Agriculture Minister David Carter has announced an extension to the voluntary bonding scheme for vets to cover all practices that deal with production animals.
The scheme, launched last year, encourages new graduates to stay in an eligible practice by providing a taxable payment of $11,000 for every year, up to five years, that they are working in the practice.
The scheme was originally aimed at practices in specific rural areas. Since then, 20 vets have been accepted into the scheme.
From this year, all practices that deal with production animals like dairy and beef cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry will be eligible, providing the vets receiving the funding will spend most of their time working with these animals.
This is a sensible move.
The difficulty of recruiting graduate vets to work with production animals is widespread so it makes sense that the incentive applies wherever vets are needed.
