A Dutton-led Coalition government has vowed to ban Chilean salmon imports, arguing they pose a serious risk to Tasmania’s salmon industry and the broader environment.
Shadow Environment, Fisheries and Forestry Minister Jonno Duniam said the ban would be enforced immediately if the Coalition wins the May 3 federal election.
“It is a slap in the face to Tasmania’s salmon workers and the industry that the Albanese Labor Government has allowed the importation of Chilean salmon products,” he said.
“These products pose a very real threat to our salmon industry and the wider natural environment, risking the introduction of new salmon diseases into the state.”
Salmon Tasmania CEO Luke Martin backed the Coalition’s stance, warning that current imports pose a “profound” risk to local producers and could potentially shut down the entire industry.
“The Chilean industry doesn’t take much to do a bit of Google searching and see just the scale of the issues they deal with around pathogens and disease outbreaks and practices that are not conducive with our industry,” Martin said.
Martin said the decision to allow Chilean imports was based on a 25-year-old risk assessment that fails to account for current biosecurity threats.
Duniam pointed to recent challenges faced by Tasmanian salmon farmers as a clear sign of how vulnerable the industry is to disease.
“We all saw what happened this summer when a new, naturally occurring disease struck salmon farmers in the south. Just imagine the damage that an imported disease could do,” he said.
Martin stressed the industry’s concerns are specifically about Chile, not competition from other countries.
“The Tasmanian salmon industry, Australian salmon industry, has got no concerns about imports coming in from Canada or from Norway … It is the Chile factor,” he added.
“That’s the real concern we’ve got here … It is purely about an absolute deep concern we’ve got around biosecurity.”
