Henry E wrote on this subject and grabbed the best lines but I had already prepared the following which was published in the Herald Sun on Friday. It is appalling that the Commonwealth has decided to adopt the Luddite view on the fishing industry by banning new tecnology and equally so that the Baillieu Government has endorsed this. Encouragingly, the Coalition federally has opposed the restraint and the Nationals in Canberra have led the way.
Here is my piece in the Herald Sun
Australia has thrived by achieving high productivity levels, especially in our agricultural and mining industries.
Commercial fishing has had a more mixed success, partly because Australia’s catch quotas are set extremely conservatively. As a result, we are a net importer of fish despite having the one of the world’s largest oceanic territories.
Aggravating this is the Commonwealth Government banning the Abel Tasman, one of a new more productive class of trawlers, from taking part in Australia’s fish harvesting. The ban has no effect on the catch because it is already limited by a fixed quota.
The action was a response to a Twitter campaign by green activists openly hostile to all modern primary production activities. The activists’ campaign persuaded the Government to pass new laws that override the regulatory approval provided by the Commonwealth fisheries management.
This not only denies lowest-cost technology, but tells all entrepreneurs that rules are arbitrary and subject to political whim. This is the banana republic approach to government – without fixed rules, enterprises must lobby to buy favours as a condition of doing business.
The outcome is economic stagnation.
In promoting the ban, Environment Minister Tony Burke falsely claimed this would conserve fish supplies.
Truth-bending is common among environment ministers eager to please anti-business constituencies.
But Mr Burke has taken this to a new low. His trawler ban adds to his long list of productivity-busting measures, which include unnecessary duplications of environmental reviews, costly conditions imposed on projects and lengthy approval delays that have inhibited development.
However, a most disappointing feature of the trawler ban is that it is support by the federal Primary Industries Minister, Joe Ludwig.
In supporting the ban on efficient trawling technology, Mr Ludwig cited the “precautionary principle”, which provides an excuse to curtail productive activity without evidence about any deleterious side-effects.
The “precautionary principle” allows politics to usurp commercial decisions, magnifying the influence of politicians and making increased costs inevitable.
Industry ministers are supposed to promote, not impede, productivity. In the past ALP ministers have occasionally overlooked this.
For example, they supported the union ban on wide combs for shearing – a ban designed to increase jobs at the expense of productivity.
But Minister Ludwig has made such policy aberrations the norm. He banned exports of cattle to the valuable Indonesian market because an ABC program showed apparent ill-treatment of the animals before their slaughter. That knee-jerk reaction created a major loss of wealth for northern Australia’s beef growers.
Minister Ludwig toed the green line in opposing additional dams to provide irrigation. And he also railed against cuts to an unproductive agricultural bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, other primary industry ministers seem to have caught the Ludwig disease that substitutes political for commercial decisions. Victoria’s Agriculture Minister, Peter Walsh, and South Australia’s Fisheries Minister, Gail Gago, have endorsed the trawler ban, absurdly claiming that it would prevent over fishing.
Unless quickly reversed, the idiocy prevailing among agricultural ministers will bring a costly toll to primary production.
The way the fishing industry has been treated by the Australian government – and by successive state governments- is utterly disgraceful.
And I’m not just talking about the latest, ridiculous attack on the trawler for nakedly populist reasons, but this anti-fishing crusade stretches back several years. Fishing could be a major industry for us, but we’ve neutered it and smothered it. A few trawlers going out for Sydney restaurant ‘catch of the day’ menus does not a major industry make.
Bring back fishing. No more license buy-backs. No more marine parks. No more last minute, ra-ra populist destruction of serious commercial undertakings.
dd
23 Sep 12 at 7:49 pm
Are there votes in making a deregulated, expanded, and revitalised fishing industry a priority?
Or maybe The Greens would just start screeching about sustainability?
…. or are both of these things true?
dd
23 Sep 12 at 8:24 pm
Same deal as the timber industry. We now import some 3 billion in wood products compared to exports of around a billion. Using other countries fish and forests while isolating our own seems to be coming a national pass time.
Bronson
23 Sep 12 at 8:42 pm
Beat me to it Bronson!
If you don’t own your resource the next Trade Union Party / New Communists ‘pandemonium’ will shut you down.
Just carve the coast up into saleable fishing blocks and flog them off to the highest bidder. Overseas research shows under fishing reduces the cost of catching fish increasing profits. The New Communists are perfectly capable of buying their own blocks if they want to stop fishing in those blocks.
Forester
23 Sep 12 at 9:21 pm
Now why am I not surprised to hear this.
Can someone remind me why Victorians changed government in 2010. They still got a useless public transport ticketing system, still got a useless desal plant, still got lumbered with so called ‘smart meters’ and the ridiculous Charter of Human Rights is still in place.
There must be lots of Victorians who would like to see a Liberal government in Victoria.
Johno
23 Sep 12 at 9:31 pm
Tony Burke and Labor haven’t seen a renewable resource they won’t take out of production.Victorian Alps,Murray Darling,Toorale Station,Redgum forests,The Coral Sea,live cattle exports….The poor old disAbeled Tasman had no chance.
Barnaby Palin
23 Sep 12 at 9:48 pm
Some years back, Australia claimed a massive amount of ocean as our exclusive zone. it was a huge victory in international diplomacy and there was talk of us increasing our fishing industry to match it, becoming a real heavy hitter.
But instead we get the minister for the environment just enjoys standing there with a starry-eyed smile because he has saved the little fishies from the bad fishermen.
