Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I reaffirm the words of the member for Clark, Mr Bayley, and Mr Jenner and Mr Garland, who understand, we understand, and at least are being truthful about the disaster that is unfolding around us.
I have heard what Mr O’Byrne said about it being premature to have an inquiry. In fact, now is the time to get started. This is the biggest salmon mass mortality event in the state. Ms Finlay said earlier in her contribution that she was glad to hear that the Greens called it ‘unprecedented.’ The words of the acting director of the EPA last Friday was that it is ‘unprecedented’ and that does not mean that enormous mass mortalities have not occurred before. They have. We had 1.35 million salmon which died in Macquarie Harbour. I cannot remember if it was 2018.
Mr Bayley – It was 2018.
Dr WOODRUFF – Thank you, Mr Bayley. If the salmon companies had not learnt from that experience then that would be on their head, but we have certainly been here with mass mortalities before. What we have never seen is the scale of impacts so apparent to our eyes as we have in the current event which is still ongoing. A large part of that is because of very committed campaigners and locals who have themselves taken footage of things that have happened and posting the experiences of what they are seeing on beaches across the vast amount of the Huon and D’Entrecasteaux Channel.
Whilst those 1.35 million salmon died in Macquarie Harbour from a heat wave event seven years ago, we did not see that happening in real time and now we are. What the reality is of how salmon farming occurs in Tasmania is writ large for everyone to see – not just in Tasmania but around the world. Definitely on mainland Australia people are paying notice. The RSPCA is paying notice. It is having a devastating impact on our marine environment. It is having a devastating impact on the reputation of Tasmania and I believe anyone who is watching what is happening in Tasmania from outside of Tasmania would see more clearly than most of us here are able to see that this is in greatest part because of the capture of the Liberal and Labor parties by big salmon corporations and their donations.
It is the relationship between the Liberal and Labor politicians and the big salmon corporations that has meant we have such appalling laws and we have effectively no arsenal in to deploy to do anything about them, even if we want to, in this unfolding marine event. We have no laws to throw at them, effectively. What the EPA has at their hands is so pathetic.
I have even heard complaints from the salmon companies themselves at the EPA not providing information in a timely fashion, at the run-around between ministers, between the multiple ministers and the lack of coordination in the Liberal government, their mismanagement of this event.
Let us start off with the biggest mismanagement, which was hiding, obfuscation and silence. It was weeks before anyone in this government spoke up and it was only in parliament that it actually happened on the back of Greens questions and from Mr Garland, and that is not textbook perfect management of a mass mortality event. That is not the way to handle a community of people who were looking forward to summer holidays on the long weekend and you had no clear information about what to do with the stuff that was washing up on their beaches.
I have listened to minister Jaensch with his comments from the public health authority and now I can understand why people were genuinely confused and were posting and calling each other and talking in the Huon Channel, ‘What do you do? Is it safe to go in the water?’ because it was such a mixed message: ‘Leave the fish’, ‘Avoid contact’. How do you avoid contact with fish when you are swimming in the water and they are floating around? How do you avoid contact with parts of contaminated, diseased fish, diseased fish oil when it is a surface of oil on the water? Is it a problem for dogs? Is it a problem for children who are playing in the sand and putting things in their mouth? These are entirely reasonable questions where people were left to make up their own answers themselves with no help at all from the Liberal government.
When Mr Jaensch said before that, ‘Oh well, people knew about it because they heard the message’, as Mr Bayley said, from an EPA email that referenced an advisory that Public Health had given them, and it was to an environmental group. Classifying that as information to Tasmanians is bizarre. There were no alerts on beaches, there were no signs anywhere. There was no stand‑up media about public health risks, even after people had been asking these questions. They were left alone to work it out themselves.
There was no TasALERT. Why was TasALERT not used? For sure, you did not know which beaches were going to be affected from day to day, but I can tell you, there were so many of them: Verona Sands, Charlotte Cove, Randalls Bay, Ninepin Point Marine Reserve, Mickeys Beach, Drip Beach, Gourlays Bay, Surveyors Bay, Garden Island, Huon Island, Kays Beach, Eggs and Bacon Bay, Abels Bay, Roaring Beach, Conleys Beach on Bruny Island, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. They are the ones we brainstormed in our office from the conversations we have had with people in the community and things people have posted. It could have been an alert to the whole of the Huon and Channel. That would have sufficed. That is actually what we are talking about, all those communities and all the people who flooded down there.
