Tony Galati, the self-described “spud king” of Western Australia, has won the potato war.
After a 30-year campaign against the state’s archaic potato regulator, including a lengthy and unresolved court case, the Barnett government has announced the industry will be deregulated from 1 July.
New agriculture minister Dean Nalder, who is just two weeks into the job, made the announcement on Friday. From 1 July, the Potato Marketing Corporation (PMC) will be wound up, and two supporting pieces of legislation abolished, ending the regulator’s powers to stop and search a vehicle they reasonably believe may be carrying more than 50kg of potatoes.
Former agriculture minister Ken Baston, who was dropped from the front bench in the March reshuffle, had previously maintained the government would not deregulate the industry until after the state election in March next year.
But Nalder told reporters in Perth on Friday growers had told him they wanted the matter resolved sooner.
“I met with the head of the industry and they advised that the biggest thing that they wanted was certainty in the marketplace and they were pleading that we get on with it,” he said.
The deregulation will be coupled with a $14m assistance package, all but $2m of which, Nalder said, would go directly to growers once an equitable distribution arrangement could be worked out. The remaining $2m is to support the industry transition to deregulation and encourage WA growers to move into export markets.
“We still see a very strong future for potato growers,” Nalder said. “We don’t see any other vegetable or fruit that has government regulation and a marketing board for an individual fruit and vegetable ... All the advice we have received is that this has been an impediment for the state to grow.”
The call for market certainty followed five particularly quarrelsome years in the potato community and protracted legal battles between the PMC and Galati, the biggest potato grower in the state and sole supplier to his chain of Spudshed discount grocery stores. The court cases centred on Galati’s habit of growing more than his allocated tonnage of potatoes and, in one case that got him on to the front page of a national newspaper, giving the illicit crop away for free.
In November, the WA supreme court granted the PMC an injunction to stop Galati selling or distributing an extra 3,600 tonnes of potatoes grown above his quota. The PMC had previously taken Galati to court in 2010 and again in 2011 for growing too many potatoes.
In last year’s annual report the PMC said “one grower” – it did not name Galati – was the cause of significant challenges in the industry. Galati, in turn, said he was prepared to go to jail rather than stop selling cheap potatoes, and penned a long letter in a wraparound advertisement on the cover of the West Australian criticising the PMC, surrounded by what were apparently letters of support from devoted Spudshed shoppers.
Nalder would not comment on whether the state government, which controls the PMC, would withdraw its case against Galati given the quota system would soon cease to exist, saying that decision would be made at “arm’s length” from him.
He said the government would work with the PMC’s eight staff to see if they could be redeployed in other government roles.
