Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I thank the minister for addressing some of the issues that came up in the briefing and in my examination of the environmental standards that we are moving to disallow today.
I say from the outset that I will be supporting the disallowance motion because, once again, as is so often the case here, we settle for second best. We have a long and sorry history on this island of government and its entities being too close to industry, which leads to regulatory capture. The context behind these environmental standards is important to understand. I am supporting this disallowance because the Greens want to see us have genuine world’s best practice environmental standards and technical standards for the salmon farming industry. Our position is that industrial fish farming should be moved out of inshore public waters into deeper waters or onto land.
Where I grew up in Queensland, they farm prawns and barramundi on the land. I am sure there are other creatures of the sea that are also found on land in a much more sustainable way. Having looked at these standards, and having listened to the minister and the two briefings that we have had, I do not have any confidence that they will improve the marine environment.
The reason we can be reasonably sure that these standards are subpar is how quiet industry has been about them – very quiet. Luke Martin, for example, has morphed from being the mouthpiece for the Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania to being the spokesperson for Salmon Tasmania, which is there to present a united Tasmanian front for an industry in Tasmania that is entirely foreign‑owned. They are all multinational foreign companies that have paid no company tax for the past three years, and pay in total, as I understand it, about $1,000,000 in total across the industry for their leases.
Luke Martin has stated:
This industry will not concede one single fish or one single job.
That is the foundation and the backdrop for my cynicism about the development of these standards. We have had JBS, which owns Huon Aquaculture, who paid $4000 a ticket to have dinner with the Premier, Jeremy Rockliff. The Premier is reported to have said, and the Greens asked a question about this in parliament in 2022, to one of the Batista brothers who was there:
It is not going to be popular but I am here to tell you we will back your industry all the way.
Then, shortly after a ground‑breaking and deeply distressing IMAS report on the state of Macquarie Harbour and the future of the Maugean skate, Henrique Batista in The Australian and on the front page of the Mercury called for salmon farming regulations, already so inadequate that we have the Maugean skate on the brink of extinction, to be further weakened. And we were threatened by this partner in a global multinational corporation when he said that, if the Batistas’ demands were not met, hundreds of millions of dollars of potential investment would be at risk, which would be, quote, ‘A huge loss to the state’.
Here we are, industry is quite comfortable with these environmental standards, and that should tell us everything we need to know about them: business as usual, regulatory capture, a weak Environmental Protection Authority, which, because of the politics, oversaw the expansion unchecked of fish farming in Macquarie Harbour; knew that the water was becoming more and more toxic to species in the harbour; knew that there were impacts on the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, which reaches into Bathurst Harbour; saw mass fish kills in 2015 and 2018‑19.
The EPA has been hobbled here on this island ever since it was established, because that is the way we do business here. Government bends over to industry every single time. It would be different in some ways if we were dealing with Tasmanian companies like they used to be, Petuna, Huon Tassal, but they are not. They are multinational predatory corporations which have huge reputational problems.
JBS has had a record of bribery, price fixing, tax evasion and worker exploitation, and it has overseen massive deforestation in the Amazon jungle. And this is the corporation that our Premier toadies up to every chance he gets, at the expense of coastal communities and our coastal marine environment. And one of the big problems with the set of standards that we have is that they build on a failed adaptive management plan, which is there to accommodate industry instead of understanding, as was made clear to us this morning by the Environmental Defenders Office, the Independent Science Council, that we need to recalibrate and have ecologically‑based management plans as they now do have, as I understand it, in Norway, Scotland and New Zealand. And, when we asked the question this morning, there are new regulatory frameworks in those jurisdictions that have seen profound impacts on their waterways as a result of unchecked industry expansion. How is the industry responding to that different framework which goes into deeper understanding of the ecological impacts and is driven to protect marine ecology?
Well, apparently, industry in those countries is adapting just fine. They have certainty, they have a set of strong regulations. There is a level of public trust in the products that they produce because governments in those countries have recognised business as usual was not working and moved to a modernised ecological management planning framework for regulating the industry.
