Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to take this opportunity to share the concerns of a local worker in my electorate. A few weeks back, I spoke with an abalone diver who told me he was struggling, and he told me it was not just him. Every abalone diver he knew was finding it hard to make ends meet. These are hardworking men and women. They spend long days on the water and longer nights at home trying to square the books. The point he raised was this: our abalone quota system is not working for our divers and it's not working for our regional communities.

Quite rightly, abalone stocks are sustainably managed with limits on what can be taken. The Tasmanian government has created quotas—each one is worth about 238 kilograms of abalone—and it sells the right to harvest these quotas on the open market. The problem is that wealthy interstate and overseas investors are buying up the quotas and they essentially lease the fishing rights back to divers. The quota holders are raking it in, while the blokes who do the work are barely keeping their heads above water. In 2021, the beach price for a 238-kilo quota unit of abalone was $11,650. That's what the market paid the quota owners. For collecting that 238 kilos, divers were paid $2,380, or $10 per kilo, and out of that they have to pay all their fixed costs, as well as wages and fuel.

The Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment commissioned a major report, the Knuckey report, that found that divers' yearly fixed expenses are around $48,000. When you add deckhand wages and fuel, you are talking around $80,000 a year, and that's without the diver taking a decent wage for themselves. For a diver just to meet their basic expenses, they have to win a contract for 33 quotas, allowing them to haul in eight tonnes of abalone. The diver gets $78,000 from that, every cent of it going on bills, while the quota owner hauls in $384,450, most of it clear profit. And, if it doesn't sound fair, you're right: it's not. The system works for quota owners, not divers.

We do need quotas to ensure that our fish are sustainably managed, but the quotas should be owned by the people who do the work. If someone wants to own a fishing quota, they should get on a boat and haul the fish, not sit in an office and pay someone else to take on the risk and do the work. If quotas were owned by divers and not investors, we would rejuvenate our fishing towns. Divers would be able to afford to pay deckhands higher wages, offer more secure employment and run safer, more modern vessels. They'd be getting the full benefit of the market price of the quota. Their hard work deserves reward. We need to see more money poured back into local economies and not stay in the big cities.