Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of government document No. 4 listed in the Notice Paper, titled Northern Territory Fisheries Joint Authority: report for 2002-03. On 17 February, I spent the day with the Bardi community of One Arm Point in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. I went to One Arm Point with a delegation of my colleagues. The task force was in the Kimberley the week before Minister Abetz, and we met with many of the same people Minister Abetz did.

The reason I want to share my experience is that, although the minister was able to find 45 minutes to meet with representatives from One Arm Point while he was in Broome, he did not find time to visit the community itself. In the newfound spirit of friendship and cooperation that Minister Abetz called for in question time on Tuesday, when he kindly asked for the opposition’s assistance to help him do his job, I will share with the Senate what I learnt to help Senator Abetz as he attempts to fix the mess left by his two predecessors.

I was truly inspired by the people I met, who are the traditional owners of what would have to be one of the most beautiful parts of the world. The Bardi are a proud and industrious people. Through their spokesman, Mr Andrew Carter, the Bardi people told us that they do not want sit-down money or to have to rely on the CDEP. The Bardi people want economic independence, real industries and real jobs. And, to their credit, they are getting on with the job of creating these industries, albeit without the assistance of the Howard government.

While I was there I was taken on a tour of the trochus hatchery that the Bardi people have installed adjacent to the township. This aquaculture project is run by members of the community employed through CDEP. A young man by the name of Michael Hunter, who is employed to work on the project, gave us the tour. Michael was proud of the work he was doing and shared in great detail the success he and his community are having at spawning trochus and breeding various species of fish in the hatchery.

As traditional owners and protectors of the trochus fisheries on Brue Reef, the Bardi people collect around 15 tonnes of trochus a year. The community’s licensed pickers are careful to leave small and large trochus to ensure the sustainability of the fishery and they reseed the reef with the trochus they farm in their hatchery. Just to give you an idea of the hard work that is involved in picking trochus, it takes 40 people a whole day to collect around 500 kilograms of legal sized shell. This yearly catch is cleaned and polished by the Bardi people in a workshop on the community. As their highest quality product comes from one of only three trochus fisheries in the whole world, the Bardi have a strong export market for the polished shells, which are sold to the fashion industry in Italy for the manufacture of buttons. This harvest earns the community an income of around $85,000 a year. The money they earn is set aside to pay the next year’s wages for the trochus pickers and the remainder is reinvested back into the community.

The tragedy for the Bardi people is that Brue Reef has been raided a number of times by Indonesian illegal fishermen, which has had a devastating effect on the Bardi’s trochus fishery. To put these raids into context, just one three-tonne raid from an Indonesian illegal fishing boat takes one-fifth of the entire community’s take for a year. And, because the Indonesian illegal fishermen strip the reef bare by taking everything that moves, the reef must be reseeded and allowed to rehabilitate before the Bardi can recommence their harvest. When a reef is stripped bare it takes at least three years to rehabilitate, which represents three years of lost income to the community.

The tragedy is that here is an Indigenous community that is working hard and trying to become economically self-sufficient and create sustainable industries and real jobs for their community so they can get off sit-down money and the CDEP, but they have been let down by the Howard government’s inability to police Commonwealth waters. Luckily for the Bardi people, Jon Ford, the Western Australian fisheries minister, did not sit idle in the face of this onslaught like Senator Abetz’s predecessors did. Minister Ford directed the Western Australian Department of Fisheries to reallocate resources and officers to make the eight-metre patrol vessel, FD10, available to the Bardi community to conduct marine patrols off the reef platforms of King Sound and Brue Reef. This has been necessary because, despite the repeated requests by the Western Australian government for the Howard government to do its job, wave upon wave of illegal fishermen—