Ms BADGER (Lyons) – In the past, Tasmania has had a mantlepiece that we could proudly put our business brand on with great confidence. Clean and green, that is who we were for decades. We were the magnificent wild state, where people could come for fresh produce. They could come and have fish out of our fresh waterways. There is no point greenwashing it; this is no longer the case.
How can businesses in Tasmania have confidence when we see, over and over again, deals being done behind closed doors for the same old boys’ club while everyone else is sidelined?
The salmonoid cartels are a perfect case in point. We have mum and dad fishery businesses, oysters, fishers who cannot have confidence in the fresh waterways because there are big toxic salmon companies that are polluting them. The nutrient levels in our waterways are going through the roof, building up sludgy muck on our rocks and our pristine bays. How can tourism operators have confidence to take people there – people who have come from elsewhere around the world – to see the beautiful place that Tasmania is, when it is being destroyed by big multinational companies?
It is not just those, it is the restaurateurs as well. This industry is damaging culinary tourism. We are seeing the salmon that has been farmed here in Tasmania taken off the menus of restaurants right around the country at record pace.
Speaking of selling out our environment, let us talk about the tourism expressions of interest process, which has led to 10 hectares of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area listed island, Lake Mabena, leased out to a tourism developer for less than $20 a week. He should have confidence in his business, except that it has been 10 years, and nothing has got off the ground. How can anyone else – the mum and dad businesses that are doing the right thing, upholding the integrity of our Wilderness World Heritage Area – with the developments outside of the protected areas? The EOI process has been an abject failure, and tourism businesses have been left in a vacuum, while the government has kept pushing the privatisation agenda for a few – an exclusive few.
On the subject of killing the planet, what about the native forest logging industry? We are letting those workers down. We are selling off truckloads of native forest logs, ironically on the Spirit of Tasmania to Victoria. They are not going to Tasmanian sawmills. That is not jobs for Tasmanians; they are going to Victorians who have already been paid out $875 million from this archaic practise.
It is time we ban native forest logging here, gave that sector certainty and smartened up the process. We need to ban native forest logging to smarten up, and to smarten up the process of the plantation estate. We need to offer these workers an opportunity to transition to future industries like ecosystem restoration, which will be an ongoing global industry where they can get a fair and consistent income into the future. We have seen successive governments drag their heels on support for the industrial hemp industry. We are now decades behind the rest of the world in this space.
Likewise, single use plastic. There are small businesses across Tasmania that are trying to transition out of it on their own. They are doing so with uncertainty because the government has not put anything formal in place for everyone to consistently come across on the same action. There is so much we can do, but fundamentally, we have to make sure that we have an integral brand that every tourism business in this state can hang themselves upon so that everybody across the world knows what they are coming here to get.
It is no longer clean and green because it is not at the moment, but that does not mean that it cannot be again.
