Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, members mightn’t have caught up with the news that I heard last week that the Albanian Prime Minister has decided to nominate an AI minister to oversee corruption in Tasmania and to make sure corruption doesn’t occur.
Mr Bayley – In Albania.
Dr WOODRUFF – In Albania – did I say Tasmania? Well, this is my point. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had an AI-generated minister overseeing our aquaculture industries and our environment protection, because when the honourable Deputy Leader of the Opposition talks about sustainable industries, I am confident that if you plugged into an AI generator the metrics of protecting the environment, having sustainable jobs that survive in the long term, where there is genuine support for people in regional communities, not fly in, fly out people, not the very few high-end people who are paid, increasingly in jobs that are being automated, actually generate a niche industry.
If you plugged in what sustainability means for the brand of Tasmania, what pristine actually means when you’re talking about our waters, what our brand to the mainland means ‑ when you put those measures in, I am really confident you would not end up with the system of rules and laws that enable international giant corporations to come to Tasmania and plunder our incredibly precious, beautiful marine environment that once was pristine and now unfortunately no longer is in most of our bays, estuaries, rivers and near ocean areas where fish farm companies are farming salmon at the moment, but they’re looking to move to kingfish and anything else they can.
Jobs are diminishing in regional areas. The quality of the jobs and the sustainability of the jobs is diminishing. That is not what a sustainable industry looks like. I’m really confident we’d have an incredibly different set of laws in front of us and there is a way to make the changes where you can walk towards a sustainable industry where you have regional jobs, you protect the environment and you get fish farming out of inshore waters, out of the areas which are so vulnerable, stopping the pollution which is going into the marine environment, that is generating the mess and the impacts on Long Bay, on the growth of algae and slime in shallow waters, as well as all of the problems we’re having with drinking water quality for Hobart and other areas from upstream flow-through hatcheries.
These are all preventable, but this government and the Labor Party choose to allow the environment to be used, abused – and if we go the way of South Australia and we all hope that doesn’t happen – fundamentally devastated by the impacts of over-pollution coming from fish farming. This is something we can prevent. It’s something that the Greens took to the election and there’s a lot of support in Tasmania for making real changes to the salmon industry.
When the honourable deputy leader talks about the devastating impacts on international corporations from what the government’s announced, there’s no change to business at the moment at all from what the Premier has announced, nothing. They’re intensifying production in pens in farms in existing places. They’re continuing with their plan to expand into north-east Storm Bay.
Nothing is stopping any fish farm company from putting in a new application to farm. There are no breaks on this industry. Meanwhile, the marine environment is the thing that’s suffering. We’ve got a Minister for Primary Industries and Water who wants to allow the dumping of an antibiotic. Sustainability has to mean something and it’s got to be about protecting the environment as well.
Time expired.
