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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-06-17 Daily Xml
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World Aquaculture Conference

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (15:42): I rise today to talk about a significant conference event which occurred in this state just last week: the World Aquaculture Conference 2014, hosted in South Australia. Delegates from all over the world undertook activities which went on for more than a week. The World Aquaculture Society has been in existence for over 30 years, and this is the second time the conference has been held in Australia, the first time being in Sydney in 1999. Last year's conference, in 2013, was held in the US, and next year the conference is due to be held in Korea.

Topics covered almost everything imaginable: technical advances in aquaculture, segments on 'from farm to table', biosecurity, sustainable health development in aquaculture, and ranching, of course, which is something that tuna fishers in Port Lincoln undertake. Other topics included emerging species in aquaculture, and there were addresses on new varieties of mussels, sea cucumbers, urchins, lobsters, crabs, and freshwater crayfish. Interestingly, there was even a segment on genetically modified salmon in aquaculture, which I have no doubt the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries was all over.

Delegates came from the world over. I think the real opportunity, of course, was not just the exchange of information but also the networking that occurs at these events. On Wednesday, I attended a few of the sessions, and on Thursday night I went home to Port Lincoln and attend an event at the Axel Stenross Maritime Museum, where delegates who chose that particular field trip to Port Lincoln gathered. There were representatives of all the local aquaculture industries, including kingfish, tuna, oysters, mussels, abalone, and freshwater crayfish, otherwise known as marron or yabbies.

It was certainly a great event, and I understand that on the Thursday the bus trip ventured up to Arno Bay and had a look at the Clean Seas hatchery up there, which of course these days is concentrating very much on kingfish propagation and farming. It seems to be very much a success, and the kingfish is a wonderful table fish. Tuna ranching or tuna farming—tuna fishing, of course, is a combination of wild catch fishing and farming whereby the wild catch is towed via nets into the closer waters and fed until market. Unfortunately, the weather turned bad on the Friday, a number of site visits were due to occur, so I am not sure what people did ultimately on the Friday, although I did hear that a good number of the Korean delegates finished up at the Marina Hotel eating anything and everything that was raw. So, no doubt, they had a good time.

Just today, I have viewed via the internet an episode of Landline, where they featured the oyster industry, particularly on the West Coast and Eyre Peninsula, and took some footage at Coffin Bay. It was interesting, because it featured a few of the locals: Brendan Guidera I will mention, who is supplementing his operation by growing the native angasi oyster. It also featured Jill Coates and her son Jed, and Rodney Grove-Jones, who is pioneering the propagation of the Pacific and angasi oyster. The angasi is interesting because it is a local native oyster. It was fished out in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century, and has really been reintroduced into the oyster farming situation, one as a matter of spreading the risk and also as insurance against the potential impact of Pacific oyster mortality syndrome, otherwise known as POMS.

So, these are innovate farmers, it is an innovate industry, it continues to develop, and the only downside at the moment, of course, is that time and time again these growers and all those involved in aquaculture and fishing tell me that the cost recovery programs undertaken by this current government are extensive, prohibitive and damaging the sector.

Time expired.

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