Proposed Australian Animal Welfare Standards and Guidelines – Exhibited Animals Consultation Regulation Impact Statement March 2014

A4.10 – Unquantifiable cost of providing additional containers for transport – S11.1 (Macropods)

Under proposed standard S11.1 the operator transporting a macropod must ensure macropod transportation containers do not have slatted floors. The incremental cost would result in a small percentage of containers having to be modified to allow for solid floors (e.g. by either covering with a continuous piece of timber sheeting or filling in gaps between slates with additional slats). The cost of this would be minimal. Proposed standard S11.1 remains unquantifiable as the number of containers typically used for macropod transport in jurisdictions, or Australia for that matter, is unknown. However it is quite likely that this would be a minor cost.

A4.11 – Incremental cost of developing, maintaining and implementing procedures – S1.2, S5.4 and S6.2 (Crocodiles)

Under the proposed crocodile taxon standards there would be a requirement for operators to develop maintain and implement written procedures:

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  for keepers undertaking hand feeding procedures (S1.2);
  
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  to confirm equipment is functioning properly and temperatures adjusted as necessary where any artificial means of heating is required for land areas or ponds (S5.4); and
  
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  to enable the collection of eggs (S6.2).
  

Furthermore, it is assumed that such procedures would already be provided by 95% of operators and therefore would affect 5% of operators and would involve a time cost of 4.5 days i.e. one day for the development and half a day for the implementation of procedures (3 procedures in all). Furthermore it is assumed that large facilities already have such procedures in place and, therefore, the estimation of incremental costs is undertaken for medium and small facilities only. Taking 7.5hrs as a typical working day, this would require a total one-off time cost of 33.75hrs per affected facility¹⁷⁰ in NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA, NT, TAS, and ACT. As discussed in Part A2.9 of Appendix 2 the hourly charge out rate for a program administrator is taken to be $101.52 including salary on-costs and overhead costs. This rate is used to determine the hourly time cost of procedures.

As shown in Table A4.22, the estimated one-off cost of providing plans and procedures (crocodiles) over 10 years would be $11,905 in present value 2012-13 dollars with 86.48% of the cost incurred by small size facilities - particularly in NSW, VIC, and QLD.