Fishing industry under threat

Transcript

Hi, I’m Senator Malcolm Roberts and I’m in Rockhampton with David Swindells and Rob Pie. They’re both fishermen, they’ve been fishing for many years. And I am absolutely stunned and shocked with the stories I’ve heard in the last hour and a half. So we’re just gonna pick a couple of really startling stories. Can you tell us what’s involved when you catch Black Jewfish?

Well, just for me to go and catch a Black Jewfish, which has a quota on of 20 tonne for the commercial sector.

So that’s for a year, the whole commercial sector gets 20 tonnes of Jewfish. Just 20 tonnes for the whole year. I think this year it took 48 days to catch that quota. After that, we were not allowed to go and catch any more. But, while I could got and catch ’em, just to go and catch this fish, I had to ring up fisheries every morning before I left the boat ramp.

Were they in Brisbane?

Oh, gotta ring up Brisbane, on an automated system, which isn’t real good. Then, once I go out there fishing, or I catch a fish, when I come home I’ve got to ring ’em before I get to the boat ramp, let ’em know how many fish I’ve got. I’ve got to the boat ramp, then I have to take ’em to the wholesaler. And when I go to the wholesaler, all this period of time I cannot let that fish outta my sight.

So you can’t even have a leak?

Oh, I wouldn’t want it to be for too long. But anyway, then I can’t let it outta me sight. Then, once I’ve sold it to the wholesaler, I then have to do what they call a CDR, docket to the wholesaler. Then he can have it. Then I have to ring up Brisbane once again and tell them who I’ve sold it to and the weight and the number of fish. And I thought that would be enough. Then I go home again, I then have to put it into my normal logbooks, to send that to Brisbane again. And I have to send that to Brisbane within seven days of entering it in of catching the fish. Now, these regulations are over the top. Now, the State Government has to come and do something for the fishermen. I’m sick and tired of the fishermen being the lower class. It happens all the time. We are not to be stood on. It’s about time the public and the State Government got up and stood up for us.

Now, fishing is one of the biggest, I think it’s the world’s biggest recreational sport, maybe apart from golf. So, you’re not opposed to recreational fishermen. But, if a recreational fisherman catches a Black Jewfish, does he have to do this?

No, if a recreational fisherman catches a Black Jewfish, all he has to do is bring it in whole. He is not allowed to gut it or anything, same as we’re not allowed to gut ’em.

Doesn’t have to report it?

He doesn’t have to report it.

So, just one thing, before we move off your topic and go onto one of Rob’s. The 48 days of catching Black Jewfish for the whole industry, 20 tonnes, last year it was 48 days. So the rest, the other ten and a half months, there’s no Black Jewfish caught?

There’s no Black Jewfish caught commercially, so the public doesn’t get any fresh fish, once again. Like the net free zones, when they brought them in, they stopped 36% of the wild caught Barramundi being fed to the Queensland consumer. Now, don’t our Queensland consumers have some rights? Or is it only the recreational fishermen that they’re looking after? And as far as I’m concerned, they’re only there to get votes. Votes do not put feeds on the table.

Rob, can you tell us quickly about the costs involved? You’ve got what I would call a dinghy, it’s a big more than that, but it’s a dinghy. We’ll get some photos of it. And it costs a recreational fisherman or anyone who wants to buy that same boat with the outboard motor about $25,000. What do you have to pay for it?

Well, if I was to tear the backside out of it now, and to replace that boat it would cost me upwards of $70,000, without me putting equipment on it to shoot away and retrieve trawl nets, as they class the net with fisheries.

And even though the fish take notice of the moon and the tides and what have you, and the weather and the climate, they don’t pay attention to whether it’s weekend or not as far as I know.

No, no.

But you can’t fish on the weekend, even if the tides are suitable and the moon’s suitable.

I can fish in certain parts of the river, but with the net free zones, when there was nets in the river allowed, that was classed as weekend closure, which allowed the commercial fishermen only to work until 6 p.m. Friday night. It was closed from 6 p.m. Friday night to 6 p.m. Sunday afternoon. And then that was open again on 6 p.m. Sunday night for the commercial to set their nets. So, on the weekend, if you called it weekenders and pros clashing, they saw that weekend clash as a way of softening the blow on it and avoiding the fights or whatever may be. Now the net free zones have been declared, the net free zones still have the trawl areas. The big trawl area here is still closed for weekenders for no apparent reason.

