The Galati family business started out as a market garden on Yangebup Road in Spearwood in the 1960s. Tony and his brothers, Vince and Sam, grew up helping their Sicilian parents Francesco ‘Frank’ and Carmela Galati, on the 2-hectare (4.9-acre) garden. Although he worked fulltime at either a local quarry, Jandakot Wool Scours, Robb Jetty Abattoir or as a sandblaster and spray painter on the Naval Base, Frank also had a potato licence.
 
In the 1960s WA was the last Australian state where potatoes were regulated. The Potato Marketing Corporation (PMC), founded in 1946, controlled prices and volumes of potatoes grown, and was self-funded by revenue from licence fees.
 
If a grower, like Frank, also had an outside job, he couldn’t obtain a licence. People got around this by putting the licence under a partner’s name. But Tony’s father didn’t realise this, and he lost his licence. Tony never forgot how this affected his father and as soon as he was old enough, he got his own licence to grow spuds.

In the 1990s, as Tony and brother Vince expanded their market gardens, they bought up more licences. This caused conflict with the regulating body with their policy to restrict the number to around 200 farmers growing potatoes in 1996. Tony argued this policy caused unnecessarily high prices in the market and he decided to fight the Potato Board.
 
'It was an unfair system and people like my family, our friends and others trying to make a living from growing potatoes, were suffering because of an outdated system that was based on favouritism', he said. 'We were forced to only grow allocated amounts of potatoes which made it unprofitable and forced people out of business'.
 
The Potato Marketing Corporation tried to use the Marketing of Potatoes Act to stop the Galati brothers. They had the powers to search premises, confiscate equipment and stop and search a vehicle they reasonably believed may be carrying more than 50kg of potatoes.  In 1998, the Potato Marketing Corporation also refused to accept trucks of potatoes from Galati for not arriving strictly on time. He was taken to court by the Corporation in 2010 and 2011.

Galati, now WA’s largest potato grower, was sued again in 2015 by the Potato Marketing Corporation for exceeding his quota. Prohibited from selling excess potatoes, Galati protested by giving the potatoes away for free. On 14 January 2015 he gave away over 200 tonnes of potatoes.  'It put a lot of stress on the family, and all the staff, but we stood our ground. I had to fight for what I believed in'.
 

 

In 2015 The Potato Marketing Corporation of WA announced plans to take legal action against Galati in the Supreme Court and he was again charged for disobeying an injunction ordering him not to grow more potatoes.

On 1 April 2016 Tony Galati announced on 6PR’s breakfast show that he was running as an independent candidate for the state seat of Baldivis. Famous for his working-class attitude and blue singlet, Mr Galati said he wouldn’t necessarily be donning a suit for Parliament. He admitted later in the day that this was an April Fool’s prank.
 
 
The case was still going through the WA Supreme Court when the Barnett Liberal government deregulated the potato industry on 1 July 2016, abolishing the PMC in December 2016, and the quota system which had dictated potato growing in the state since the 1940s.
Some say the deregulation of the industry caused prices to crash, and many farmers walked away from the state.

In June 2017 Galati pleaded guilty to the contempt of court charge, for defying an order preventing him growing more than 1,049 tonnes of potatoes. He agreed to pay $200,000 towards the costs of the government lawyers to end the legal proceedings enacted against him by the state.
 
When the former Liberal government issued a new writ revealing their intention to continue the legal battle against WA’s ‘Spud King’, newly elected WA Labor Leader Mark McGowan, who supported the abolition of the PMC, said the whole concept of prosecuting a potato grower for growing potatoes was 'unusual and bizarre'.

Mr McGowan said the restrictive laws were responsible for some of Australia's highest potato prices and, of the 66 commercial varieties grown around the nation, only 13 were permitted in WA…'