Mr Abbey received a warm response as one of the guest speakers at the Mortlake Big Brekky for Business as part of the Great South Coast Small Business Festival at Olivine Restaurant on Friday.

Speaking later to The Standard at the site of the saleyard which is due to begin operation in January, he said those involved in the Warrnambool Livestock Exchange had “been very negative in their attitude” towards the Mortlake yards, but it didn’t bother him.

“The Warrnambool saleyards is a bit like Nokia,” Mr Abbey explained.

“The head of Nokia (resigned in July) and basically said Nokia had done nothing wrong, it just failed to change. Everyone had a Nokia 10 years ago and now they have iPhones.

“At the end of the day it will be producers who decide where their livestock goes to get the best price, and we think this new state-of-the-art facility here (in Mortlake) with more numbers and more buyers will result in less livestock going to Warrnambool.” 

He told the business breakfast part of the appeal of Mortlake as a location was it was “surrounded by weak selling centres”.

“There’s not enough competition (at council-run yards),” he said.

“If you bring it all into one centre, you create more competition. This has the potential to be the biggest cattle selling centre in Victoria. Within a 200km radius of Mortlake there are 1.6 million cattle.”

He told The Standard that the Warrnambool yards’ days were numbered once the Mortlake yards opened.

“If we drop Warrnambool’s numbers by 20 or 30 per cent, Warrnambool City Council will question the viability of leaving their yards open if it’s losing money,” Mr Abbey said.

He said that during the first 12 months of his saleyards at Yass, three of the “five or six council yards” in the area had closed.

“Two of those were probably going to shut down anyway (but) Goulburn was the one that was operating and now it’s shut due to a lack of support. All the agents are now on board there.”