CHARLES WOOLEY
Another fisherman – known as Mr Flathead – is our great state’s latest champion of the people
This is truly the age of disillusionment. Confronted with economic and political challenges from ambitious totalitarian regimes like China, our democracy in Australia seems by comparison directionless and insubstantial.
The constant revolving door of leadership and the repeated insidious and arrogant undermining of elected prime ministers this week gave further cause to ponder if our democracy is still worth the fight. Well of course it is and this week I encountered a bunch of brave and angry everyday Tasmanians who are fighting for their country, or at least their patch of it, and I support them wholeheartedly.
They are patriots who love this place and love their coastal way of life. I’m planning to join them; leaving the shadow of the mountain for the sunny Mediterranean reaches of the distant eastern shore. In fact I’m bound for Carlton beach, on the fringes of lovely and pristine Norfolk Bay.
It seems trouble follows me. I find my new community caught up in the Tasmaniawide environmental war against Big Salmon. Hundreds of people at Dodges Ferry and on the Peninsula have been overflowing halls and community centres to protest against the bizarre decision to relocate diseased fish into the uncontaminated waters of their bay. That’s to say Norfolk Bay is THEIR bay, not Huon Aquaculture’s bay and not the Liberal Party’s bay. With so many attacks now on our traditional Tasmanian way of life, it is high time we sent clear instruction to our remote, indifferent and arrogantly obdurate government. We want our state run for the people who live here. Not for people who don’t. Not for foreign interests, not for tourists, not for big business, not for quick profit takers, not for politicians but for us, the people who live here.
This week I encountered the stirrings of Tasmania’s own Boston Tea Party. A gathering of hardworking middle-class citizens, some of them self-employed and none of them people whom timeserving Liberal politicians too often snidely describe as ‘the anti-everything brigade’.
Recently in the Braddon by-election, a fisherman called Craig ‘Garbo’ Garland humiliated the out-of-touch schemers and plotters of the Liberal Party by handing victory to an equally undeserving ALP. Well, there wasn’t much choice between a twotime loser and someone who couldn’t work out their own nationality. Garbo was the standout and let’s hope next year he goes for the Senate.
Comes the time, comes the man.
Now at the other end of our island there has arisen another fisherman who is also a champion of the people. He is known as ‘Mr Flathead’ but in fact Mark Duncan is a tousle-haired salty character running a tourism fishing charter business. He has turned out to be a popular, articulate and passionate advocate for the part of Tasmania he loves. If he hadn’t blown the whistle, the secretly planned relocation of contaminated salmon to pens in Norfolk Bay might have quietly proceeded. Now there will be a fight.
“There was zero public consultation and the public has been outraged,” he told a packed meeting at Dodges Ferry. “No attempt at consultation with us. Just secret backroom deals between the Liberal Party and Huon Aquaculture. It’s not our fault that salmon farming killed Macquarie Harbour. Not our fault that Pilchard Orthomyxovirus (POMV) killed 1.3 million fish there. But now in Norfolk Bay it looks like we are next.”
The POMV virus is as nasty as it sounds. It is adaptable and has mutated a number of times and has already jumped the species barrier from pilchards to salmon. “Where might it go now?” ask the protesters. Huon Aquaculture wants to relocate surviving salmon they hope are cured, but which might remain infected, into what they call an ‘isolation site’ in Norfolk Bay. “We won’t cop this,” Mr Flathead told the meeting, “We will stick it up them.”
And it looks like they will. That meeting of conservative non-political folk has a radical plan to embrace the spirit of Dunkirk and the Franklin. They intend to sail a smallboat flotilla across Norfolk Bay to occupy the site of the pens.
It will be a spectacular vision and will certainly draw national media attention, especially if the Hodgman Government sends in the cops. Politics in Australia is dumb enough, as we saw in Canberra last week as the Libs handed the next election to Bill Shorten. But it is even dumber down in the little league of Tasmania. On the stormy waters of Norfolk Bay there is little freeboard for our one seat majority Liberal government. Right around the state they have alienated their own conservative coastal base while generating bad publicity for the Tasmanian salmon brand.
Pilchard Orthomyxovirus sounds most unappetising and best kept quiet. Mainland buyers won’t like it.
The protest meeting considered the effect of a possible social media campaign directed against Coles and Woolworths for selling the controversial product.
Government spin has been promising a multimillion-dollar expansion of the salmon industry but now their highhanded, secretive and out-of-touch attitude brings the smell of stinking fish to the table.
So expect the Norfolk Bay small boat protest to be a huge one. Tasmanians have the highest per capita boat ownership in the Commonwealth and craft from all over the island will join the protest flotilla because at heart we are a saltwater people. The problem is that our out-of-touch politicians appear at heart (if they have one) to be a cafe latte people.