Message from the CEO
Welcome to our first edition of Tendrils for 2025!
We’re kicking off the year with a packed calendar of exciting collaborations and events. Highlights for the first half of the year include the National Fruit Fly Council’s (NFFC) Think Tank webinar on using eTools in Area Wide Management (AWM) in February, the Northern Australia Food Futures Conference in April, the International Day of Plant Health in May, and Hort Connections in June. This April we’ll also be celebrating an incredible milestone, 25 years of PHA driving change and creating a stronger biosecurity system for a more resilient future. It’s shaping up to be an inspiring start to what promises to be an exciting year.
Our people and our Members are at the heart of PHA and with our biosecurity system under growing pressure from complex, evolving challenges, it is more important than ever for us to maintain and augment the services you have come to know and trust. With our focus on enhanced organisational capability and providing exceptional support, we have undertaken an organisational redesign. Key updates include redefining our senior leadership roles of General Manager, Partnerships and Innovation and General Manager, Emergency Response and aligning areas of the business to ensure we’re well positioned to navigate the changing biosecurity landscape and deliver meaningful results. Changes are reflected in the following roles:
- General Manager, Resilience and Innovation role is being led by Dr Lucy Tran-Nguyen integrating both preparedness and emergency response and transitioning our digital systems projects to the innovation portfolio.
- General Manager, Partnerships role is being led by Jonathan Terlich in an acting capacity for the next 12 months covering Member engagement, training and the delivery of surveillance, diagnostic and professional development through our networks and national protocols. Our training area has also transitioned to this portfolio to expand our training offering across the entire biosecurity spectrum.
- General Manager, Corporate Services role incorporating Finance, Governance, Marketing and Communications continues to be led by Amanda Yong.
These changes are now in effect and we appreciate your support during the initial transition period.
Another significant event is our upcoming Member survey, which will be distributed soon. We’ve once again partnered with Kynetec, a leading agricultural market research firm, to conduct the survey. This activity will evaluate our performance against our Strategic Plan and priorities, while also assessing the effectiveness of our programs, initiatives, communications, and engagements. We look forward to your feedback.
I’m excited to welcome three new team members this month, expanding the PHA team to 50-strong – read more in this edition’s Staff movements section. Congratulations to Dr Yasmin Chalmers who has been promoted to the role of National Manager, Partnerships, and Kirsten Schulz, who has been promoted to Project Coordinator in the Partnerships team.
This year also brings significant external changes such as the new legislative framework for the Australian agricultural levies system that came into effect on 1 January. Key features of the levy system remain the same, but the new legislation is more streamlined, making it easier to understand. The disbursement of levies to organisations such as PHA, is now included in the Primary Industries Levies and Charges Disbursement Act (No. 59, 2024).
Partnerships and collaboration remain at the heart of our work and two weeks ago I joined Nigel Hart, Managing Director of the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and their Chairperson, Sharon Starick, to meet with Adam Fennessy, Secretary of the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), and Justine Saunders, Deputy Secretary of Biosecurity at DAFF. We discussed our continued collaborative efforts and as well as the Grains Biosecurity Plan.
Here’s to a year of growth, collaboration, and progress!