Future food regulatory system in Australia

Australian and New Zealand Food Ministers have a final opportunity to set a future food regulatory system that supports a healthy, viable and valuable food supply

The article was originally published on Croakey.

Damian Maganja1, Veronica Le Nevez1, Andrea Schmidtke2, Sally Witchalls3

  1. The George Institute for Global Health 
  2. Food for Health Alliance
  3. Australian Medical Association

Walk into any supermarket and you will be accosted by shelf upon shelf of unhealthy foods, from soft drinks that contain up to 14 teaspoons of sugar to whole aisles of confectionery, chips and biscuits. Even foods we might think are relatively healthy can contain excessive amounts of added sugar, salt and fat, such as yoghurts, breakfast cereals, foods for kids, and ready-made sauces and meals. 

The ubiquity, easy accessibility and constant promotion of unhealthy products creates food environments that are making us sick, contributing to the disabilities and early deaths caused by conditions like heart disease, type-2 diabetes, many types of cancer, and kidney disease. Millions of years of healthy life are being lost each year to these preventable chronic diseases and it has been estimated that the costs of obesity in Australia totalled $11.8 billion in 2018 alone. Health impacts of diet-related disease to the Australian population include:

The catastrophic and preventable burden of disease caused by these risk factors needs to be addressed for the future health of all Australians. Improving the healthiness of the foods that are manufactured, marketed and sold to us is critical to this effort.

So how is the healthiness of our food governed? 

Australia and New Zealand share a food regulatory system. Australian and New Zealand Food Ministers agreed in November 2022 to Aspirations for Australia and New Zealand’s food regulatory system, which outlines a vision of a “world-class collaborative food regulatory system focused on improving and protecting public health and safety.” 

This system is already largely successful at ensuring food products don’t immediately make us rush to the bathroom (or worse, to the emergency department). However, it demonstrably fails at safeguarding our communities from the long-term implications of consuming harmful products that have been characterised as causing long-term poisoning – though it has great potential to do so.

The development of food regulatory measures is overseen by an Australian Government statutory authority within the health portfolio, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), which operates under the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Act 1991 (the FSANZ Act). 

The FSANZ Act is currently undergoing its first major review in three decades. This presents a generational opportunity to align this fundamental legislation with Food Ministers’ Aspirations and better meet the public health needs and challenges that we face today. 

This opportunity is not being taken. 

What are public health and consumer representatives calling for?

Since 2020, public health and consumer organisations have repeatedly called for this review to consider and address the failure of our food regulatory system to reduce and prevent the harms caused by unhealthy foods, drinks and alcohol. Our earlier calls have been largely ignored.

We agree on the need for reforms to the FSANZ Act and we welcome some of the reforms proposed, which will introduce efficiencies and desperately needed resourcing. However, as a whole the package of proposed reforms that we have seen raises concerns that the capacity of the food regulatory system to protect public health and consumers will be eroded further, with yet more cheap ultra-processed products flooding our food supply. 

Proposals to date increase the risks of diet-related disease to our communities by smoothing the pathways for more unhealthy and ultra-processed foods to be brought to market 

The proposed directions go against community expectations that our governments will set public health as the highest priority in regulating the food system. Instead, the agenda to date has focussed on changes that facilitate more unhealthy foods being brought to market, with less oversight and community consultation. In effect, this prioritises the profits of the unhealthy food, beverage and alcohol industries over public health. This poses risks to our communities, will affect public trust and confidence in our food systems, and undermines governments’ stated priorities to reduce the burden and cost of chronic diseases.

We could see processes enshrined in legislation that would significantly reduce transparency and rigour in the oversight of potentially harmful products, while waving through measures which support private business interests at the detriment of public health and consumer outcomes. This would be done through the adoption of a risk-based approach in which matters deemed “low” risk would proceed on a fast-tracked approval process. However, the framework to guide this hasn't yet been developed. We are being asked to support a regulatory approach that necessarily increases risk without any detail of who will make decisions, what consultation or independent oversight there will be, or how matters will be assessed – though it has been suggested that only industry-focussed work will be eased. Meanwhile, processes to protect public health and consumers will likely remain drawn-out and susceptible to industry protests. 

Another threat is posed by the mooted acceptance of assessments of product health and safety from other unspecified jurisdictions. This raises the possibility that our specific national contexts will not be considered as a relevant factor or even allowing the automatic and uncritical adoption of weaker standards.

Other proposals that introduce weaker regulatory forms such as codes of practice, or reforms that may undermine genuine public health and consumer participation in governance structures, pose serious threats given the consistent evidence that this undermines public health and risks regulatory capture. We only need to look at the failures of industry-led codes on gambling and unhealthy food advertising to children, or the low and highly skewed voluntary uptake of the Health Star Rating system after ten years, to see ample evidence of the failure of self-regulation in achieving better public health outcomes. Industry interference is already implicated in the food regulatory system and other regulatory areas in Australia. Reforms that would help to improve the most prominent problems with the food regulatory system continue to be excluded, despite our continued efforts to suggest practical solutions. 

Now is the time to set the food regulatory system on a course that promotes long-term health – here’s how

To address this, we recommend that FSANZ apply a standard set of public health principles to ensure improved standards for foods, including consideration of impacts on diet-related disease in their processes and decisions. We call these principles a ’public health test’. Because these principles are fundamental to enabling a food supply that works to support the long-term health of the community, we argue that they need to be embedded within the FSANZ Act, rather than reflected in policy or other regulation which can be amended at any time.

Because the risk assessment framework is so central to the proposed reforms, we strongly recommend that appropriate consultation on this framework be undertaken as a priority and that expert public health advice is meaningfully included.

We also urge the inclusion of additional measures to protect and promote public health in a renewed FSANZ Act, including: 

  • Statutory timeframes for public health and consumer-focussed initiatives, as currently mandated for industry work, to ensure these progress more quickly;
  • The elevation of Ministerial Guidelines to ensure that policy guidance previously provided by Food Ministers is considered as a priority; and
  • The inclusion of environmental sustainability as a relevant consideration, as a fundamental criterion underpinning the health and wellbeing of our people and countries into the future.

We urge Food Ministers to put a stop to measures that we believe endanger public health. These include proposals:

  • To introduce weak regulatory forms such as Codes of Practice and guidelines; 
  • To introduce minimal check pathways for amending or developing new food regulations; and
  • To remove nominations from designated public health and consumer organisations to FSANZ’s governing board.

Other failures of the review to date include persistently inadequate calculations of costs and benefits that preference industry outcomes over broader public health and consumer impacts. Dedicated, meaningful engagement with Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori people and experts has also been sorely lacking; given the demands and expectations placed upon First Nations communities by this review, much more needs to be done to ensure their expertise, perspectives and priorities are genuinely heard and incorporated into these processes. 

The decisions being made during the FSANZ Act review will have important and long-lasting consequences for the food regulatory system. Australian and New Zealand Food Ministers are meeting on 25th July to consider the final stages of the review. This may be their last chance to guide the review in the direction of a future food regulatory system that supports good health. 

We urge food ministers to take this opportunity to set the foundation for better health outcomes, which will also lead to reduced economic costs.  

Further reading