Gwyn, Nick And I met with Barry Penner The new Environment Minister this morning. The meeting was to give the reasons we felt the blanket bait ban proposal but forth by Al Martin Director of the Branch was not warranted.
We went over our brief with the Minister with Nick taking the lead on it and he of course did a top notch job. The minister asked some good questions and as he is new to the job we expected he would.
We then talked to Al Martin and we were pleased to hear it does not look like it is going to proceed.
Mr Martin added he had received a lot of letters on this, I then asked if most were against it and he said they were.
Once again it shows how important letter writing is.
We had a good discussion during our hour meeting and Mr Martin's recommendations for the 2006-2007 season will be coming to Barry's office for his approval in September. We told him we will be avaliable if required to review the recomendations then but the three of us felt the proposal is history.
I presented Barry with 12 sheets of the petition of a few hundred names. I will also be sending the orignals to the Premier in the near future. If you have not signed it, it still is not too late. Thanks to those that signed it and wrote letters, it is very important to do so.
Rodney has a copy of the brief we presented for discussion and I will ask him to post it for those interested.