Question Time

Minister's Recreational Fishing Advisory Council

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (14:05): My question is to the Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development. Can the minister explain how the ballot was conducted for the Minister's Recreational Fishing Advisory Council?

The SPEAKER: It does assume there was a ballot, but I will listen to the answer. Minister.

The Hon. T.J. WHETSTONE (Chaffey—Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development) (14:05): Well, I certainly can. As we know, coming into the 2018 election there was a commitment that we gave to the recreational fishing sector right across South Australia. There are 277,000 recreational fishers in South Australia, and they felt that they had not been given the appropriate voice leading up to the election, so the commitment we gave them was that we would select a panel and they would be there as a minister's advisory panel on behalf of recreational fishing.

We designed a number of persons on the panel—nine in all—and what we first did was we gave the major representative groups a person on that panel. There were four of those groups, and so they brought forward their representative and that was the first four. We then put out for consultation people to have input as to who would like to be the remaining five members on that panel. Of those five members, there would be one who would be a woman, there would be one who would be from the retail sector, there would be one who would be from inland fishing (which would be reservoirs and river) and the remainder would be selected on a voting panel.

People put their names forward, and the assessment panel came up with 42 names. That was an independent two-person panel, and those 42 names were put forward. That went on to the YourSAy website and people were given the opportunity—I think it was one month—to vote for their preferred representative. What we saw as of midday on Monday was that that process was exhausted. As of last night, we have manually counted the votes that have come in. There were about 1,450 votes that came in on the vote process, and we now have the nine-member panel.

That nine-member panel is now going to being verified, re-counted, so that we do have an opportunity to make sure that all that voting has been appropriately done. We are also going to use blockchain to verify the people who voted. We will be the first in the country to use this process, making sure that there is transparency and making sure that those people who have been put onto the advisory panel have been so in an appropriate manner with transparency so that there is no reclaim.