disposal of their stock.
As far as market price transparency is concerned, my Department endeavoured over a lengthy period in 1999 and 2000, through the monitoring committee on the report of the beef task force, to secure the agreement of all of the interests in the beef industry to a voluntary price transparency mechanism. While substantial progress was made on a price transparency model, the industry was unable to reach agreement on the issue of independent verification.