Something both terrible and sad has happened today. Minister Plibersek, who is still sitting on an EPBC decision over the 2012 approval of the expansion of fish farming in Macquarie Harbour, has announced the successful hatching of a Maugean skate egg in what has been dubbed a world first. So, why do we have Maugean skates in tanks, trying to get them to breed? Because, according to IMAS, over the eight or nine years since fish farming was expanded in Macquarie Harbour to 2017, Maugean skate numbers crashed in Macquarie Harbour by 47 per cent.
This is attributable, on a commonsense basis, to the expansion of fish farming in Macquarie Harbour, which has directly threatened a species that is now critically endangered, and, if members have not read Richard Flanagan’s small masterpiece in The Monthly from May this year, I encourage everyone to read it.
It is called Labor’s first extinction and it is the story of the Maugean skate, which is a political choice by federal and state governments to allow, to monitor, to extinction. Richard says this of the skate:
When this sad tale is told in the future, it’ll be as a chronicle of an extinction foretold, but it is also a parable of what happens when we do nothing, of what happens when we let corporate greed and political cowardice define our world as a lie, and we with it, for when we are putting Tasmanian salmon, branded as responsibly sourced and ethically produced, between our lips, we are swallowing, with it, the Maugean skate, a species as old as Tyrannosaurus rex and known to scientists as the thylacine of the sea.
Today it is reduced to its last refuge on Earth; Macquarie Harbour, on Tasmania’s remote west coast, a waterway six times the size of Sydney Harbour and so remarkable ecologically that a third of it is part of Tasmania’s celebrated World Heritage Area. The harbour, though, with its World Heritage waters, is badly sick from ongoing salmon farm pollution.” [TBC]
The standards that we are debating today will do nothing to save the Maugean skate. It is very clear neither the federal government nor the state government wants to take on the multinational salmon corporations and listen to their own scientists and remove the pens from Macquarie Harbour.
These standards will not change that. We have official government policy to prioritise industry over the survival of a species which has been evolving for billions of years, estimated to have been in Macquarie Harbour for something like 60 million years, and it is unlikely to survive just a decade, one decade, of expanded salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour.
And, so, we are reduced to spawning them in tanks. It never ceases to baffle the Greens why we, as an island community, and why our governments, why we do not demand the very best of industries, which have the privilege of operating in and benefiting from our environment. We apply weak, lowest-common-denominator laws and regulations. We let industry write the laws and the regulations here.
When I was preparing for this motion, I remembered a conversation that I had with palawa man, Rodney Dillon, about what the D’Entrecasteaux Channel was like when he was a kid, when he and his mates would go down there, these pristine waters, rich with life and fish and abalone and oysters. The way Rodney describes that, it was like a paradise. And it was, he was comparing that with the state of the waters now. He said it is very hard to catch a fish there and said you know what you see all through the bottom of D’Entrecasteaux Channel, he said you know those little worms, he said those little worms on the sea floor, they are everywhere now.
I have not had it confirmed because I have not dived down to have a look, but I suspect they are the same Dorvilleid worms that are now infesting Macquarie Harbour because of the amount of fish faeces, let us face it, the nutrients in that harbour. This comes to an issue that as human beings, given the time scale of our life – which is relatively short – do not really understand the sliding baseline.
We see an environment and to us, particularly in Tasmania where we are so privileged to live in such a beautiful place, to us it looks perhaps healthy and normal. But, Rodney Dillon’s story tells us that within the space of one lifetime, there have been profound ecological changes in D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Because we are talking about a set of standards that are adaptive management to business as usual, that even grandfather in the existing leases, we are guaranteeing a slow insidious damage to the ecology of Macquarie Harbour, D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Storm Bay, up near Okehampton Bay, because we do not understand the sliding baseline.
We are dealing with a marine environment today which is in much poorer condition than it was even 10 years ago, and certainly in poorer condition than it was 40 years ago. The problem with the ocean, is that you cannot see what is underneath unless you go diving, or unless you have access to the science that is rigorous and independent and tells us about the state of that ecology.
We have got a long way to go here. It is an odd analogy, but Tasmania reminds me of that old-fashioned analogy of the beautiful girl at the dance, the most beautiful girl in the room who has no idea how beautiful she is and accepts an invitation to dance with the first con man who comes along.
