Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Deputy Speaker, it is with great pleasure that we speak to this. I thank the independent member for Braddon, Mr Garland, for bringing this on. This has been a position that the Greens have taken since 2017. It was the formal policy that we took to the 2018 election. At that time the evidence was, from the federal Department of Fisheries was that Tasmania’s salmon industry had doubled in size in the previous decade.
Already, at that time, there had been a Senate inquiry into the finfish aquaculture industry that the Greens moved at the federal level, because of the disasters that were unfolding in Macquarie Harbour. What that inquiry uncovered was dead zones that had occurred in the harbour. It already foreshadowed serious impacts on the survival of the Maugean skate. It also uncovered threats to other native species, such as the handfish and the Gunn’s screw shell. Many others were noted in that inquiry as being at risk of becoming threatened or actually becoming extinct from fish farming.
What we have seen since then is – well, here we are today. Here we are today, and we have a situation now which is entirely of this government’s own making. I firmly believe that if this Liberal government, and the Labor Party, which has supported them all the way through, had taken a different road at that point in the 2015 inquiry, then we could have had a sustainable salmon industry with us today. We could have been transitioning then from 2015, 10 years ago. We could now have on‑land industries like we have in other countries. Other countries are going down this path. What we did in Australia was, through failure of regulations and through cosying up to the big salmon corporates, being the part of the world that was so weak in our regulatory framework that we were preyed upon by the largest international protein‑producing corporation on the planet, choosing to take over one of our Tasmanian industries, so that now all of the Tasmanian salmon companies are foreign‑owned.
It is a terrible place for Tasmanian business. It is a much worse place for our marine environment. In the middle are the workers who Mr Abetz talked about before, who we all have different connections with and who we are all concerned about for a range of different reasons.
The Greens understand that there is no sustainability possible for this industry unless we get onto the land. Let us talk about what the Liberal’s failed policy has done in the past 10 years. It is hard to imagine an industry that could have a worse social licence. It is hard to imagine worse environmental impacts that are occurring at the moment. We have, it seems, an unknown but very large volume of antibiotics being poured into waters that were predicted to get warm from climate change, predicted to have an impact on disease pathogens in salmon populations. The response of salmon companies has been to increase the density of the fish in the pens and increase the risk for the salmon. Therefore, we have a large‑scale salmon disease outbreak on our hands. They have been pouring antibiotics into those fish. We know from the research of scientists that antibiotics spread out further than the marine pens. They spread out long distances. They have been caught in recreational fishing by recreational fishers, with levels of antibiotic in their fish. We know it spreads into the environment.
We know that since then we have seen damage to the World Heritage area from fish farming in Macquarie Harbour. We know we have the Maugean skate now on the very brink of extinction. Federal and state Liberal and Labor parties are committed together to changing any laws that stand in the way of fish farming companies continuing to operate in Macquarie Harbour. They do not care. They do not even care about a species going extinct. They are here to do the bidding of big salmon companies. It is writ large in the response to this mass mortality event.
We know that we had at least three weeks after dead fish were reported floating at the top of pens in the Huon Aquaculture and Tassal pens in the Huon and D’Entrecasteaux Channels before we heard anything from ministers of this government. That is only because we came back to parliament. If it was not for Mr Garland and the Greens asking questions in parliament, and the activists, campaigners and local community who have provided footage to the media, no one would know what is actually going on in our waterways.
Instead, we know there are well over a million fish. We are in the middle of the second week of March, and we know from marine scientists that it is very likely this mass mortality event will continue. That is devastating for the marine environment. It is terrible for people who care about the beaches and the fact that they cannot go swimming in the area.
It is terrible for salmon farm workers who are being forced to work overtime. They are being dragged from all around the state to deal with this event and are being pushed to do things that I do not believe any of them are comfortable doing. I do not believe any of the workers on that boat who were scraping live fish into tubs and putting the tops on them so the fish would suffocate were happy with doing that. That is not normal practice. That is the responsibility of the salmon companies. How dare they point the finger at Tasmanian workers and try to absolve themselves of their responsibility for pushing people so hard in that situation. We have workers who are working in difficult conditions in very heavy weather on the seas.
We have the evidence of community people who have taken photographs of seals that have been shot, seals that have been blinded by salmon company workers to keep them away from pens to stop them predating on salmon. We have had explosives by the thousands let off by fish farm companies, shot covered in plastic fired at seals by the thousands and thousands. The bottom of our inshore waterways and our bays is covered with microplastics, not just from seal shots but also from the ropes, tubes and all the other plastic that comes from an industrial farming operation in the water. It is out of sight, out of mind.
If it needs to be any clearer how little this government cares about the impact on the marine environment, look at the comments from the two scientists formerly on the Marine Farming Planning Review Panel. They noted with regard to the Storm Bay expansion that only eight pages was devoted to an environmental management plan for that massive expansion. It just goes to show the difference to what would be required on land.