It shows that this government and, from the things I have, unfortunately, heard from the Labor Party, having been champions and cheerleaders of big salmon for so long, are now, at this point, riven and immobile, incapable of having anything like an adequate response because they do not know what the salmon companies want them to say in this unfolding PR disaster.
Ms Finlay said that companies responded immediately. Yes, they did respond immediately. I heard from the people at Verona Sands that they responded immediately to try and hide what was happening. They denied to locals that they were employed by Huon. They would not say which company they were employed by. The same thing happened on Bruny Island. They had unknown people on their local beaches cleaning up stuff and they would not say where they came from. Then, they must have read the room when it got out later that day how bad that looked, from the social media comments. They went back in the afternoon and told people, ‘Oh yeah, we are actually from Huon Aquaculture’, and, probably, ‘We are from Tassal’, too.
Ms Ogilvie – They were volunteers, weren’t they?
Dr WOODRUFF – No, they were from those companies. They were cleaning up the beaches. This was an act of PR management. It was a disaster unfolding. Both of the companies have been scrambling to do everything they can to keep a lid on it.
The lid popped off with the footage the Bob Brown Foundation posted on the weekend about the animal cruelty. I have been through that numbers of times. If members have not seen that, I strongly suggest you do because it is something I would never have expected or hoped to see in Tasmania. It is vile. Those companies should be held to account for what they were doing to the salmon, and also to the workers that they threw under the bus at the same time.
Let us not forget, it is been such a bad PR disaster that Henry Batista, who is the CEO of Huon Aquaculture, has cut and run from Tasmania –
Ms Finlay – Get out of here. That is just –
The SPEAKER – Order, member for Bass. You may take a point of order if you like.
Dr WOODRUFF – Where is he? Where is he to take responsibility? He was parachuted in from Brazil, one of the great Batista family, to come in, have a little play around with business in Tasmania –
Members interjecting.
Dr WOODRUFF – They have such weak rules, they can do whatever they like. Who knows? A bit of money laundering. Not sure. That is the sort of stuff that was happening in Brazil –
Members interjecting.
The SPEAKER – Sorry, I will stop the member. I did not allow the Leader of the Greens to interject on anyone else. I will not allow you to interject on her. You may take a substantive motion or a point of order if you wish, but sniping from the sidelines is not going to be tolerated today. The Leader of the Greens has the call and I ask her to come to the matter before her.
Dr WOODRUFF – My point is that he has disappeared to Europe to have his hand at doing something with the chicken industry for them over there. JBS are the biggest protein producers in the world. Our three salmon companies are not owned by Tasmanians any more. They are profit‑making companies, some of the biggest on the planet. What they are doing is damage control. The last thing on their mind is the impact on the marine environment.
The motion we have before us today is an attempt to say: ‘We are at a crossroads. We can make a decision about whether we continue with an industry like this. Every time one of these events happens the community gets stronger.
I remind members that when the mass mortality event happened in 2018, Neighbours of Fish Farming had barely been established. There was no Friends of the Bay, there was no massive Carlton River-Dodges Ferry community group, which sprang up like a mushroom overnight. The Friends of the Bay and the Carlton River and Dodges Ferry communities have got together in the last couple of months, or six months or so. They are very new in the space because there are communities all around Storm Bay who are sick to their back teeth at the idea that this industry is not only existing where it is and doing the damage it is to the marine environment, but it has planned on expanding and stomping down south.
They have already had a taste of fish farms in Norfolk Bay. It might be good for people to remember the reason that Huon Aquaculture took their salmon pen into Norfolk Bay in 2018, was because it was diseased, it had diseased fish. They were potentially responsible for biosecurity breaches and Tassal, at the time, was very concerned about it.
There are so many questions we do not have answers to. Where did this strain of the Piscirickettsia come from? It has now been identified, it seems, as the Tasmanian rickettsia‑like organism (TRLO), and I think it is understood that came from the east coast.
How did it get around here? What is happening to all the fish being dumped, the 5000 to 6000 tonnes that have been dumped so far? We understand from the EPA that some of it involves illegal dumping practices. But even with the legal dumping practices, the community is saying: Where is it going? How are you dealing with such large quantities of fish all at once? What are you going to do? Is it going to end up coming into our waterways? Is it going to contaminate our rivers if it is being sprayed as a kind of compost on properties? What is the oversight of what is going on there? Are we going to have rickettsia-like organisms in our rivers?