That is what Tasmania is like in some ways, we have got it all with the most beautiful place. We have more coastline per unit area than any other Australian state or territory. This island is kissed by three oceans, the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean.
This island should be demanding the best of us and governments should recognise they are simply the custodians of this environment. Now, I am among the privileged Tasmanians that has a shack. We have a little place at Nubeena that looks out over Storm Bay. In fact, we look out over the pens in Creely’s Bay [tbc Creese Bay? 3.29].
There are definitely more pens than there were six or seven years ago, but when you really feel that impact is when you go around to White Beach when the weather conditions lead to great drifts of slimy sea grassy stink. It is the same thing you see just around the corner in Long Bay, where they are also pens. Sometimes, just for the sort of small horror of it, I try to imagine what is under those pens in a very inshore waterway like we have at Nubeena. It will not be good. It will not be pretty.
Another one of the problems identified with these standards is because you have a government that does not want to take on the industry with existing leases, you have grandfathering provisions in relation to these standards. Overwhelmingly, because we are talking about companies that have existing leases, these standards are going to be a bit of a walk in the park for them because they have been written to accommodate industry again, as we do so often hear. I was disappointed to hear this morning in the briefing while these standards have been developed and consulted, the EPA director has taken no steps to regulate the industry. None at all apparently, in a process that has taken some two years.
There are many powers there for the director now to bring that industry into line somewhat. I am sure the EPA director, having had a look at some of the data and the science relating to Macquarie Harbour and the pending extinction of the Maugean skate, would have untapped powers to deal with that, but it will not happen because here in Tasmania, industry invariably calls the shots. We are poorer for it, because we are dealing with substandard standards that have been roundly criticised by organisations like the Environmental Defenders Office, the Independent Science Council, Neighbours of Fish Farms, the Peninsula Group and on it goes because the standards are substandard.
That is why they are being criticised. That is why I am so thankful to the member for Nelson for providing this opportunity for parliament to have a look at these standards and understand what we are being asked to accept. We are being asked to accept second best again. Until we have a legal and regulatory system that understands we are part of an ecological system, that sliding baseline will continue to perplex us.
Members, I am sure, have read the materials provided by the Environmental Defenders Office. One of the issues that has been raised constantly by coastal stakeholders and the EDO, Independent Science Council and the like, and everyday Tasmanians who can see it for what it is, is the lack of transparency on the data. I listened carefully to what the minister said. He said something about the enormous discretion of the minister to provide access to some data. This gets us to one of the biggest problems with this industry, opaque. Government is too close to it and we are not being provided with readily accessible data on the operations of finfish companies and the impact on the marine environment, including those species which are part of the marine environment.
Why should we accept as a standard that the EPA director has the discretion to release monitoring data? What is wrong with being open about the impact of these industries on our environment?
JBS, Cooke Aquaculture – they do not care about Tasmania’s marine environment. That is a statement of fact. What they care about is profit. Pure and simple and their record as corporations is very shady indeed – both of them. Why should we accept this opacity around information that will help Tasmanians understand? What is the state of the industry? What impact is it having? How are any regulations or legislation or standards improving industry operations and restoring, to some extent – would it not be great – the health of the marine environment?
To give the EPA director the discretion – we have a portal for other, less relevant, potentially less contentious information – to decide what we can see is not good enough. The EPA director also gets to decide many things in these standards with too little reference to independent scientists. I heard what the minister said before about inviting scientists to be part of developing the technical standards. I thought his language in relation to those scientists concerned was a bit glib and dismissive, because he said ‘if they claim to be so concerned’. They are concerned. They know what they are talking about, minister, and they have every reason to be concerned.
Ed Butler, from the Tasmanian Independent Science Council, came to brief us this morning and made it clear – as if we needed to be told, but maybe some in government need to be told – that these standards are not world’s best practice. We know world’s best practice applies an ecological management lens over industrial finfish farming as we now have in Scotland, Norway and New Zealand.
