A world-class sustainable seafood industry being banned without a substituteviable fishing source being identified, must be immediately restored for devastated intergenerational family businesses, interdependent regional communities, and domestic supply security of affordable and abundant protein during a cost-of-living crisis, Kennedy MP Bob Katter today warned the PM.
Mr Katter told the Prime Minister that Environment Minister must act on scientific evidence proving that gillnetting in North Queensland’s estuarine inshore and inner reef waters is not risking the Great Barrier Reef’s world-heritage or at-risk environmental assets, nor species sustainability of fish targeted for Australian plates and export of a globally renowned, clean-and-green seafood source.
He said the independent Marine Stewardship Council pre-assessment vindicated outraged industry – reduced to 25 interim gillnet licences since 2024 from almost 250 on the East Coast (about half in Reef zones) that were sacrificed by previous State and Federal Labor governments to appease United Nations threats to declare the Reef ‘in danger’ from climate impacts but not fishing (bar coral harvesting for conditional management, not peremptory banning outright).
“It is a sign of how bad government is when for years, Australia has been a net importer of seafood grown in conditions nowhere near Australian standards required of local industry, and infecting our prawns with white spot disease reportedly from a raw prawn from the major supermarkets used as bait by a recreational fisher,” said an exasperated Mr Katter after decades fighting to protect farmers from imported biosecurity and trade risks of free market exposure on an unlevel global playing field.
“But it is criminally negligent to eliminate North Queensland’s sustainably wild-caught supply of affordable and nutritious fresh seafood prized by tourists and locals alike – and in turn, worsen overall environmental degradation through displaced foreign fishing effort and fish farming to fill a vacuum we’ve created – just because the UN holds us hostage to climate threats caused neither by Australia’s piddling carbon emissions nor our irresponsibly low fishing effort to help feed the world.”
And with separate James Cook University analysis confirming most seafood eaten in Australia is imported – as now labelled under laws led by Katter’s Australian Party for food services including local fish and chip shops now forced to use foreign catfish since domestic shark fishery shutdowns – Mr Katter condemned “spineless governments of all stripes who sacrifice our food producers and regional communities at the wokie altar of international ideology while paying lip-service to science”.
He said the independent assessment to international standards of North Queensland’s remaining net fishery, including iconic barramundi, unconditionally passed every habitat indicator and recorded the majority of threatened, endangered and protected (TEP) wildlife were released alive – with zero deaths of dugong, humpback whales or marine turtles all ranked down to manageable medium risk.
“Still, the Crown has no right to take away the people’s right to sustenance from the land and sea – and yet, our right was taken away from us on a massive scale by the Liberal Party when they closed two-thirds of North Queensland’s fishing industry and took out 2000 jobs from under people. Now, our right to sustenance from the sea is being taken from us by the Labor Party.
“And whilst the Liberals were playing to the environmental push and influences in their own party, the ALP most-certainly plays to those influences and – of course – under their puppet-masters the Greens. Now, we’re out to destroy the Greens – let there be no doubt – to give back to the people of Australia the freedoms our forebears died for in 1215 at Runnymede. In the Magna Carta, they wrote and died for a principle that the land and sea does not belong to the Crown but to the people.”
Mr Katter reinforced to the PM the futility of the 2030 completion of a $9 million government-funded project to find a viable alternative to existing netting that will end three years beforehand – and thus extinguishing the Reef’s only fishery to satisfy UN monitoring requirements by camera and observers; along with three years of data collection to validate mandatory reports of manageable interactions with TEP species, for inclusion in UN conservation reporting due by 2029.
“The Minister has the legislative power and the scientific evidence required to give confidence to our ecologically sustainable northern fishery, which has survived decades of betrayal by successive governments’ overregulation into oblivion whilst allowing mass imports of inferior and unsafe fish.
“Meanwhile, community uncertainty is mounting about a total absence of planning detail for continued local supply when our net fishery is shut down in 10 months – leaving local consumers and hospitality high and dry, and North Queensland fishing communities hanging in the balance.”
Mr Katter concluded by reminding both the Federal and State governments of the dire political consequences of blanket fishing closures on ideological grounds such as in Western Australia, where Labor’s uninterrupted half-century hold on a working-class seat in outer-Perth has fallen to an historic protest vote against major parties’ born-to-rule edicts from double-degree do-nothings in capital city towers that entrench generations of public servants whose vegan shoe leather has never set foot off a pavement”.