Bob Katter's decision to recruit leftwing ex-union leader Dean Mighell to write his party’s industrial relations policy should worry all regional Australians, Queensland Senator Ron Boswell and Senate candidate Matthew Canavan said today.

Labor’s management of the Renewable Energy Target (RET) is a massive failure, Queensland Senator Ron Boswell said today.

“Labor’s mis-management of the RET ranks right up there in terms of massively expensive, wasteful, policy and administrative failures as the carbon tax, the mining tax, debt management, illegal boat arrivals, pink batts, and their so-called Building the Education Revolution program,” Senator Boswell said.

Queensland Senator Ron Boswell said in the Senate today that country of origin labelling for seafood sold in restaurants will be a matter of priority under a federal Coalition Government.

“This would increase demand for locally-produced seafood and lift prices, giving the Australian seafood industry a big boost,” Senator Boswell said. “I know it is a priority issue for the seafood industry across Australia and the Coalition in government will make it a priority issue too.

“Surveys have shown Australian seafood consumers are prepared to pay extra for Australian seafood. However, they have to be able to recognise it as Australian. At present, there is nothing to distinguish Australian-produced seafood from imported seafood on restaurant menus. We will make sure this changes and labelling is applied in restaurants, take-aways, etcetera.”

Senator Boswell (Queensland) (13:45): On 15 January, the Australian newspaper published an article about a professional fisherman in the Gulf of Carpentaria, David Wren. The accompanying photograph showed Mr Wren sitting on a wharf pile with trawlers tied up behind him. That photograph is a perfect analogy of the outcome of the Labor government's treatment of the seafood industry. The logical outcome of what the government is doing is that a lot of fishermen are going to be sitting around on wharves and jetties, getting splinters on their backsides. And it will not just be fishermen but seafood processing workers, chandlery staff and many other employees of businesses supplying goods and services for the commercial and recreational fishing industry. Under Labor, fisheries policy is a mess. Just how bad things have become is summed up by Dick Adams, the Labor member forLyons,in a media release on 27 November. Rather heroically, given that he is a member of the government, he talks about the so-called supertrawler Abel Tasman. He said: 'The community was mobilised to oppose the supertrawler based on unfounded fear, despite the fact that scientists in the field explained that its impacts would be no greater than for other methods of fishing. We should not be managing fisheries by changing the rules in high-profile cases through emergency measures.'