Dr WOODRUFF – Deputy Chair, I’m very pleased to provide our thoughts on the government Estimates committee process that happened. I will speak as the leader in my portfolios and make some general comments and all the Greens members are going to talk about the portfolio responsibilities they had and the conversations they had with ministers.
The Greens are incredibly concerned about the state of the budget. We’re on record for being concerned about the state of the budget, and we can see the path that the Treasurer is walking us down. In fact, he’s been very open about that. He’s walking us down 2800 public service job cuts as of today. We wait to hear what the next budget will bring, but he has foreshadowed that cuts are going to be deeper. He’s been quite clear about that and we know that the debt that this state is labouring under is like nothing we’ve ever seen before in Tasmania. It is a matter of mainland conversation, the basket case of Tasmania’s finances. If other members don’t speak to relatives or hear from people on the mainland, you should ask them what the current conversation about Tasmania is. Everyone is aware that we’ve had multiple credit downgrades now – two, just in the last week – and that is going to have a devastating effect on the amount of money that we have to spend every single year, every annual budget to servicing the debts that we will take out on any further infrastructure, including the stadium.
Obviously, the Greens oppose the stadium because it is a financial disaster for the state; because we desperately need services, and the funding for them, for people who don’t have service provision today; and because of what it would do to the centre of Hobart and the damage it would bring to the sacred side of the Cenotaph, to our heritage values, – The prime reason people come to Hobart is to look at our heritage, which is not some ticky‑tacky show heritage, but a living heritage. We live our heritage in Tasmania – the Constitution Dock, all the buildings around the waterfront, they’ve been used in recent living memory as active places of industry and manufacture and they exist today representing a lived experience of colonial heritage.
The stadium is proposed to be on a site far more significant than colonial heritage and that is the place where Muwinina people lived on the banks of Timtumili Minanya and they lived for countless generations in that space. It’s a very important spot that, as has been discussed and proposed, should be a site of remembrance, reflection and truth‑telling. It should be a place where Aboriginal people craft and design as a reconciliation, remembrance and truth‑telling site, not a stadium.
The point is, when we went into the Estimates process we were concerned to get information from ministers about what the real costs of the stadium will be to Tasmanians in cuts to services over the long term, and what the current – regardless of whether a stadium is built or not, what the cost will be under this Liberal government with the harsh austerity approach from the current Treasurer in deciding on the priorities of spending in the budget. The real cost to people who don’t already have access to healthcare treatment when they need it and to community services that are already being pinched and are not functioning at the need that people who are offering the services. I’m talking about people like Neighbourhood Houses, food distribution programs, homeless shelters, family violence shelters – all of these places, we know, it’s a matter of record, are struggling today already and the need, we understand, is growing. Into this space we asked the questions, what are the real costs going to be in each area of the Budget, in each portfolio area? What are the decisions that the government are making about spending? What will those decisions mean? What are they cutting out, what are they not prioritising?
Obvious to us as the Greens is that the government does not prioritise ‑ and indeed we found out, will not prioritise ‑ any money to protect the environment, even though we’ve had a State of the Environment Report and member for Clark, Mr Bayley, will go into this in more detail. Even though we’ve had a State of the Environment Report, which has a devastating record for Tasmania and a series of recommendations that the government needs to take up in order to shift us from our continuing state of decline across ecosystems that are the bedrock of survival and flourishing in this state, the government hasn’t agreed to adopt any of them and the government hasn’t put any money into responding to any of them.
Anybody who has responsibility for a Primary Industry portfolio, anyone who’s concerned about rivers and water catchment and Tasmania irrigation, anyone who’s concerned about the impacts on animals and insects that we need to pollinate crops and to support functioning, healthy ecosystem, should be concerned about that. It’s not just the Greens who are concerned about that. It is farmers, it is conservationists, it is people who are living on the land and who understand that this beautiful island that we live on is unique and special and we not only have a responsibility to look after it for the people we represent who live in Tasmania today for their health, wellbeing and prosperity, we also have a responsibility for our future generations because things are going in the wrong direction fast.
