26 February 2025

Three Federal Government Departments and three separate Ministers have confirmed that salmon laws the Prime Minister promised 11 days ago have not even started drafting laws, making a mockery of his recent letter to Salmon Australia that committed to save salmon jobs in legislation.

If the Prime Minister was serious about protecting salmon jobs, all his Ministers and Departments would have been directed to start meeting with each other, with industry, and for the Bill drafting to have commenced. Officials from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry confirmed at Senate Estimates hearings in Canberra this week that this has not been the case.

With the current parliamentary term all but over, the Prime Minister is leaving his run to create this legislation late. He may even call an election before the next scheduled sitting day on 25 March, which would show that the commitment in his letter to the introduction of new legislation was a farce all along. Should this be the case, the fate of this legislation may be left in the hands of a minority Labor-Greens-Teals (and majority anti-salmon) government.

Shadow Environment Minister, Jonno Duniam, is cynical of the Government’s intentions: “the Prime Minister promised this legislation even when the Government had done no serious work on it. His offer to Tasmania is worth nothing until these laws are passed in the Parliament.”

“Labor are not serious about this. If they were, there would have been a clear direction from the Prime Minister to get this legislation moving. Yet no one from Government had even initiated meeting with industry to commit to making a joint drafting effort to get these laws started.”

“It is tricky and misleading for the Labor Government to say that they support salmon workers when it was their own Environment Minister that forced the review on salmon workers,” Senator Duniam said.

“The Labor Party seem to believe that this issue is finished and that workers shouldn’t worry about all of the problems that they have created. Proof is in the pudding.”