Development of the original GIA Deed

In late 2011, government and industry agreed that a GIA Deed would be jointly drafted to capture the principles and processes of working in partnership under a Government Industry Agreement for Biosecurity Readiness and Response to achieve better biosecurity outcomes.

Joint Working Group

Industry representatives were nominated by a wider industry group and worked with the Ministry for Primary Industries to draft the GIA Deed in a joint working group.

The Group was tasked with drafting a Deed that enables the effective partnering between the Ministry for Primary Industries and and primary industries to best prepare for and effectively respond to biosecurity risk, and achieve better biosecurity outcomes for New Zealand. The Group particularly focused on:

• Reducing the biosecurity risks through cooperative effort and effective industry engagement resulting in lower risks and reduced costs of dealing with those risks
• Creating a vehicle to share and mould the biosecurity system in a way that complements existing consultative arrangements and connects across the end-to-end of the biosecurity system
• Providing transparency and certainty around sharing the costs of readiness and response including:
  • Control on how costs will be shared by negotiation and against agreed principles
  • Having a say in how money is spent
  • Certainty in advance on activities, their costs and shares
  • An agreed limit to cost liabilities of industry to a maximum of 50%, even where the benefits to industry are higher than this
  • Access to loans and levy arrangements.

Group members were drawn from the Ministry for Primary Industries, and peak bodies representing the range of primary sectors expected to be covered by GIA. 

Timeline

• Late 2011: JWG is established and drafting begins
• June 2012: Memorandum of Understanding, also drafted by the JWG, is available for MPI and industry to sign. The MOU is signed by 23 industry organisations
• December 2012: Exposure draft of the Deed is circulated to industry and government with questions and answers
• February 2013: Industry workshop on the draft Deed held in Wellington
• March 2013: Comment period closes
• July 2013: Deed circulated to industry and government with Q&As and consolidated comments received on the draft

Consulting

The three-month comment period on the exposure draft of the Deed closed on 30 March 2013. More than 350 written comments on the exposure draft were received by the GIA Secretariat. Further feedback was received at an industry workshop on 27 and 28 February in Wellington. The joint working group considered each comment and issue received on the draft text and recorded their decisions on handling the matters raised in the interests of transparency and for ongoing reference. These will continue to be a valuable resource and will inform the implementation of the Deed and its processes.

The final

A final Deed that the joint working group considered had the best chance of being acceptable to both government and industry partners was circulated to industry and government on 16 July 2013. It was approved by Cabinet in December 2013, and came into being as a legal document with the signing, in May 2014, of the Deed by the Ministry for Primary Industries and Kiwifruit Vine Health.

Since its first signing, the Deed has been reviewed three times by signatories, with a number of changes made to reflect the operational needs of the partnership as they have developed over time.

Memorandum of understanding

The joint working group that drafted the GIA Deed also developed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The MOU was developed as a means for the Ministry for Primary Industries and interested industry organisations to jointly engage in and resource a process for developing information for a business case and value proposition for one or more unwanted organisms, in order to make a decision about whether or not to sign the GIA Deed. The MOU was signed by 25 industry organisation between 2012 – 2013, with 23 of those organisations eventually having gone on to sign the Deed itself.

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