I asked the Premier about one of the costs to the budget. One of the worst examples of the bad priorities that the government is choosing to make and it was in relation to the commission of inquiry. A key recommendation from the commission of inquiry is making sure that all children in care have a case manager, setting a maximum caseload for child safety officers, and regularly publishing relevant data. That is a basic requirement to keep children in care safe and protected from potential child sexual abuse in an institution the state government is responsible for. You would think that that would be a funding priority, but we found that this government has pushed back the date for implementing that recommendation by at least a year and likely up to 18 months. That means an extra year and a half on top of the year ahead of us. We are two and a half years away, by the government’s current projection, from ensuring that every child in child safety services has a case manager and that there is a maximum caseload for those case managers so that they can do an effective job, let alone not be burnt out. This basic information, this basic service is not being prioritised and will not be funded and this is clearly a funding decision.
What this demonstrates is the penny pinching that that the Treasurer is doing, scraping bits of money out of every pocket of every government service to make sure that the money that can be there to pay for the stadium, to pay for the interest that we’re already paying on the interest and that we understand will be a compound interest rate. We’ve been warned by Martin Wallace to the Legislative Council, a compound interest rate we will see from the cost of the stadium.
As if things aren’t already bad enough, this government, this Treasurer, wants to ladle on the pain for people who are vulnerable, for people who are at risk, and take away the support and the checks and balances they desperately need. I thought it was shameful when I pointed these things out to the Premier, and he couldn’t actually accept that the prioritising was occurring in that way. He couldn’t accept that there are cuts.
There is no excusable reason to put off for another 18 months, on top of the extra year that it will already take them, the assurance that children who are in care have a case manager. Shame on the Premier for that approach.
The Premier said:
We need to acknowledge the enormous amount of work that has been done: the 57 recommendations and the enormity of the work and the complexity that’s associated with such a large body of work with the Commission of Inquiry.
Yes, sure, it is a big job of work, but that’s not the reason that this particular recommendation is not progressing in time. It is because it will cost money. That is something that the government is doing ‑ they’re pushing all those things as far as possible down the line as they can.
A second thing that I raised with the Premier was our concern about the firearm safety laws in Tasmania and the risk of them being weakened with pressure from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers member, to try and open Tasmania up to unsafe firearms laws by allowing the use of silencers and other sound suppressors, and shooting on public land. We have always stood for strong firearm laws in this state. Christine Milne led the charge and made sure that we had strong firearm laws. We will continue to stand with Tasmania Police, who are also concerned about the changing security environment, to make sure there is no weakening of our laws. It is very clear from recent incidents that have happened, where police were shot at. Only three or four weeks ago police had their car shot at, shot into, bullet holes in the car, and silencers were found on that property. It is a real and current risk.
I was hopeful from the Premier’s response where he said that the only exemptions that can be granted to use sound suppressors must be granted by the Commissioner of Police; currently there are 11 designated NRE employees who possess one of four permitted sound suppressors; and that the use of sound suppressors is subject to very strict conditions and limits their use in certain purposes. He also said, ‘The risks presented by sound suppressors include public safety, misuse by shooters and criminal activity.’ Community safety, he said, will always be the highest priority. Well, Premier, we will continue to hold you to that, because the firearms inquiry that was conducted after the Liberals attempted to weaken the laws following the 2018 election comprehensively recommended that we uphold our national firearms agreement, and that there be no change at all to that agreement or to Tasmania’s position. And if there are to be any changes, they should go to the national level for discussion, Australia-wide, and not be made at the state level. We back our Tasmanian police and we will stand with people who want to be safe from gun violence.
I also spent a lot of time in Estimates talking about the government’s failure to respond to the growth of the salmon industry and the incapacity of the regulations in Tasmania to protect the marine environment, and the interests of people in local communities, from the harms that are occurring from salmon industry operations in Tasmania. What we’ve seen with the dumping of a new antibiotic never before used in Tasmania, florfenicol, in southern waterways has been deeply, deeply concerning to people who live in the south. What we did was uncover the impacts and the staggering volume of antibiotics that have been used.
