Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I rise after a long, hot summer weekend to speak on behalf of many of the people in my community of Franklin and other people who visited over the weekend with the hope that they would enjoy the beautiful, clear, sparkling waters of the Huon and channel rivers. I want to speak on behalf of all the communities who are affected by what they have seen over the last month and what they saw when they tried to go to the beach on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
What they saw were stinking, rank globules of fish fat lining the shores of the beaches they went to, an oily sludge on top of the water in some areas, and soupy, murky, lifeless waters in the sea when people went into them. It was a very shocking and deeply outraging experience for many people. Others have talked about being depressed at where things have got to.
The beaches affected were Verona Sands, Charlotte Cove, Randalls Bay, Ninepin Marine Reserve, Mickeys Beach, Drip Beach, Gourlays Beach and Surveyors Bay – which I hear from people that there is evidence that that beach swept three times over the weekend by Huon Aquaculture staff to get rid of the fish chunks and residue on that beach – Garden Island, Huon Island, Kay’s Beach, Eggs and Bacon Bay, Abels Bay, Roaring Beach, Conleys Beach on Bruny Island. This was the tip of the iceberg when you consider the remote coves, the bays and the headlands, let alone what is in the water column that is out of our vision. The communities that were affected were Cygnet, Lymington, Garden Island Creek, Randalls Bay, Bruny Island, Verona Sands, Gordon, Surveyors Bay, just to mention a few.
People felt deep anxiety about going to the beach. It was a real fear that people had – for their pets, for their children and for themselves – because of the mixed messages and the lack of action that they have had from the government. There were mixed messages about the impact of the diseased fish on their health; there was a failure of the government to take any real actions, especially to provide them with information about going into the water. People have fear for the futures of the areas that they have invested their lives into and great outrage at the EPA and the government for, in the last couple of weeks, parroting industry talking points.
There is a determination amongst themselves to make decision‑makers listen – for this event not to be the one that people turn away from, but actually look and understand that this is something which has happened because of the failure of this Liberal government to regulate, to hold the industry to account and to prevent these sorts of marine devastations occurring.
Communities are coming together, from the Tasman Peninsula to Carlton, Cygnet and Dover. I want to give a shout‑out especially to the locals and the community campaigners who have done the work to bring this evidence to the public attention. If it was not for them, if it was not for the Bob Brown Foundation taking that drone footage over fish farm pens, we would have not seen the images of the extreme cruelty of taking live fish and putting them in with dead fish into a container, putting the lid on top and suffocating them.
That is the sort of stuff that is happening. It is only because of campaigners doing this work that we have seen the dead, rotting fish, that we have seen the globules of fish fat and chunks of dead, diseased salmon on beaches. Thank you to them. Thank you to the neighbours of fish farms for their work.
Of course, what has happened, the failure to manage our marine environment and the expansion of fish farms, their push of the global foreign-owned corporations trying to go further into Storm Bay has meant that new communities in Carlton River and Dodges Ferry, South Arm, the Friends of the Bay, have developed in response.
People demand action and we are supporting them, demanding that we get fish out of these inshore areas and get them onto land. We need an inquiry into this issue and we need to understand the failures, we need to hold the industry to account and we need to hold this Liberal government to account for failing to regulate and allowing this crisis to occur in the first place.
