E&OE.
JOHN DE BRUYN:
Good afternoon everyone, my name is John De Bruyn and I welcome everyone here today. Thank you for coming out in support of the salmon industry. It’s a great industry and it’s under threat, and it needs support.
So it’s a very important industry to Tasmania, it’s a very important industry to the Northwest Coast and also our business as well. We are heavily linked to the aquaculture industry – important customers. So, thank you everyone for your support and thank you Peter for coming out here in support of the aquaculture industry as well. I’ll now hand over to Jonathon Duniam.
JONNO DUNIAM:
Thanks John.
It is great to be here with you. My name Jonno Duniam, I’m a Senator for Tasmania. More importantly though, I’m a big supporter of your industry, along with Peter Dutton and the rest of our team; Richard Colbeck, Gavin Pearce and Mal Hingston, just to show our support for you today.
The situation, as John said – and thank you again for having us here in your great business – should never have come to this. The stress that your industry is under, the threat over your jobs and the communities you’re a part of should never have been the case. The fact that the Federal Environment Minister has allowed the Bob Brown Foundation and the Environmental Defenders Office to basically upturn the permits that allow salmon farming on Macquarie Harbour, should never, ever have been allowed to happen.
I can tell you today that Peter Dutton and his team would never have allowed this to be the case. We support your industry, and we will do whatever it takes to ensure that salmon farming continues as it does today on Macquarie Harbour into the future. If we win the next election, that is a commitment we’re making to you: to support your industry, to protect your jobs, to do whatever it takes to regulate, to legislate, to ensure that those of you that work down over on the West Coast, and those of you that work here at De Bruyn’s involved in the salmon industry, those of you that work at BioMar providing this feed, have jobs, can pay your mortgages, can look after your families and make sure that you’re not lying awake at night wondering what’s going to happen. It should never, ever have come to this, and it is my pleasure to be here today with Peter and our team to make that commitment to you.
So, I’ll hand over to Peter now, but thank you again for being with us as we show our commitment to you, your families and the communities you’re apart of.
PETER DUTTON:
Jonno, thank you very much. Firstly to De Bruyn’s, thank you for hosting us today, but most importantly to all of you, thank you very much for being here.
I think the most important thing that we can do at the moment is to send a message and a very clear message of strength and of unity, to be as one in what is a really very significant fight that’s underway at the moment. It’s about jobs, it’s about industry, it’s about making sure that there is a future for you, for your families and indeed for Tasmania, because there is a knock-on effect here. If this decision is made, it won’t be the last one. Let’s be very clear about that.
Something wrong is happening in our country at the moment where you see in New South Wales a gold mine that had perfectly legitimate permits to operate, people had invested money into the business, thousands of people, including local small businesses relied on that mine, it had met all of its environmental approvals, people had jumped and were jumping through all the hoops that were required, and Tanya Plibersek made a decision – which I don’t think was an objective one – it was about what gave her political advantage in her fight against the Greens for votes. And I think that is exactly what is playing out here at the moment.
What Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese need to hear is that there is a human face to the consequences of decisions being made for political reasons. If people are making decisions on matters according to the law, and you can understand the rules and you need to abide by it, that is one way that we should approach any of these matters. Companies can do the environmental undertakings, and they can invest into all sorts of projects and ways in which you can make an industry sustainable, and that’s exactly what your industry has done. There is another way where it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what commitments the companies make, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, and it doesn’t matter how much you sacrifice, that there’s a predetermined outcome, and the Government’s just going through the niceties until and like to live in the bad news of a decision that they’ve already made.
So I believe very strongly that we can stare this bad decision down, and this fight has just started. I want to say thank you to everyone who is here today. Gav Pearce has been front and centre and he’s been lobbying in Canberra, he’s been working hard along with Jonno Duniam and Richard Colbeck as well, and Mal Hingston now obviously is stepping in for Gav Pearce and has the same passion for this community.
I want to say to you genuinely and sincerely today, that we want there to be a future because without the aquaculture industry, without mining, without agriculture in our country, there are no jobs in regional areas, there are no kids at schools, the health services close down, the other jobs in town go because the spouses and people who’ve got part time jobs in other sectors, all of that goes; and to what end? It’s a multi-billion dollar industry and salmon farming, in particular is at the front of it, and we should be proud of it. We should be treating Australians equally. Just because you live in inner-city Sydney or inner-city Melbourne doesn’t make you worth more than somebody who lives on the West Coast or lives anywhere else in regional Australia. That’s the reality.
