There were also occupational health and safety issues caused by dust and many staff at the facilty needed to wear masks when drafting stock pre-sale, Mr Buller said.

"Another major deficiency is the lack of a ring-selling facility, which precludes feature female and bull sales and it is hard to see where they would implement one,"?he said.

"WAMIA has been vocal in wanting to see the yards used for more than two days a week, yet a ring-selling facility has been omitted or more likely culled by WAMIA without proper consultation.

"With foresight a ring selling-facility could also have lent itself to the horse and alpaca industries."

Ms Paliskis said she was happy to take RMAG members on a tour of the facility to go through all their concerns, some of which she believed were unfounded.

Despite Mr Buller's claims, Ms Paliskis said any design errors were not as a result of poor industry consultation.

"Constructi on has begun on modified railing over the feed troughs to prevent stock from falling in, so that problem is being rectified," Ms Paliskis said.

"With regard to the individual weighing rather than pen weighing, we consulted extremely heavily with industry on that and that was the recommendation that came through."

Ms Paliskis said the walkways were actually wider than the ones at Midland, with a lot more frontage.

She said there had been a recognised defect with the wash-down facilities since early on and WAMIA had been negotiating with the builder on fixing it, with remediation work starting on September 1.

With the roof and downpipes, the facility had a cyclonic system which had been specifically designed to have no spillage, Ms Paliskis said.

She said the original design included a ring-selling facility but with budget restraints and through consultation with agents, it was decided it was not needed, especially given the proximity of the Gingin ring-selling facility.

"I'm happy to argue each one of these points," Ms Paliskis said.

Mr Buller questioned the extent of industry consultation and said there were elements in the design that simply would not have occurred had there been adequate consultation.

"There is all this talk about industry consultation but this usually means consultation with other government departments and consultants," Mr Buller said.

"It is about time they started consulting with farmers because without farmers, there would be no industry.

"They've had problems popping up from day one, there are lots of things that aren't as good as they should be.

"I'm the first to acknowledge that there are always going to be issues at any new facility and it will take time to bed them down.

"But when they are actual design faults and these people are taking responsibility and are supposed to be the meat industry authority, they need to step up to the plate and be responsible for what they're doing.

"When they do get it wrong, they need to be held accountable for it.

"As it is, instead of it having the impact on the people who made the mistake, industry suffers.

"From a RMAG point of view, we believe that WAMIA is responsible for many of the ills in the beef industry over here through providing poor advice to the current government and previous governments.

"They are leading government up the garden path with their advice about the industry and they're taking farmers along for the ride."

Ms Paliskis said she believed WAMIA was fully accountable and had not shirked away from responsibility of problems at Muchea.

The authority had been extremely pro-active by working with the builder to resolve problems and working with industry through the formation of a users' group, she said.

"We've had three meetings with the users' group so far and obviously I can't get to every gate on the facility every week, but I've got people like truck drivers who tell me about gate latches and other issues," Ms Paliskis said.

"So the level of communication that we've got with the users of the facility is, in my mind, very good.

"On the level of consultation regarding the design, we've been consulting with industry on the design since 2007.

"In 2010, towards the end of the building, we sat down with livestock transporters and built all the ramps from scratch again because we realised there was a deficiency in the design of the ramps.

"There was extremely intensive industry consultation."

Ms Paliskis said in the first instance, the main concern was the design and the building of the facility itself, with construction of the ramps done last which is why it was not until the end they realised the faults in the initial plans.

"We had the luxury of time to get the design of the ramps right, because when we looked at the initial design we thought there was no way it was going to work," she said.

"So we said right, we need to sit down with the transporters and get this right.

"The facility is not perfect and we realise that but just like any major facility, we are working with industry to get it right from an operational perspective.

"You will not get it 100 per cent right from the beginning because you look at drawings and it looks fine but then you see it in operation and it doesn't work."

Mr Buller said compared to some saleyard facilities in the Eastern States, such as the privately-owned Central Tablelands Livestock Exchange, Muchea had really missed the mark.

He said the RMAG did not necessarily support private ownership over government ownership when it came to saleyards, but he did not want to see WAMIA involved with any other saleyards in WA.

"Finance for the beef industry is hard to come by so we don't want money wasted on inefficiency, poor design and management ineptitude," Mr Buller said.

"We believe that saleyards and other government facilities need to be run efficiently and I think time immemorial has proven that private enterprise probably runs most enterprises more efficiently than government.

"I think government should be able to run things every bit as good as private enterprise but it really gets back to the matter of accountability and I just don't think we have any of that.

"We think our livestock industry should be able to expect better of the authority that is supposed to be governing these affairs on our behalf."