This is an opportunity for us to put fish farms onto the land and require them to work under the same regulations as any other farm. We are not targeting them. We are just saying get on the land and do what all other responsible businesspeople do and follow –
Ms Finlay – Like battery hens.
Dr WOODRUFF – No, Ms Finlay, no, it does not mean we adopt the worst practices of farming. We adopt the best practices of farming. Farming practices that are not intensive –
Ms Finlay – They are fish.
Dr WOODRUFF – that do not treat sentient beings barbarously.
Ms Finlay – They are fish.
DEPUTY SPEAKER – Ms Finlay, you will have chance to contribute.
Dr WOODRUFF – We can choose to have the best practices of farming for our fish farming industry in Tasmania, something we can be proud of, something we can control and manage, something that is not affected by the heat of climate change and waters, which will keep going up. It is known now that it is going to keep getting hotter and hotter in our waters. It will be normal to have mass-mortality salmon events in summers to come unless something changes. It will be normal to have diseased fish on our beaches unless something changes.
I do not agree with Mr Abetz saying that there is absolutely no public health risk because there was mixed information that went to members of the community from the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) who reported that the public health department had told them there was the potential for risk and that they should not touch or swim in water where there were dead, diseased fish and rank stinking fish oil.
We have had mixed messages from the government. It is obviously not on top of this because their reflex has been to hide everything about the operations of the salmon farming industry because they are so stinky, because it is obvious from the response of the EPA that they are is not in charge of what is going on. They have no intention of providing us with information about what is happening.
We had the acting director of the EPA on radio last Friday morning and she could not tell us where the non‑compliant waste management sites were. She could not tell us about the stocking densities. She could not tell us about the impacts on the native fish. She could not tell us because the EPA is not really interested in those matters. They are not doing the job they should be doing as an organisation that protects the environment. That is something for the Liberals to deal with.
However, we are here today talking about the proposal for a feasibility study, an independent consultant to undertake work to look around the world at what else can be done and how we can do it differently. The Greens have looked around the world from time to time and there are many places where land‑based salmon operations are happening at varying scales. They are in operation today, we understand, in Chile, Norway, Scotland and Canada. Further developments have also been proposed in Iceland, Japan, the United States and other countries.
It is a fledgling industry and, as with any fledgling industry – I am minded of Mr Jaensch, who was the minister responsible for environment at the time, talking about the development of a recycling industry. He was very clear that when you have a new industry, you have successes and you have failures. You have to trial things and you make mistakes, and you do it differently. We are not blind to the fact that this is a new industry, but we support what Mr Garland is saying. We have to give it a go because we have no other option in front of us.
We cannot continue with what we are doing. We cannot continue to have salmon mass‑mortality events like this, with the cruelty, the antibiotics, the vast amounts of microplastics we are seeing in our waters, with the disease, the biosecurity risk, the impacts on native fish, which has not been researched, so we do not have the information about how it is affecting other fish. These are all reasons why we cannot keep going down the path we have been.
What we can do is have a go, do as Canada did and make the forward-thinking decisions to ban open-net pen farming. Canada made that decision last year, and that will be banned in British Columbia by 2029. We are talking about a transition out of the water as quickly as possible and into land-based farms. We have a real opportunity here. Part of the work that will need to be done will be to look at the animal welfare issues, exactly as Ms Finlay has suggested; to look at the energy implications; to look at the water implications; and to look at how you manage the waste.
Part of any feasibility assessment for on‑land fish farming has to compare what happens now, so we have to have a measure of the nutrient load, the pollution from salmon farming that goes into our waterways. We have to have a balance of the ledger. We cannot look at the benefits of on-land fish farming without looking at the benefits and costs of leaving fish farms where they are. We know it is not measured properly and any independent assessment will say that or if it is, the public does not have the information. We would certainly hope that that would be acquired through a feasibility study done like this. Yes, it would use water on land to have land‑based fish farming. We use water in the water. We hose our fresh, palate‑potable drinking water over fish to prevent them from disease outbreaks. We are already using that. We are already using vast amounts of energy to move them around on the waterway. We already use a huge part of our marine environment.
It would have very little impacts on visual amenity for all the communities on the coastline if they were on land. It would have very little impact, if none, on people with noise, which is such a problem at the moment. It would have very little impact, if none, on the tourism economy. People could come here and they could swim in the water instead of having to stay out because it was full of diseased salmon. They could see our beautiful rivers and waterways that are not polluted by nutrients and that have the flatheads, seahorses, and dolphins back, and all the other life and creatures which have disappeared from the Huon and the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and all the other rivers where there has been industrial‑scale fish farming.
I will finish by saying that we thank Mr Garland for bringing this on, and we strongly support it. We hope that the Labor Party does. Who can really say no, at this point, to an independent, interstate consultant undertaking a feasibility study? What would be wrong with that? If we actually care about the future of fish farming in Tasmania, would we not want to have all the information in front of us so that we can have a genuine conversation about a way forward for a sustainable future for us all?