I asked the Premier about the rock lobster industry and the fact that, just recently, the rock lobster industry had been closed, but there wasn’t any information given about why the industry – in the south, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel area – had been closed. I asked him why the notice didn’t mention florfenicol, can he confirm that the reason the notice was provided was because of the florfenicol that’s being used by salmon companies? And the Premier said, ‘To the best of my knowledge, yes.’
It is a fact that this government is picking and choosing who it prioritises when it comes to the marine environment and the use of law, the rules and regulations about working in the marine environment. It is clearly choosing the biggest multinational corporations over smaller industries and over the marine environment and over local communities. Every single time, when salmon companies want to continue with growing fish to a certain size and to expand the scale and the intensity of production, they get to go ahead. What suffers is the marine environment.
What we’re seeing ‑ and we saw this from the conversations I had with the Premier, the Minister for Environment and the director of the EPA, and also with the Ministers for Primary Industries and Environment ‑ is that the industry knows that there is Piscirickettsia salmonis. Obviously, disease is occurring, and instead of doing what global best practice and the research shows should happen ‑ which is destocking pens that are diseased, fallowing them or moving the pens ‑ it’s continuing to stay where it is. It has now been able to access an emergency application for an untested antibiotic in Tasmania, florfenicol, and it has been dumping it in large quantities.
I thank the member for Bass, Ms Finlay, for her very detailed questions about antibiotic use, because we were a bit of a tag team in the Environment section, finding out how the salmon industry is working. It was very useful and gobsmacking to actually get the numbers. Mr Cook from the EPA did give us the numbers, and he told us the quantity of antibiotics used by the salmon industry in the last six years. In the last six years, the Tasmanian salmon industry has dumped 5946 kilograms of antibiotics into public waterways. That is basically 6 tonnes of antibiotics. We also found out, through the questions that I asked, that in the last 13 days there had been, at that time, 700 kilograms of florfenicol used in just three sites in the Huon and lower D’Entrecasteaux Channel. When I asked why it is that salmon companies are dumping florfenicol instead of destocking their diseased fish and fallowing their pens ‑ which is the way farmers deal with disease ‑ I had no answer to that. The answer is that this government will never apply the regulations to prevent the salmon industry from doing whatever it wants. We saw this time and again. There is the possibility to strengthen regulations, but there is no will to do it. The Premier made that clear in questions I asked him about his statements about putting the industry on notice. He said he will put the industry on notice. He’s talked about putting the salmon industry on notice. But what he’s doing is relying on an independent review which will take 18 months or so, which hasn’t even started. It will take 18 months to get out of the blocks, and in that time, look at the harm that’s occurring, when we’ve already got, today, since the Estimates two weeks ago, there’s another 115 kilograms of florfenicol that has been dumped into the lower Huon and Channel areas.
We understand that the industry is trying to get a permit to dump florfenicol on the east‑coast. They won’t stop. They will continue to do whatever they want in our public waterways. I cannot tell you how outraged east‑coast shack owners will be if they spend Christmas there and florfenicol is being dumped in Okehampton Bay. It will raise the question about what are the harms that are happening to their beautiful waters over there? What are the impacts on the wild fish right near our Mercury Passage and Maria Island Marine Reserve? This is the impact that we have no information about. The research hasn’t been done, but it’s pretty clear from what’s happened in Chile where there are barrens underneath areas where the Chilean salmon industry has been dumping florfenicol for years, it’s obviously having a massive impact.
The Premier talked about regulations that have been put in place since 2014 to protect the marine environment and legislate the salmon industry, but they’re old and they haven’t been kept up to date. As I made the point, they’re no longer proportionate to the scale and the density of production that’s occurring and the expansion that’s happened in the last 10 years in Tasmania. Which is why the government needs to step in and do something now, to prevent something happening of the order of catastrophe that occurred in South Australia in their marine environment.