Our clear message and our strong message that I want you to hear today – as Jonno said before – is that we will do whatever it takes by way of regulation or legislation, to make sure there is a future and a strong future, a growing future, for you, for your neighbours, for your kids because I believe that is what is in our country’s best interests. It’s certainly what is in Tassie’s best interests, and that’s what we’re here to do today.
So thank you for rallying, thank you for that sense of purpose, thank you for the unity, and thank you for being the face, the human face, of the consequence of if a bad decision is made, what that will mean for your futures and for the future of this community.
Thank you very much for being here today. Thank you.
LUKE MARTIN:
Ladies and gentlemen, for those I haven’t met, my name’s Luke Martin, I’m the Chief Executive of Salmon Tasmania, and I’ve had the honour over the last 12 months to represent a lot of you in this room, and I work for the three great Tamanian salmon farmers of Petuna, Huon Aquaculture and Tassal. Something that often gets lost, and I don’t think a lot of Tasmanians understand is just how many other businesses have invested, or are a part, and contribute to the Tasmanian salmon aquaculture industry. It’s no better represented than here, De Bruyn’s – John, Isaac, a family run Tasmanian business that’s invested literally millions to creating infrastructure like this, have grown, employing people. I think John you told me once you tell me once employed 16 mechanics? Seventeen? He’s growing again! Seventeen mechanics. There wouldn’t be many businesses in northwest Tasmania that employ 17 mechanics. Again, symbolic of the fact that that’s all really, in one way or the other, salmon jobs.
Again, when I look around this room BioMar are here, Skretting come up from Hobart, I think some representation from Hobart. We’ve got Polyfoam down the road that opened a multimillion dollar plant, Westbury, salmon jobs in Westbury. So every corner of the State’s touched by this industry, and I think it’s important we always remember and reflect on that whenever we talk about this [inaudible] issue that is clearly front in mind for the people Strahan. It’s very much a part of what people are living with here in Devonport, but it touches every corner of the state. I know there would be workers down in Dover that here in spirit, and workers from the Tasman Peninsula that are here in spirit and in every corner of the state.
Mr Dutton, this is your second visit in the last few months to the salmon industry. It’s one thing to, I guess, use the words, but to actually come and see this industry up front, if it’s here or it’s on the water at Strahan and doing the trip in Strahan on the water and meeting some of the families of Strahan was incredibly important. It’s great to be able to back that in today, and your message couldn’t be any clearer.
This process is like a hurricane that was sort of unleashed, this EPBC process, it’s unprecedented. No one can give timeframes of when it ends, no one can give certainty of how it ends. The one thing’s probably for sure, if it’s a decision that’s favourable to the industry, we’ll be off into the courts, because that’s what the activists like to do. So, we don’t know when it will end. When you’re sitting there in the meeting, as we were last week, with the Prime Minister and he could give no guarantees of certainty about how it would end to us, it shows how difficult and challenging this is for people like us who live and breathe this stuff, but particularly for people who are just going about their normal job in the Tasmanian communities and going home and looking at the mortgage repayments and looking at the kids that are going to school next year and wondering what their futures are like. I know there’s people like that here today, and I know you also represent a whole lot of other people that are in the State that are doing as well.
So, a lot of talk about politics and a lot of politicians that have been addressing us, but when you hear strong messages like that from the alternate Prime Minister of the country, it’s important, it means something and the strong statement that certainly see a future for Macquarie Harbour and salmon aquaculture beyond this year and hopefully, for many more years to come, building on the 35 years it’s been over there operating previously.
Mr Dutton, these people do have families, they do have mortgages, but they also have votes. There’s a lot of talk about this issue on social media from activists, a lot of decisions being made by bureaucrats and policy makers in Sydney, in Canberra, in Melbourne. But we’ve seen this play out before in Tasmania and ultimately the Tasmanian community has their say, and I’m sure your statements today are going to be heard loud and clear and resonate throughout the community over the coming months.
So, on behalf of that, thank you. Thank you for being here. Good luck over the coming months, and thanks particularly for everyone who’s travelled from their workplaces to be part of it today. Make sure you got a snag from the crew from Devonport Lions. How about a shout out to them?
And let’s hope that the next time we’re gathering like this it’s a celebration, and a celebration of certainty and clarity for the people of this industry.
Thanks, everyone.
[ends]