No data, nothing.

No.

A lot of these regulations are not based on data, they go against the data. We haven’t got time now, but you’ve given me phenomenal examples of how this is actually hurting the fish that they’re supposedly trying to protect.

Yes.

It’s making it worse for the Barramundi and other fishes.

Yeah, well not only the Barramundi. Like, the Barramundi, they have problems, they eat their own young. And up to a fair size, actually, I’ve caught fish years ago, like probably a 30 pound Barra, probably had three fish up to 10 inches long in it.

So, you’ve actually noticed

Yes.

That there are fewer fish now with the restrictions that you’ve got on you, with fewer fish now than before when there were no restrictions because what you did was keep the balance.

Yeah, well what we used to do, we’re allowed to keep, until the new logbooks came in, and they threw the logbook from the offshore fishery at us for the trawl fishery and out of about 20 different species that you can catch in the offshore trawl fishery, we only catch about five here. So, it’s a useless piece of gear that we’ve gotta fill in that doesn’t reflect what we can catch. What we can catch is prawns, we catch different varieties of prawns. We catch small mullet, herrings, gar and similar fish. If we catch the prawns, we can keep them. But if we catch herrings or gar or small mullet, we’ve gotta return them to the water.

The people are being heard here. Not only the fishermen, but everyone who eats seafood in Queensland, because we’re bringing in more imported seafood because the locals can’t catch it. And it’s just absolutely insane.

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Government has nationalised the fishing industry

Australia has the largest continental shelf fishing zone in the world yet we import close to 75% of our seafood. Why?I had a chat to a couple of fishermen in Mackay to learn about their lives and the problems in the industry.

Transcript

Okay, we’re in the harbour in Mackay with lots of fishing boats behind the camera and I’m with Steve Andrew, the state member from Mirani, a One Nation member of Parliament, Ben Smith, who’s a fisherman out of Bundy.

Yep.

Bundaberg and Paul Newman who’s from Cairns, but you guys fish just about anywhere, don’t you?

Yeah.

Along the East Coast.

Travel the coast, yeah.

Wherever the money, or we think we can do the best.

Get the prawn.

Yeah.

So you’re based in Cairns but you’re in Mackay, you’re based in Bundy, why’re you in Mackay?

It’s just the time of year, we generally, over Christmas, work down home and then from first of March, which season opens here first of March, from then on, we work north of here, sort of thing, from here through to Cairns.

And how long to do you go out at a time?

Oh look, average would be 25 nights.

25 nights in a row.

Anything up to 40, yeah.

And you are up to 100?

Quite often we do a 100 day stint, yeah. From Cairns North, we’ll use some other ship’s services and do 100 days straight.

Wow. And how much fuel do you take on, what does it cost you to fuel up for a month?

$25,000 roughly a month.

$25,000 in fuel a month?

Yeah, that’s roughly, you know.

Do you have to pay excess on that?

No.

No, okay. Well, you do and then you can claim it back.

And what does it cost every week? A thousand bucks or something in insurance you said?

Oh look, between, say, 700 and 1000 a week.

Wow.

With the two boats, I think, 16, 18, a quarter or something like that, and I’ve actually had to tone down my insurance ’cause the premiums keep stepping up so much.

So you’ve got very large costs. What’s your turnover a year?

Look, you generally aim for about a million dollars.

Wow.

Generally, you need that, you need that.

So, for example, a new main engine in one of my vessels is about $120,000, $130,000.

Then you’d put a gearbox on the back of that, that’s $80,000 like it’s–

The fella helping you put that engine in, he’s often $100 to $150 a hour and the slipways where you might do said job can be as much as three or four hundred dollars a day.

So getting a prawn onto our plates is an expensive venture, and it’s risky?

That’s where the insurance comes in, yeah.

Well, it is, it’s a risky game.

It’s like anything, it’s as risky as, you know, there’s ways to manage the risks basically.

‘Cause you’ve got X amount of knots, you can go at X amount of knots?

Weather?