Ed Butler, with 40 years of environmental science experience and a specialist in marine and coastal waters who spent some time working for the CSIRO, says the environmental standards fail to achieve world’s best practice at multiple levels, but principally because they do not contribute to ecosystem‑based management. They rely on a flawed allocation of fish farming zones in Tasmanian coastal waters without the prerequisite application of authentic marine spatial planning to ensure equity and impartiality in evaluation of uses and conservation in state waters.
The precautionary principle has been substituted in practice by the substandard version of adaptive management. The precautionary principle is so critical when you are dealing with a sensitive and complicated marine environment on which so many species, including us, rely. Applying the precautionary principle to the operation of Tasmania’s finfish farming industry should be the basic, but it is not.
You talk about the precautionary principle to government ministers and they just look at you like you are a fruit loop. It is so alien to our legislative and regulatory framework. Mr Butler goes on to say:
The effectiveness of the environmental standards is diluted further by the excessive discretions and determinations embedded for the EPA director.
They are extraordinary when you look through the standards. Everything – every significant direction, decision, application of policy and determination of technical standards is a decision of the director, with very little reference to outside, independent, expert health. That cannot possibly be best‑practice governance.
Mr Butler goes on to talk the fact that sufficient transparency and accountability are not provided for environmental monitoring or reporting on evaluations, decisions and other actions of the director, and the regulation of stocking and production of farmed fish is inadequately comprehensive. He talks about what a blunt instrument total permissible dissolved nitrogen output is; how baseline environmental assessments and broad‑scale environmental monitoring programs are not fit for purpose; an over‑reliance on compliance instead of a holistic evaluation of the ecosystems in which aquaculture is situated. Again – and this has been the practice for a very long time here – all of the monitoring data that is gathered is provided by industry, and you can be sure it is applied inconsistently between governments.
I was interested to hear what the minister said about EPA audits of operations. I gather that is an audit of the data that has been provided by industry. Is that correct? For the record of Hansard, the minister does not want to answer me.
Mr Duigan – I do not have to answer your questions. You are making a contribution. Away you go; knock yourself out.
Ms O’CONNOR – Well, yes, you are.
Mr PRESIDENT – Order.
Ms O’CONNOR – It says here:
At all stages of environmental assessment and reporting, demonstrably independent experts must fulfil these roles. Therapeutant management needs to be raised from administrative compliance to international best practice, with licencing of all therapeutants, close monitoring of antibiotic resistance and other environmental effects …[TBC]
It goes on to talk about light attenuation and noise management, and failing to consider effects on wildlife.
Let us be realistic here, the Rockliff government’s policy is for industry expansion. That is the policy framework that these standards have been developed in. There are plans to go into other waterways around the island. We know that. There are zombie leases waiting to be picked up. These second‑best standards are there to facilitate industry expansion of an industry which, increasingly in Tasmania, is causing deep concern, particularly in and around coastal communities. I know plenty of people, and I am one of them, who will never, ever eat farmed salmon again, because I know, first of all, what environmental cost it comes at, but I also have a fair idea what they put in that fish, and I do not want to eat it.
One of the issues that came up probably about four years ago was the Tasmanian Marine Farming Panel and the resignation of two expert scientists who had raised concerns about the impact of industry expansion on Storm Bay. One of them is my neighbour, Lois, and the other – Tasmania, I love it – is Louise Cherry from Cherry Consulting, who has written, I have to say, quite a depressed submission on the salmon standard. Louise is someone who has given a very large part of her life trying to help this industry be genuinely best practice. Louise says:
As a former member of the Marine Farming Review Panel, I called for a salmon standard to hold operators equally accountable to high standards of environmental protection and to create an even playing field for investment. In the ensuing five years there has been little traction. The released documents for consultation are grossly inadequate, with the main issues being the absence of technical details, the absence of trigger limits, the continued over‑reliance on visual indicators, and the application of director’s discretion instead of specificity. [TBC]
Based on the inadequacy of what has been provided, I am only able to provide a summary of the following comments. Technical detail is absent now. We have had a reason given for that from the minister, therefore preventing specialists from commenting. There are no trigger values and no operational actions identified for those trigger values. The draft is peppered with director discretion, but the EPA has a history of not utilising available powers, and it is nonsensical to place the director in the position where they have to use discretionary powers which they have never used, or rarely, if ever.
