Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to give my contribution on the salmon industry reform and, indeed, reform is sorely needed and well overdue. Just because an industry is big – $1.36 billion made – doesn’t make it good. The size of the industry is part of the problem here: the stocking densities, the intensity of the industry, and just because an industry has been in our waters for 30 to 45 years doesn’t make it a traditional industry.
We’re talking about an island with a history of tens of thousands of years of human occupation and let me tell you that a few decades of an industry operating in our waters and getting bigger and bigger is not a traditional industry.
This review is an acknowledgement that this industry is a failure on so many different levels. It is a failure when it comes to social licence because the opposition to this industry is simply building. We have campaigns now targeting the marketplace of this industry. We have certifiers like the RSPCA pulling their certification for this product. It is a failure.
It is a failure when it comes to the health of its fish. The mass mortality events just keep coming. This year, 2025, was a low point when it came to mass mortality with rancid fish, fish fat and even fish bodies washing up on south-east beaches, but it is not the first one. In 2023‑24, one in 10 fish died in Macquarie Harbour. What farmer would get away with one in 10 of their sheep dying in the paddock and being left there? That was over the course of seven months. In 2018, Macquarie Harbour lost 1.3 million fish. This is an issue of significant concern and it is a biosecurity failure ultimately, because not only are they not managing the risk of disease but they are failing to manage the spread of that disease.
It is also, of course, a profound environmental failure. When you look at the fate of the Maugean skate in Macquarie Harbour, there has been a number of different issues contributing to the concerns around the skate, but the scientists have been abundantly clear that it is fish farms that are driving that species towards extinction and the number-one thing we need to do to save the Maugean skate in Macquarie Harbour is to pull fish farms out of that harbour. That is the clear recommendation of the expert scientists to the federal government.
The impacts do not extend to just the fish themselves. We have seen Tassal in the last year or so identifying the sardine fishery in the north-east of the state as a potential feedstock for their fish. A sardine fishery is the absolute base of the food chain in the marine environment. That is food for a whole raft of different species and the salmon industry wants to go after it. So the review is important and it is an acknowledgement of the failure.
As the Leader of the Greens has said, we are hopeful, we are optimistic, we are going to work hard to make it as good as possible, but as it stands at the moment, there is not a single bit of change that has happened. This needs to happen and it needs to happen quickly because this week the National Climate Risk Assessment report was released highlighting that Tasmania has significant risk with climate change, not only our terrestrial environment but our marine environment as well, and we have seen what has happened. We have seen what happened in South Australia with rising sea temperatures and we know that those rising temperatures are driving some of these mass fish deaths, including the mass mortality events of salmon.
One thing we can be sure of when it comes to multinational companies that are driven by profit, that internationally have been found to be corrupt, is that they will cut and run. As soon as they are not making the profits they have promised to their shareholders or their investors, they will cut and run and leave every single one of those jobs high and dry here in the state.
We keep hearing that the industry has a toolbox – the vaccines, the antibiotics, the selective breeding – but the government has a toolbox as well and it is in regulation, in stocking density and transparency. This is where the EPA has so consistently failed. We have been asking the EPA for information around mortality data in Macquarie Harbour for ages and its response is painfully lacking. We heard this week that the Auditor-General has found the EPA has failed in its regulatory oversight of management when it comes to landfill. There are significant concerns when it comes to environmental management overseen by the EPA and that includes the dumping of dead fish in landfill.
Time expired.