That is a risk, and we are concerned about it, and so are communities who don’t feel like they want to go swimming in the waters where there’s been nearly a tonne of florfenicol dumped in the last couple of weeks and are not comfortable throwing a line into areas near the treatment sites. They’re angry, and it seems as though the Premier and this government are much more interested in looking after the profits of big salmon corporations than it is in even slightly restraining their actions – even keeping all the other pens going; but even slightly restraining the actions is too much for this government to bear.
It says everything about an industry: Tassal, Huon, Petuna that have been funnelling money into the Liberal Party – donations that have been happening, just at a steady stream, doesn’t even need the money; it’s not about the money. It’s about this government who is not prepared to stand up to the biggest salmon multinationals on the planet. They’re not prepared to do it. They would rather sell out their voters, sell out the everyday Tasmanian who goes fishing, who lives on the water or who loves a healthy marine environment. They’re the people who are getting sold out every day. It’s pretty clear where their priorities are. This government would rather fund a stadium with Labor’s help and push a stadium through that we know is going to add billions of dollars in debt over a decade and will cost – thanks to the Treasurer confirming it in Estimates – it will be costing us money in the budget year‑on‑year, to pay for the interest and to pay, according to Martin Wallace’s comments, compounding interest, $70 million, $75 million, $80 million, $90 million. They’re the sorts of amounts he’s talking about that it would cost over the next short period of time.
In the time I have left, I want to talk about my conversations with the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mrs Archer. I was heartened to hear when I asked her questions about when the Aboriginal Heritage Act would be in parliament. She’s laid out a timeframe for that coming to parliament by, I think she said, the middle of next year. I asked her whether she had an understanding and whether she believed, recognised, and acknowledged cultural landscapes and the value that they hold for Aboriginal people. She said she did, which is great to hear because it’s an incredibly important value that has to be enshrined in law. If there are no protections for cultural landscapes, it will not be possible to have proper protection for Aboriginal heritage.
The example of that writ large, is what’s occurring at the moment on the west coast of Tasmania where this government, Mr Duigan, the Minister for Parks and the Premier, has allocated $10 million to a four‑wheel drive track through the Arthur‑Pieman Conservation Reserve. In itself, $10 million is bad enough when we don’t get the money we need for Neighbourhood Houses, but what is truly appalling is it would be going through ancient Aboriginal heritage and we have an Aboriginal Heritage Act which is woefully ineffective, and worse, the Arthur‑Pieman Conservation Area itself is desperately out of date and needs to be updated. Two things are happening that put some of the most significant indigenous heritage on the planet at risk at the moment is this government’s policy position to open up that heritage to being trashed by four‑wheel driving. The Greens will continue to stand with Aboriginal people and do everything we can to support them in opposing those tracks and to ushering in legislation, which is fit for purpose, and we would expect, and I’m glad to hear the minister say, ‘It’s certainly my wish and hope’ that the Aboriginal Heritage Act ‘will incorporate cultural landscapes.’
I also hope that the minister will be true to her word about the Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage Council and its role. The difficulty for the Aboriginal Heritage Council is they’ve been doing their job; they’ve been making very strong statements opposing particular developments going ahead. They opposed the Arthur‑Pieman Conservation Area being opened up for four‑wheel drives, the Pilitika/Robbins Island wind farm development and also the golf course on Mary Ann’s Island because of the impacts on Aboriginal heritage and their views were completely ignored. What is the role of the minister’s own Aboriginal Heritage Advisory Council if time and time again they make assessments and time and time again they are ignored? Mrs Archer said she will be strengthening the role of the council, and we look forward to that, and we expect it to be strengthened so that it can do its job properly.
Finally, I want to say that there was a commitment to progressing the work of treaty and I expect her to be holding her word, truth‑telling first, she said, before treaty, we expect that pathway to occur swiftly.