And then after that, your insurance is null and void, that’s what you’ve gotta be careful of.

Not necessarily, no.

Not exactly, no.

But it’s up to the captain as to what he sees fit and most of us are smart enough.

We’re here now, we’re only in town now ’cause with the risks of safety with this–

Because you understand the weather events are impending but even if it was just a normal weather event, you could work behind the reef in that league, in the league of the reef or the oils.

Can I just say, those of us left fishing today, numbers are only 250 odd east coast trawlers now, the safety of our vessels and the fact that we’re still here speaks for itself.

You’ve got about seven or eight different licencing with all your monitoring as well on top of that, so the red tape’s huge in Queensland and you’ve, you know, the vessel monitoring, all your satellite stuff, of course.

So what was the fishing fleet, say, 20 years ago?

1,500.

1,700.

1,700, and what is it now?

At any one time, I think there’s less than 200 of us active licencing.

So you’re down to about 12% of what it used to be 20 years ago?

Absolutely, yeah.

And yet, now, we’ve got the largest continental shelf fishing zone in the world, okay? And yet, we import, and we’ve only got 25 million people, we import almost three quarters of the seafood we eat, and where do we import it from? Number one place is China.

Yeah.

Which has got a tiny coastline compared to ours, massive population, and yet, they send their seafood down here, and then the second biggest place that sends us seafood is Thailand, but here’s the killer, guess which country has 36% of the world’s marine parks?

Us.

Us. The UN directly manages some of our coastal areas, the rest are UN guidelines that state and federal governments manage, so we’ve got a hell of a lot of our fishing zones shut down.

Shut off, yeah.

So now, one question, and you guys chime in if you want to, so we bring prawn into Queensland, it says in there, and the government tells us you can eat these prawns but don’t take them fishing.

And isn’t that just crazy?

Is that serious?

That’s the white spot related thing.

The bar for our export product is here.

I know.

The bar for our import product is here, and I have to do battle with it to sell it, to sell my good product to the people of Australia

So you can eat the white spot prawn, but you can’t feed them to the fish?

You’re not allowed to go fishing with them.

You can’t put them in the environment ’cause it can–

I’m sorry, have you heard anything so ridiculous in your life.

What we’re doing, the government is actually allowing us to import disease and destroy our bio-security area ’cause not everyone’s gonna take heed to that. Those words are so cheap.

It’s only a guideline.

Exactly.

So that brings us to the last point, and that is that you guys have been jerked around a lot by government regulations, and they’re not based on science.

No, they’re not. There’s groups that get on the government’s case obviously, whether it’s environmental, recreational fishers, GRMPA, there’s just that many of them. They’ve gotta listen to them and see they’re listening, but I mean everyone’s got their own agenda.

And we’re such a minority.

Yeah.

You know, we’re not great numbers.

If you’ve got 200 businesses left, and we’re fishermen, we’re not scientists, we’re not any of those things, all we want to do is go and do what we’ve paid our money to do, and that’s basically all–

There are really decent scientists who agree with what you’re saying that the fish are not being depleted, they’re not being over-fished, it’s bullshit.

Yeah, that’s right, yeah. And what they’re actually doing is, everywhere they close off, they’re squeezing us into a smaller area.

So what do you think happens?

But you’re not only getting squeezed into a smaller area, you’re getting squeezed in the area with the recreations as well.

How big is this coastline for him from Bundaberg and me from Cairns to meet here?

Yeah, exactly.

Because we’re pushed into one area.

Your dad would have taught you, and I know Jim Edwards and the old fellas taught me, you go out there, you take what you need or you just take that bit, and you know where to come back, doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

It controls itself to a point, and yeah, we don’t need all the overregulation.

It sort of comes back to common sense, you know, you protect what you’re trying to get

You know what the real problem is, and we’ll finish on this one, the real problem is that we’ve got a state government that goes looking for votes in the southeast and spreads misinformation about what’s happening and then people in the southeast think that they’re doing good for the reef when they’re not.

And the recreation sector compared with us, we’re so small, we have votes.

They’ve got quite a big voice compared to us.

Anyway, thank you very much for going out there so often and getting us good fish, healthy fish and prawns. Thank you very much.

No worries, all right.

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