Perth's ‘rebel potato grower’ Tony Galati still defiant despite injunction
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Version 0 of 1. Wearing a suit jacket over his trademark blue singlet and jeans, and flanked by his supermodel son, the potato kingpin arrived at court. Tony Galati, owner of Spudshed – a growing chain of discount greengrocers in Perth – and the man given the unlikely moniker of “rebel potato grower”, has been in and out of court with Western Australia’s potato regulator, the Potato Marketing Corporation (PMC), for the past five years. Related: Western Australia potato battle heads to court after negotiations fail On Wednesday, supreme court judge Paul Tottle granted the PMC an injunction against Galati. He has been ordered not to sell or otherwise distribute potatoes in excess of his official quota, which is set by the PMC and based on the estimated domestic demand for potatoes in any given quarter. According to the PMC’s estimates of how many excess potatoes Galati has grown in the first two quarters of the 2015-16 season, he will either have to export or dump about 3,600 tonnes. Speaking to the media outside court, Galati said that was not going to happen. “They won their injunction but believe me they’re not going to stop us,” he said. “We’re going to grow spuds, sell them, and like I said, no one is going to stop us.” Galati has previously said he’s prepared to go to jail for contempt of court rather than deny his customers cheap spuds. He stopped short on Wednesday of explicitly saying he would defy the court order, but admitted his next steps could “possibly” land him in jail. “The thing is we are in 2015,” he said. “The present government should be absolutely embarrassed to drive us to the supreme court to get an injunction to try and stop us growing potatoes to be competitive in this state. I can’t believe it.” Both the ruling Liberal party and the opposition in WA have promised to deregulate the potato industry after the 2017 election. In light of those plans, Galati said, it makes no sense to take court action against him now. “We are allowed to sell potatoes to south-east Asia but I am not allowed to sell them in my own Spudshed,” he said. “That is just wrong.” The PMC controls the amount and type of potatoes that can be grown in WA, and by whom, and also controls their distribution to five approved wholesalers. It also has the power under its governing legislation to stop and search vehicles suspected of carrying more than 50kg of potatoes. However that provision has not been used for decades. The regulator takes a dim view of growers who exceed their quota and has taken Galati to court twice, in 2010 and 2011, for growing too many potatoes. In 2013, the two parties struck an agreement exempting Galati from much of the potato-related bureaucracy, like the weekly quota system which all other growers and buyers must abide by, but the agreement did not increase Galati’s quota. Galati’s opposition to the regulator goes back to his time working for his father, an Italian immigrant who grew vegetables in Perth. “A lot of guys that couldn’t speak English, they did take advantage of them,” he said. “They were like the potato police. And if you were in the club, they would give you more licenses.” Related: Western Australia potato regulator lists big grower as threat to industry Galati was authorised to grow 4,073 tonnes of potatoes between October 2014 and June 2015 – instead he grew 8,681 tonnes. In January he gave away 200 tonnes of that excess for free, after the PMC threatened legal action. According to the terms of the injunction, Galati is prohibited from distributing more than 1,918 potatoes grown between July and October 2015, and more than 1,049 tonnes grown between October 2014 and January 2016. PMC estimated, which Galati did not dispute, that his actual harvest for that period was 6,643 tonnes – three times higher than permitted. Galati told the court he had already sold excess potatoes from the first growing period as cattle feed. In his written judgement, Judge Tottle said there was a “real danger” the PMC would not be able to effectively regulate the market if Galati was not “restrained”, which could lead to a “disorderly de facto deregulation”. The injunction is just the preliminary step in a longer court battle. The regulator has sued Galati for being in breach of their 2013 agreement, and Galati in turn has launched a counterclaim alleging the PMC is in breach of competition law. The parties will be back in court on Friday. “We’ll see what happens, but we’ll keep on going,” Galati said. “We’re not going to stop.An injunction is not going to stop us.” The PMC declined to comment. |