Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Deputy Speaker, the Greens thank Mr Garland for bringing this matter of public importance on today. We want to focus on the proposal for a new small pelagic fish, including sardine, fishery off the north of Tasmania. Minister Abetz said last night that there would be an investigation into the sustainability of a new fishery. We assume that there are processes ongoing by the government and fisheries scientists on this matter.
We ask what questions are going to be looked at? What are the questions that are going to be investigated? That is the important issue. If we are going to have a sustainable fishery, then we have to be asking what the impacts will be on the rest of the ecosystem that relies on eating those small pelagic fish, including sardines. They do not live in a little isolated bubble waiting for a fishery to be established to catch them. They are part of a moving web of life in the ocean.
The volume of sardines has increased in recent years because of the move south by sardines and other small pelagic fish from northern Australian coastal waters. These fish are abandoning the areas they have inhabited for millennia and moving south because the waters here are colder and they are more nutrient beneficial for those fish. They are doing what they can to survive climate change; they are adapting to climate change. Sure, there have been sardines and small pelagic fish here, but there are also increasingly numbers that are expanding into those populations because of those impacts.
We need to look at what will happen to the ecosystem of other animals that need to eat small pelagic fish to survive. They are the macro fauna and the bigger fish up the food system. Will there be an investigation on the impacts of those species? When large‑scale commercial fishing around the world has taken these sorts of fish out of areas, that has had grave impacts for the ecosystem. The overharvesting of fish has enormous impacts for the ecosystem and it decimates the food source of many communities around the world that rely on these fish to survive.
That is unlikely to be the situation in Tasmania, but we have to ask questions about what the impact will be on large predatory fishes, the large sea birds and the mammals whose numbers we have seen crashing worldwide from overfishing, particularly of sardine fisheries around the world. The Gulf of California particularly has shown the evidence of what happens from overfishing.
We also need to understand what the economic basis for this fishery will be. Mr Garland talked about the possibility of having a sardine fishery for human consumption. That might be desirable and possible, but the reality is the IMAS report from 2023 found that a fishery like this has to be industrial in size to be viable. The absence, they said, of a Tasmanian sardine fishery ‘limits the opportunity for the salmon industry to obtain the tens of thousands of forage fish that it needs annually from a sustainable local source’.
Here we can start to see what is happening in the background. For a sardine and small pelagic fishery to be economically viable, it needs to be large enough in size, and given that there is not an industry established in Tasmania, a fishery for human consumption is extremely unlikely, the report’s authors find. We also know that the salmon companies are setting up a fish meal processing factory. What we are concerned about as Greens is that what starts as a small size, kind of sustainable industry would quickly end up being driven by the requirements for fish meal increasing by salmon farms to grow ever larger and larger, and that would necessarily involve overfishing. We are just calling for caution, because we understand how things operate in Tasmania all too often.
