Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Thank you, Mr President. I know members are keen to get home and I do not blame anyone for that. There is something I wanted to bring to Council’s attention, and that is from a Right to Information request that was up on the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania website for about an hour. Then it was very quickly pulled down. That was for the mortality of finfish – salmon – in all Macquarie Harbour leases.
We have now found out that 1,149,795 kilograms of dead salmon have been pulled out of Macquarie Harbour over the seven months from September 2023 to March 2024. In the month of January this year, nearly 314,000 kilograms – kilograms – of dead salmon were pulled out of Macquarie Harbour. That is the sign of an ecosystem under enormous stress. It is probably also a sign of overstocking.
What we know from this Right to Information, which has suddenly vanished from the website after being up for one hour, is that these were diseased and deformed fish, and there were 66 mortality events statewide between 1 July last year and 30 June this year at industrial fish farming. Only seven of these were in Macquarie Harbour; there are another 59 mortality events that have happened in inshore finfish farm facilities in those seven months: 40 of them were in the Huon-D’Entrecasteaux Channel region; 12 in Storm Bay; six down at the Tasman Peninsula area; and one up at Okehampton Bay.
We know that these facilities designed to render down dead fish are overwhelmed and cannot cope, so there are millions of tonnes of dead fish which are having to be disposed of some where, way and how,.
Ms Forrest – They probably do not know where and how, because there is no plan – or there was not.
Ms O’CONNOR – This is the issue. There is a massive problem, first of all, with the unsustainability of this industry and the poor regulation of the industry, but disposing of this industry’s waste is also a huge issue.
Then we can get onto the animal welfare questions of torturing and confining, for the terms of their very brief life, millions and millions of Atlantic salmon, going around and around those pens. Anyone who has been and had a look, as I did at Tassal’s operation at Nubeena, will see that those fish just go around and around and around and around in murky water with bites and chunks out of them. This is a challenge to us all.
The data is not lying. More than a million kilograms of dead salmon have been pulled out of Macquarie Harbour. Thank goodness for the community organisations who are standing up to this industry and who lodged this Right to Information request. However, we have a massive regulatory challenge here, where it takes Right to Information to extract this information from government. This information is damning. It is damning because, as I understand it, these salmon can grow up to four kilograms in weight. I have not done the rough maths, but more than a million kilograms of salmon is hundreds of thousands of dead fish.
Ms Webb – The mortality event is hundreds of fish, so when you say those ‘mortality events’ – it is hundreds.
Mr PRESIDENT – Order, we cannot have Adjournment votes.
Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you, Mr President. As the member for Nelson just pointed out, these mortality events – even one event involves hundreds and hundreds of fish and, clearly, it is the case, because Macquarie Harbour has had seven mortality events and more than a million kilograms of fish have been pulled out.
In closing, I want to empathise with the plight of the Maugean skate, caught in that polluted and oxygen‑poor Macquarie Harbour and being driven to extinction with official government plans to rescue them by spawning them in a tank. This is a sick industry. It is unsustainable and those fish farms should be out of Macquarie Harbour, if nothing else. It cannot go on like this.
