I think you need to remove the rose coloured glasses @Symboltest1 and understand that lobbying is common practice throughout industry. It's not a dirty word.
Your idea that the industry will sort out supply issues is farcical and misguided. It suggest to me you know little about the macroeconomic factors impacting the product you're invested in. The supply constraints are not simply domestic, and therefore can not be resolved over night by the international market. You have Europe and US in the depths of winter right now with surging case numbers once again, this is seeing a huge uptake in demand for RAT in these regions. So, if you think our little part of the world will be able to generate sufficient buying power to demand that our needs be facilitated through the supply of these tests, you're wrong.
The fact that we're supposedly only seeing 10% of the expected maximum daily case numbers at the moment and the damage its already doing to the supply of labour throughout several industries, suggest that the current close contact policy health setting would need to change as we progress through to 25K daily cases, otherwise we'd see complete economic disruption. We'd have no health staff to man the hospitals, no bar tenders to pull our beers, and ambo, police, and fire personnel would all be out of action. On approaching a transition to 25K daily cases the public health policy will be tweaked, I believe, to allow a RAT in lieu of a negative PCR for persons to return to the work. This will see a further massive increase for demand of these medical devices and once businesses are unable to attain enough RAT's to enable their staff to have access to these screening tools it is at this point you'll see business groups aggressively lobbying politicians for the TGA to get a move on!
I'm simply bemused at the level of complacency you seem to have of the notion that the CareStart test is already approved as being safe for consumers to use, but the same device needs to go through a whole independent approval process again that requires a different company to justify its efficacy.... I can only guess you don't understand or cant see the link between Pantonics and Atomos situation, and the degree of needless red tape being applied here.
So how does red tape and ineffective legislation become efficient? Through being challenged. Whether thats through the courts or through lobbying by individuals or special interest groups.
Finally, I will leave you with the SMH article on the current retail situation of these tests.
How does government increase supply.....through more TGA approvals. Who would have thought!? Lol
(20min delay)