We know it can affect other species. We do not have any evidence of research done on Tasmanian native fish and this new strain of bacteria by any scientists. There is no information about the research that has been done. It is claimed it does not affect native fish, but how would we know? Where is the research that demonstrates it does not affect native fish?
We are concerned that the Labor Party has taken $5 million in donations over the past five years and has not declared where those donations came from. The Liberal Party has taken $13 million in the last five years and has not declared where those donations have come from. Clearly, that is secret for a purpose. It is secret because the Liberal and Labor parties do not want to tell Tasmanians who made those donations. We strongly suspect that large amounts of those monies have come from foreign‑owned salmon corporations who want to get a result. The result is that when things like this happen, the Liberal and Labor parties do not effectively advocate for any change in the situation.
We say we need to have an inquiry to look into this. It is entirely reasonable. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Why would we not want to improve on the current situation? Ms Ogilvie’s message was that an inquiry would be unnecessary and it would waste resources. That is what parliament is here to do, Ms Ogilvie. Parliament is here to make investigations into one of the biggest crises that has ever happened in Tasmania in the marine environment. It is a great use of parliament’s time to investigate that. It is necessary because, clearly, everything is not perfect. The regulations are not working, the laws are not working. The oversight is not working. If there is an investigation that the minister talked about, can you please table the terms of reference of that inquiry?
Ms Ogilvie – The EPA is investigating it.
The SPEAKER – Order, minister Ogilvie.
Dr WOODRUFF – Yes. Could you please come back to the House and let us know:
(1) What the terms of the EPA’s investigation are.
(2) Who is involved in that investigation.
(3) Whether people can make a submission to the investigation.
(4) Whether the results of the investigation will be made public to Tasmanians?
If we do not need to have a parliamentary inquiry, then anything else that is done should be open. It should be fully available for people to have a look at. They should be able to make a submission. We should understand what the scope of the inquiry is. It would be very helpful if you could come into the House at some other time and provide us that information.
I want to conclude and say that there is a huge number of extra information that we need to get about this ongoing outbreak. I have mentioned the waste disposal issues and the impacts on native fish species.
Salmon farming, by the way, Ms Finlay, has had a very devastating effect on commercial fishers.
Ms Finlay – The point was on hundreds.
Dr WOODRUFF – For example, there are no commercial fishers –
The SPEAKER – The member for Bass will cease interjecting. The member who has the call will direct her commentary through the Chair to stop inciting interjections.
Dr WOODRUFF – I will not speak to the member for Bass. Thank you, honourable Speaker.
What we have are commercial fishers who have all been, as I understand it, taken out of Macquarie Harbour as part of the skate management plan. The salmon farms were not taken out of Macquarie Harbour. The commercial fishers were removed, but not the big salmon companies. I spoke to people in the Storm Bay expansion who are commercial fishers and are deeply concerned about the impacts of the West of Wedge leases from Tassal would have on their fisheries. I heard years later that they were badly affected by that.
We used to have an enormous amount of flathead. Most recreational fishers in Tasmania would be very concerned about that. They might be interested to know that escaped salmon have been shown to eat the eggs of flathead by our IMAS scientists. The evidence is there. IMAS has shown that escaped salmon – and we never get any information about how many escaped salmon there are. That is another bit of information that Tasmanians would like to know: how many salmon escape into the wild to eat the eggs of our own native fish. If we knew that we might be able to have an appropriate response. That is another piece of information that we should be able to get at in an inquiry. If we want to have a sustainable fishery, if we want to have our own native fish in the river for us to enjoy, for people to have recreational fishing activity, then we need to know what the true impacts of this evolving marine crisis are.
We hope that Mr O’Byrne changes his mind. We will see what happens a month down the track. We know it would probably take about a month for this inquiry to get fully going, at the earliest, to start calling people. Now is the time to start. In a month’s time, I sincerely hope this evolving marine crisis is over. I am not confident from what we have heard from scientists that that is the case. The Greens are going to be here standing up with other people on the crossbench to call out the secrecy, the silence, and the shocking mismanagement, and to stand up for the marine communities who demand us to do better.
