First, I want to thank Mr. Arnold, because he's right. There are these issues that are constantly coming up, and the department are not explaining themselves. They're making knee-jerk decisions that are impacting people's lives. People are out fishing right now, and some are afraid to go fishing. They're afraid that it just takes one officer to enforce the reinterpretation of the rules and shut them down. They're resistant to making further investments in future seasons. It could affect the market. There are lots of things that are coming into play right now, and obviously uncertainty is the big issue right now. They want this addressed right away.
Here we are. It would literally take two meetings to get this fleshed out, and hopefully the department will back down and we can get them to commit to backing down.
This doesn't just affect the prawn industry; it affects all different fishing industries, because if you talk about reinterpreting the rules, and if they can't check frozen-at-sea prawns that take five minutes to thaw out, how are they going to get a fish that's in the front of a hold on a boat and check that and inspect that? This could be over to other species, so I think this is something fairly serious that affects both coasts and multiple fisheries.
I think we should get the government in front of the committee to explain itself on this reinterpretation of the rules, because it's going to end up transcending over to other fisheries as well, and we've got a lot of fishers concerned about it.
Hopefully we can get this cleaned up quickly. That's what we're hoping.