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.
