Port Lincoln To Become Iron Ore Port – Tuna Industry Appalledff

Source: ABC News

The export of iron ore through Port Lincoln has been approved by the South Australian Government.

Centrex Metals will build bulk-handling equipment at Port Lincoln to export more than 1.5 million tons of iron ore per year from its Wilgerup mine on Eyre Peninsula.

There has been strong opposition to the project at Port Lincoln with some worried that mining exports will threaten the clean image of the area's seafood industry.

But Mr. Holloway says the approval includes environment safeguards.

“That was all about ensuring that this facility can exist in harmony with the other activities in Port Lincoln. Iron ore is exported form a number of other ports particularly in Western Australia, ports such as Geraldton and Esperance both of which have significant fishing industries.”

Seafood industry representatives say they are appalled by the approval. Tuna industry representative Brian Jeffriess is angered by the approval. “This is incredibly naive government and bad public administration and it's quite breathtaking in a sense of how bad it is,” he said.

The Southern Bluefin Tuna Industry Association's David Ellis says the exports could cause irreparable damage to aquaculture.

“These big boats coming churning up the sediments. We know what that did to tuna many years ago. It created massive mortalities and it’s going to have the same effect for all the other aquaculture industries that have been developing,” he said.

Centrex managing director Gerard Anderson says the fishing industry claims of environmental risk are unfounded.

“In fact they arguably know that they’re rubbish because they commissioned their own report by CSIRO and they're quite happy to tout that, you know, iron will create algal blooms but they don't actually make copies of that document available to people,” he said.

“The conditions of approval are nothing extraordinary - if we couldn't do the exporting to the standard that we expect then we shouldn't have been given approval so we are confident we can meet all of the conditions of approval set by the minister.”