Preserve the simple joys - eating our own prawns

For as long as I can remember, one of the simple joys of living on the Central Coast is the ability to have a nice feed of Hawkesbury River prawns, washed down with a couple of cold beers and perhaps followed by a nice feed of flathead.

Now it appears that this is under threat.

Apparently the small, one-man trawlers operating out of Patonga and Brooklyn aren't professional enough.

They aren't catching enough fish and they aren't aiming high enough.

The present NSW Government, under the guise of creating a stronger and more sustainable industry, wants to consolidate this industry, perhaps into the hands of a wealthy few and to aim to sell to the export markets of the world.

Globalisation, free trade agreements, profit before everything else, and conservative ideology at its most basic.

Well, a lot of people don't want to build business empires.

They want to go to work and, in this case, supply fresh, local, sustainably caught seafood to the people of the Central Coast.

I personally want to know the prawns I'm peeling have come from a local trawler, not an environmentally disastrous prawn farm in China.

There have been suggestions that the Hawkesbury River Fishery is unsustainable, so how about the government bureaucracy get out of the way and let these fisherman do what they have been doing for 50 years, keeping me fed.

Email, 18 Jun 2016

Ross Cochrane, Woy Woy