Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I rise tonight to speak about the stark and confronting truth of a salmon industry that has gone rogue and is having profoundly negative effects on our communities and the marine environment that we all treasure.
Some horrifying figures were released by our Environment Protection Authority (EPA) yesterday. They confirm what many of us have feared. In just two months, 10 million kilograms of industrial farmed salmon have died from an insidious disease in southern Tasmanian waters; 10 million kilograms of dead fish equates to about 2.5 million mature Atlantic salmon that have suffered a cruel death at the hands of Huon Aquaculture and Tassal. It is an animal welfare disaster of unrivalled proportions. At least 13 per cent of the entire annual statewide production of the Atlantic salmon industry has suffocated and starved in sea cages in our once pristine bays and estuaries in just two months. That figure does not include the fatty and fleshy remains of fish that washed up on our beaches, ruining the summer for southern Tasmanians.
Despite those very alarming figures, the EPA cannot or will not provide an accurate breakdown of which fish farming leases these deaths occurred within, or even which region in Tasmania. That is a great shame, and it is an indictment on this government and its environmental laws that the EPA cannot give us that information – or will not. They do not collect the information, and it shows how shockingly weak our environmental laws are and how impoverished, because salmon industries self‑regulate.
If this was not bad enough, Salmon Tasmania CEO Luke Martin has now confirmed in a Saturday Paper article that an unknown and undisclosed number of diseased fish have also been processed for human consumption under so-called standard procedure.
The unchecked outbreak of disease throughout our coastal waters is a biosecurity disaster of unprecedented scale in modern Tasmanian history. The Liberal government has failed to explain how the disease Piscirickettsia salmonis has become endemic through our waterways, and the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the salmon industry biosecurity plan has failed. Weak biosecurity conditions have allowed the movement of fish and equipment between biosecurity zones. The self‑regulation of multinational companies has been a significant reason that we are now in what can only be described as an obscene marine disaster.
Despite this, the Rockliff government continues to back an industry that has gone rogue and is clearly devastating parts of our marine environment. The EPA has also published results from sampling to test antibiotic levels in wild fish following the dumping of oxytetracycline on the Zuidpool south lease in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. However, the sampling was done over two kilometres from the lease, and no testing of wild fish within the lease has ever been made public. Tasmanian anglers and the public have no faith in those results.
It is clear the EPA is hindered from doing robust and independent monitoring and desperately needs reform and additional resourcing. The Greens continue to stand with the community and demand for reform of the EPA and for the industrial salmon industry to be reined in and made accountable through a comprehensive parliamentary inquiry into this disaster.
What has happened this summer is just the start of what we know will happen in summers to come. This is just a fact of life; the climate is warming, our waters are warming. This year, our waters off the east coast of Tasmania were some 3 degrees higher than the annual average. The east coast of Tasmania is one of the fastest warming places on the planet.
What we are looking at is a salmon industry that is not regulated, that is jamming enormous increases of fish biomass into pens, is reducing the amount of oxygen in our waterways, and is increasing massive amounts of pollution – and it will only get worse and more frequent.
We have the Liberal and Labor Parties lockstep together. The Greens stand with the community and we will demand that we get strong state and federal environment laws, so that we can keep those beautiful creatures in the oceans and waterways with us into the future.
Time expired.