There is no requirement for public environmental reports – as are common for high-impact industries. How do you build trust and transparency without public reporting?
It is deliberate, the hiding of the data, for not being open and transparent about the impact of the industry on our inshore public waterways. It is deliberate and it continues. All plastic items used on-farm should be specified, tracked and contained. Some of our fish farm marine debris makes its way over to New Zealand.
Baseline environmental assessments only apply to new leases and are exempt in emergency situations. There is no provision in the standards that deals with existing lease areas and slow-degradation of waterways ‑ that sliding baseline I was talking about earlier. Louise Cherry says :
Biogeochemical modelling is not mandatory – blatantly inadequate. Broad scale environmental monitoring plans should be designed by an independent scientific body and assessed and approved by a scientific panel, not the director. [TBC]
Absolutely, at a bare minimum, absolutely.
The standard states that benchmarking will be established by the director ‑ the all-powerful director . Benchmarking is the standard and should be against best practice environmental management, not against the open-pen salmon farming that is increasingly being outlawed in other countries. [TBC]
She signs off with :
Highly disappointed that after five years this is all that has been developed. On a positive note, the font was quite nice. [TBC]
I believe Tasmanians have been sold a pup with these standards. Tasmanians keep being told by government ministers and even bureaucrats that we have a world’s best practice salmon industry. That is a lie. It is manifestly absolutely untrue because world’s best practice does not drive a species which has been in that body of water for some 60 million years, as far as we know it, to extinction within 10 years.
It is not world’s best practice to provide no openness and transparency to the people of Tasmania about the impact of these pens on the marine environment. These are not world’s best practice standards, because industry likes them, and we know industry likes them, because they have not said a word about them. And that is a pretty good sign, isn’t it?
The context for these standards is a government that wants to expand salmon farming around the island. A government that has demonstrated it is too close to industry, a Premier who has made a promise to industry that he will do what they want him to do so these standards are not even green-washing. I genuinely do not mean any disrespect to people who work for the Environment Protection Authority, because I understand you work for the EPA because you care about the environment. You want to be part of an effective regulatory response so that we are delivering genuine sustainability in world’s best practice. But the EPA has always, no matter how you tinker with the foundational act, the EPA has always ultimately done exactly what the government of the day wants, and what the government of the day wants is to please industry. This government wants to make two multinational corporations who pay no company tax, who could not care less about our marine environment and coastal communities happy.
It is more interested in keeping JBS and Cooke happy and quiet than it is in making sure we have genuine world’s best practice standards, that we are protecting marine ecologies and that we are not disenfranchising coastal communities who for years now have been sounding the alarm about the impact of these pens on inshore waters and their cries have been falling on deaf ears in the major parties. Absolutely, members.
I am a realist, but really hope members see through this rubbish greenwashing about world’s best practice or what we were told in here the other day, which is an absolute porky when one of the bureaucrats said, ‘Oh no, industry doesn’t like these standards’. Rubbish, absolute rubbish. Not true. The industry is quite comfortable with them. They have made their position clear. They want weaker regulations. Luke Martin has made his position clear. Not one job in an industry that is mechanising rapidly, I might say. Meanwhile the Maugean skate is being driven and monitored to extinction as a result of a political choice by the Liberal Party down here and the Labor Party in Canberra to do very little. To establish a management plan which is about monitoring, when government knows because IMAS, its own advisers, told it, state and federal governments know if you want to save the Maugean skate, you have to get the pens out of Macquarie Harbour. This decision –
Mr Duigan – Did not work in Bathurst Harbour.
Ms O’CONNOR – I thought you were not engaging with me on the floor. You cannot have it both ways.
It is a decision on the part of governments to let that species go to extinction, just as it is a decision on the part of this government and the federal government to allow the Swift parrot to go to extinction. I am certain that in both cases industry is just waiting for the last one to die so it can get on with further expansion and massive corporate profits at the expense of the people of Tasmania and our environment.
