Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to talk on the Greens’ MPI on salmon and comment on the disease that has swept through Tasmania’s waterways and killed millions of fish. It is one of the most devastating industrial and environmental failures in recent memory.
The image of dead fish and chunks of rotten flesh washing up on Tasmania’s beaches is not one the public will forget soon, and not one the market should ever forget. There have been 6300 tonnes of fish, at last count, sucked out of industrial fish farming cages, transported to rendering and other facilities, or buried in shallow pits to compost.
The salmon mass mortality crisis highlights the need for a strong and truly independent Environment Protection Authority. This is not a reflection on the people working at the EPA. This is a reflection on the system, and the EPA’s complete lack of teeth and inability to deal with the crisis and challenges facing industry.
The early stages of the crisis were marked by a lack of certainty for the public about whether the EPA or Public Health were adequately managing the disaster. Who was in charge, who was notifying the public? Why was no message put on TasAlert?
The Greens have been pushing for EPA independence for many years. Recent reforms have not gone far enough. The minister is still able to influence the EPA through issuing statements of expectations, which the EPA must abide by.
Mr Garland mentioned Senator Duniam. I will mention Julie Collins, the federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who has also made recent comment on the need to strengthen the Environmental Protection Authority here in Tasmania. We agree with Ms Collins one hundred per cent in this regard. We would like to see a similar response from state Labor rather than its current position, which is identical to the Liberals, of total capitulation to the salmon industry.
In order to be an effective regulator, the EPA needs to be completely separated from government and industry. It is unquestionable that the cosy relationship between the salmon industry and the government has been a factor in this most recent salmon mass-mortality event. Mr Garland has just spoken about that eloquently.
Stocking densities, biomass levels and biosecurity restrictions favour the industry above the environment. We have salmon biosecurity zones that do not prevent the movement of vessels or equipment between those biosecurity zones. We know that the salmon bacteria moved from the east coast biosecurity zone to the south‑east biosecurity zone, but there is no clarity on how or when that happened. Clearly, our environmental laws and regulations in relation to salmon biosecurity were not strong enough to prevent this outbreak, and we can expect more failures in the future unless we take action.
The Greens acknowledge that the EPA is currently doing the best it can with the hand it has been dealt, but it is underfunded and its remit is unclear. Up until 2008, one of the functions of the EPA board, as stated in the Environmental Protection and Pollution Control Act, was to, ‘Protect the environment of Tasmania.’ Labor removed that line in 2008 and it has not been put back in. How is it the Environment Protection Authority does not have enshrined in its overarching legislation a requirement to protect the environment of Tasmania? How can our sole environmental regulator not have the protection of the environment as part of its core functions?
The Greens will continue to call for an EPA with teeth, an EPA empowered and funded to hold salmon companies and other industries that threaten the environment to account. We need to move salmon farming on land. In the interim, to ensure that salmon mass-mortality events do not happen again, we need to ensure that the EPA is a body truly independent from government, including by removing the minister’s ability to issue statements of expectations and statements of intent.
We need to reinstate the protection of the environment as a function of the EPA board enshrined in legislation. We need to require membership of the EPA board to include a person nominated by the Aboriginal community to ensure that it is truly representative. We also need to establish principles to be observed, including that the prevention of harm to the environment and human health is prioritised ahead of mitigation or remediation.
There has been much said about this salmon mass-mortality crisis, and it is not over yet so I am sure there is still a lot more to come. One thing we can agree on with the federal minister for Fisheries and Forestry, Julie Collins, is that the EPA in Tasmania needs to be strengthened. She has visibility of some of these issues and is seeing the failure of the local EPA. She has called for those laws to be strengthened and we agree with her on the necessity of that.
Time expired.
