Updates to our import laws

August 12, 2022

So it's fair to say this update is very late to tell you what's been going on with our import laws recently, but with good reason. We've had a number of changes to our laws in the last two years and the handling of it by the Department of Infrastructure has been totally shambolic, and every time I've gone to write a news article on it the facts end up changing and everything is turned on its head. Rather than constantly giving people info that just turns out to be wrong as so many others have I thought I'd wait for the dust to settle and provide a real world idea of what's been happening.

Recent events:

I'll spare you the specific details as it all gets pretty complicated, but the Department of Infrastructure has pretty badly botched the whole transition from our old laws to our new ones. They've announced that changes would take place on certain dates several times now and have then failed to meet their own deadlines and had to push things back as they just haven't got their act together to set up the new scheme in time. This includes extending our old laws for another 12 months until June 2023, as they did not get the new scheme up and running in any workable manner.

The Department towards the end of 2020 also decided to start enforcing the 100 plate limits compliance workshops had under the old scheme (even though they had been allowing it previously) and did so without any notice, which caused absolute chaos. There is almost not a single person in the industry not affected by this change, and everyone is incedibly angry about how the Department chose to do this, screwing over may businesses and people importing cars who bought a car in good faith trusting the Department, and without warning they changed things on us. This resulted in delays for some cars being complied for a very long time indeed, and it's only now that some are emerging form this aftermath.

The current status quo:

So, at the moment we have 3 different import laws running at once. The old scheme, which is due to end June 2023, the interim scheme which was suppoed to be the intermediate step between the two schemes which also ends June 2023, and the new RVS scheme which is for the foreseeable future.

The old scheme is what it is and will eventually end, the interim scheme is roughly similar but allows us to import a few more models. The main focus looking forward is the new RVS scheme, I'll actually keep it brief here as a large proportion of changes to the new scheme are behind the scenes and affect or be visible to you, a potential importer. How compliance workshops do things, the regulatory requirments they have to meet, how evidence packs/model reports are prepared and a variety of other things have changed, but this is stuff that a compliance workshop has to worry about, and won't affect the end consumer so much.

In theory under the new scheme the availability of compliance for various models in various states should become better and this is certainly a good thing, we're far from seeing these benefits though to date as the Department has been so incredibly slow to add cars to the new scheme that many models are still being complied under the old or interim laws.

Some models we are now having complied under the new scheme, and as of June 2023 this will be our only option. The new scheme's biggest advantages are that it does allow us to import some models which weren't possible previously. In particular we are able to import cars where engine variants weren't available in Australia, so for example if there is a hybrid or high performance version of a model that Australia didn't get we can now import it. The new scheme also allows the import of kei cars without much restriction, and it allows provisions for very rare models though that won't affect so many people... that's advantageous to millionaires wanting some rare version of a supercar, but most production vehicles are unaffected.

We do also lose some models when the old rules end in June 2023, some popular cars such as Mitsubishi Delica Spacegears and D:5's won't be importable under the new scheme, nor will Elgrands or non hybrid Estimas.

I know some people love to get tied up in the details and this article is keeping things pretty basic, but from experience most of the time it just adds confusion and misunderstanding so I know I've not gone into the real nitty gritty of our new laws. The changes taking place are of interest and importance to people working in the industry, but to members of the general public looking to import they just need to know if a particular model can be imported, not the complex decision tree our laws dictated needed to determine that!