Animal welfare groups have warned companies in Australia that delays to the ban of the sale of animal-tested cosmetic products (which was expected to be rolled out in July this year) could mean that ingredients tested on animals are still allowed to be imported.

The Coalition’s budget papers have now revealed that the ban will not be brought in until 2019 at the earliest, ABC News reports. And activists are now saying that, in any case, the laws will not make sure that products sold in the country do not have ingredients in them that haven’t been tested on animals somewhere else.

The Greens senator Lee Rhiannon observed that this new law would only be a ban in name and name alone, adding: “People buying cosmetics in Australia, even once this ban has been introduced, can’t be confident that their cosmetics are no longer being tested on animals. We need to go to the issue of the ingredients. What the industry does is import animal-tested products and ingredients. And that’s what we need to tackle.”

In Ireland, meanwhile, a new fund was recently set up to research alternatives to animal testing after it emerged that over 225,000 animals were used for scientific purposes in the country in 2015. The fund will offer support to those who are keen to find new research methods to improve and replace tests on animals.

Ireland’s chief scientific adviser professor Mark Ferguson explained at the time that there are already high-tech testing methods that don’t use animals, such as in silico modelling and organs-on-chips, which typically produce more reliable results in any case.

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