Heads up! We’re not at risk of depleting our fishing reserves. We’re a smart, developed country and we can use the best fisheries management research there is (which by the way happens to include exclusive licenses of fishing zones). We can do this. We can manage fisheries and not-over fish.
There’s no need for this anti-meat-eating, stop-the-fishing boats, leave-the-little-fishies alone attitude.
dd
23 Sep 12 at 9:55 pm
As an ex Commercial fisherman who fished for the best part of thirty years, I am appalled by the bureaucratic attack on the fishing industry… We have been pretty much “ethnically cleansed” from productive society….. The Queensland East Coast prawn trawl fishery is almost gone now, the support industries that relied on it obliterated. The skillbase retired or moved on to other places…. But not as business owners of their own enterprises, they are now merely workers in the mining industry, which in turn is being strangled by Mining taxes and carbon dioxide taxes, etc.
I barely recognize the Australia of my youth… Queensland was once like a different country within Australia. As an economic refugee from Western Australia, back in the Seventies, Queensland was a land of wonderful opportunity. A great place that I was fortunate enought to have stumbled into and thrived in.
Now it is hardly distinguishable from some Socialist European regime… Though I have some faith in Campbell Newman to be a change for the better… The blind obedience to Labor’s Socialist Ecofascism is probably entrenched within the very fabric of the Bureaucracy that Newman’s administration has to work within…. And purging a whole bureaucracy in front of a hostile pro Labor party Media, is something that will take time.
The moment Abbott wins the federal election… There can be no shirking. This country has to be wrested back from the brink of ruin that Labor state and federal Governments and their ecofascist policy and regulation has put it in.
J.Hansford
24 Sep 12 at 1:32 am
J.Hansford
Couldn’t agree more mate you have hit the nail on the head. And Tony Abbott is going to have one hell of problem pulling this country back from the brink. I don’t think he has it in him. He needs to be tough and patriotic and defiantly not politically correct.
shauno
24 Sep 12 at 6:46 am
The same thing has happened in other states.
We’ve learned the surprising truth in recent times that closing down entire industries doesn’t actually cost many votes. Especially, as has been done with fishing, if you do it slowly.
dd
24 Sep 12 at 7:14 am
This is by definition the ALP stance: Jobs Not Productivity.
And every time the party of trade unions fights to keep jobs, they destroy a little more of Australia’s productivity.
The economy has moved on from the 1890s. There is no longer the same wide open opportunity to work at almost anything as J.Hansford has pointed out.
Now productivity is the massive bottleneck – unless we can do more with less (ye gods, I sound like an environmentalist), we will remain uncompetitive.
John A
24 Sep 12 at 7:45 am
The irritating thing about the ‘precautionary principle’ is that it is selectively applied. No-one is concerned about taking precautions against the harm done if we don’t do something they disapprove of – back in the olden days, it used to be called opportunity cost.
The trawler debacle has been based on lies, and sleazy governments plus an uncritical MSM have conspired to deceive the public.
What with this and effectively banning a Dutch MP from visiting Australia, you would think that the Netherlands was a hostile pariah country with which we want no dealings. At this rate, it soon will be.
johanna
24 Sep 12 at 9:46 am
“What with this and effectively banning a Dutch MP from visiting Australia, you would think that the Netherlands was a hostile pariah country with which we want no dealings. At this rate, it soon will be.”
Its bizarre isnt. How did Australia get to the stage where it welcomes Islamic extremists who only preach hatred of the West but bans a Dutch Politician who only denounces the hatred and terror encompassing Islam throughout the world.
shauno
24 Sep 12 at 10:43 am
That’s not actually true. IIRC the catch historically has never exceeded about 20% of the quota. So while it wouldn’t have exceeded the quota, the actual impact would have been much greater than in previous years. One other reasonably sounding point I’ve heard is that the quota was set for the whole east coast area, so you could get localised problems if too many fish were taken from one area, rather than the quota taken from the whole area fairly evenly.
This article spins the confrontation as a green vs. industry fight, but I don’t think this is really the case. There were many Australian based fishermen, both recreational and commercial opposed to the trawler, because they said they were concerned about the impact on their ability to catch fish. Not directly from the quota that the trawler would use, but that they were very concerned about the impact on the fish that feed on the fish that the trawler would take (which is basically bait-fish that is only practical to take in very large scale).
Chris
24 Sep 12 at 11:38 am
J Hansford,
You have lured me out of lurkerdom again.
Have you ever looked at the NSW freshwater commerical and aquaculture rules?
The rules are ridiculous and bizzare. A short summary of anti ecological and anti business rules:
You cannot grow native (endangered) fish in enclosures/dams that might be inundated by rivers they are native to.
You need 900 hrs experience to qualify for an inland coxswain’s rating – which means navigating a tinnie or 5 metre fishing boat on say the Darling or Murray River.
Plus you need to pay out about $6000 of licensing fees before you could legally pull your dick on the boat with the gear in it – including about $800 of BS workcover course costs. Like we all need some NSW entry level PS grad (no offence, probably a young lady who apsires to be a Family Court Magistrate and has never even gone over a river bar out to sea in real life) telling us how to use a fire extinguisher in case our tinnie motor catches on fire! Pure BS.
John A is wrong. The Australian Labor Party and Australian Greens are committed to unemployment.
This is why in vireta delenda est…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-14/australian-marine-reserves-maps/4069666
Never forget.
.
24 Sep 12 at 11:58 am