Regulation and regulatory reform

Accord aims to ensure that industry operates in an environment with minimum effective regulation, reducing the compliance burden.

This is perhaps our busiest area of operation, with many areas of overly complex and fragmented government and regulatory activity affecting our industry.

There is a need to remove the shackles imposed on Australian businesses by complex, nationally inconsistent and poorly designed regulation.

We work both on regulatory reform and on ensuring that new regulations that are introduced are not cumbersome for industry. Accord is instrumental in pushing forward a range of reform measures for the benefit of all members.

To do this, Accord makes an ongoing contribution to key regulatory policy committees, including: ACCS, NICNAS IGCC, NICNAS ECRSC, APVMA ILC, the Advisory Committee for the Transport of Dangerous Goods, and various Australian Standards Committees.

We also liaise with senior regulatory personnel and political stakeholders, including the parliamentary secretaries responsible for the TGA, NICNAS, FSANZ, Office of Chemical Safety and APVMA, in order to ensure that they are aware of industry's interest in their activities.

As well as this regular contact, Accord actively engages in many one-off opportunities to direct the shape of regulation or regulatory reform, and it is encouraging to see that much of our input is frequently adopted in the final enacted rules.

Recently, our involvement has included:

Involvement in the Productivity Commission study of chemicals and plastics regulation
Joint representation by Accord and other associations to the Prime Minister on inadequate consultation on Security Sensitive Chemicals, leading to effective industry engagement through Accord's involvement on an Industry Consultation Group
Being instrumental in helping to settle the Regulations and Cosmetic standard to enable legislative reforms to be fully implemented
Simplified regulation of personal care products as part of NICNAS cosmetic reforms passed by the Australian parliament in 2007
Commissioning an updated Safety Data Booklet for professional-use hair products' OHS compliance
Improvements in the ACCC Cosmetic Labelling Regulations, consistent with international practices
Active engagement of member interests in the work of the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee

Global Harmonisation

We also work towards harmonising regulations internationally, promoting minimum effective regulation as the optimal outcome. This helps our members import and export products and ingredients consistently and reduces the workload needed to bring a product to market.

This has included:

Implementing an international industry association position on global harmonisation principles for cleaning products
Lobbying for mutual recognition of tampon test methods
Engaging in the public consultation process for the reform of the EU's Cosmetics Directive
Urging Medsafe New Zealand to treat goods such as anti dandruff shampoos and fluoridated oral hygiene products with the same regulatory processes as cosmetics
Actively engaging in the APEC Chemical Dialogue and developing a paper on Principles for Best Practice Chemical Regulation
Engaging APEC Member Economies on global harmonisation through the APEC Chemical Dialogue