Call for WA woolgrowers to ‘lift their game’ on declarations

An abysmal result by WA woolgrowers in National Wool Declaration results has encouraged local industry stalwarts to call for a greater uptake of WoolClip and to “lift” their game, after it was revealed WA has the worst reporting status in the country at 54.2 per cent.

The Australian Wool Exchange published the declaration rate for the 2022-23 season last week on social media, which shed a light on what has been an ongoing problem in WA, but appears much worse than originally thought, according to Endeavour Wool buyer Steve Noa.

An AWEX spokesman said the overall national NWD rate was 74.8 per cent, which was in contrast to “98 per cent of WoolClip farm specifications (that) have a completed NWD”.

The spokesman recommended that “woolgrowers and wool classers use the web/mobile tool #WoolClip to create specifications, consignments, and NWDs”.

“Growers and classers can work collaboratively, or separately,” he said.

WoolClip is an online internet and smartphone app that allows the user to create wool specifications and NWDs, even where there is no signal or data connectivity.

Once finalised, WoolClip sends the information by email to the nominated marketing organisation as well as owner/managers and marketing representatives in the team.

The specification data is also released for the destination warehouses to download and import into their systems.

Mr Noa reacted with shock to the AWEX announcement of WA’s low declaration rate on social media and immediately called on woolgrowers to “lift WA”.

“That’s a lot worse than I thought,” Mr Noa said.

“We have the purest (Merino) clip as a state and we’re not promoting good practices.

“It’s like selling a car without a rego. LIFT WA!”

Mr Noa said it “appears that the slightest error on a specification/declaration will lead to your wool being ‘Non Declared’, unless your broker chases you up to fix it”.

“While I encourage classers and owners to embrace WoolClip, I’d hate in the meantime to see WA’s low declaration rate to be well under the national rate simply because it’s a matter of basic errors on submitted written species,” he said.

“Broker staff have an obligation to their growers, and us as buyers, to quickly follow up on any innocent error discovered to ensure the declaration is recorded and thus shown in the sale catalogue for buyers to see, and consider in customer’s order requirements.”

Mr Noa said a solution to the problem could be that “the grower’s broker agent could act as a proxy to sign off on simple mistakes such as wrong bale numbers, line breaks etc”.

WA Shearing Industry Association president Darren Spencer said it wasn’t hard to use the electronic declaration system and it was something that wool classers could do on site, with or without online access.

He said one of the main issues was that woolgrowers were not filling out their details correctly on the specifications and using the paper copies, which could get misplaced or damaged, while sending through the electronic version to the stores saved all those hassles.

“It’s just laziness really,” Mr Spencer said.

“Hopefully more people start to do it correctly.”