There has been a resurgence of discussion over the importance of having the Australian Made logo on products. Since then, the government is moving towards stricter country-of-origin labelling on food in hopes of boosting consumer protection and their confidence. This applies to the consumer both locally and internationally.
Another benefit of pushing for these laws it that it will benefit Australian food producers who have long argued that food manufacturers and the large supermarket chains have used weak laws to mislabel foods as “made in Australia”. Australia’s recent parliamentary inquiry found that the consumer laws regarding product labels, such as “Made in Australia”, “Australian-grown”, “Product of Australia”, “Made in Australia from local and imported ingredients”, are confusing and ambiguous.
So the House of Representatives have proposed to make the following changes;
1) Country-of-origin labels must follow these rules:
- “Grown in”— 100% from the country specified;
- “Product of” — 90% content from the country specified;
- “Made in [country] from [country] ingredients” — 90% from the country specified;
- “Made in [country] from mostly local ingredients” — more than 50% Australian content;
- “Made in [country] from mostly imported ingredients” — less than 50 per cent Australian content.
2) The Commonwealth government amend the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code so as to allow for prescription of country-of-origin label text information on packaged foods to be increased in size compared with surrounding text on a product label.
3) The Commonwealth government increase scrutiny of products with imported ingredients that use misleading Australian imagery.
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