00:00I'm here outside this 100-year-old dairy facility on King Island.
00:07It employs about 58 people directly, but many more down the supply chain.
00:12We're talking packers, wrappers, truck drivers, farmers who supply the milk to the factory.
00:19All that staff amounts to about 6% of the island's population.
00:24What we've heard from this factory, from locals, is that without this factory, many of these people would have to leave.
00:32There's no other jobs here for them, particularly the skilled workers on King Island.
00:37They take their families with them, ripping them out of the community, taking their business with them as well.
00:43Dairy giant Saputo made this announcement yesterday.
00:47We heard that in about nine months this facility and the iconic cheeses that come from it would be no more.
00:56We understand those workers were given some notice, but the farmers were not.
01:01We've also heard from farmers that transitioning from their farms, from a dairy operation to a beef operation or closing them down, is a multi-year process.
01:11But they've been given nine months to make a decision on their livelihood.
01:16This comes on the back of a really tough year for farming on the island.
01:20We've got record droughts. It doesn't look like it at the moment, but it's been extremely dry.
01:26Farmers in debt trying to feed their animals, and now this news for them.
01:31On the cheese side, Saputo, which is a multi-billion dollar company headquartered in Canada, says that this brand just wasn't competitive in the market anymore.
01:43And in other Tasmanian brands you might be familiar with, Mersey Valley or The Heritage, they say they're doing really well, but this brand is not keeping up.
01:52It speaks perhaps to the ballooning cost of manufacturing in Australia, where even the slightest extra cost, such as shipping over the Bass Strait, can be really unappealing to a large multinational corporation.
02:06In the dairy space already, Australia doesn't produce enough milk for itself, so this could open the door for even more imports.
Comments