Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, last Tuesday, the Environment Protection Authority renewed the environmental licences for 16 salmon farms in Long Bay and surrounding areas of the Tasman Peninsula, allowing them to continue until November 2027. This was against overwhelming evidence presented by local community and independent scientists of the serious environmental harm that industrial salmon farming has caused in those areas. It’s a disgraceful act. The environmental licence for Long Bay expired last November, but the EPA director took over eight months to make the determination that salmon farming can continue business as usual in the sheltered and biodiverse waters of Long Bay. It’s beyond belief that the authority tasked with protecting the environment has approved this continuation.
There was never a baseline assessment taken of what was once a pristine bay ecology and the EPA’s own environmental monitoring program shows that nutrients from salmon farms can cause algal growth in the area and residents have for years reported the extensive algal growth that is damaging rocky reefs and seagrass beds and the loss of life that depends on those. People took so much time to write submissions and share the devastating changes they’ve seen to the bay since salmon farming started there. They engaged in good‑faith with the EPA after the licence expired late last year, but they’ve been disrespected and stonewalled throughout the process. They’re very distressed at how they were treated and gutted, frankly, after months of trying to hear from the EPA when the decision would be made. They’ve been strung along and fobbed off.
Long Bay is exactly the kind of sheltered, sensitive and biodiverse inshore waters that Legislative Council recommended in 2022 that the industry move out of. Mark Ryan, the Tassal CEO, himself had the temerity, in 2017 to promise that they’d get out of exactly these sorts of areas when they were in the Huon, then promptly moving the company’s farming operations into Long Bay – so hypocritical and cynical. If the EPA was as committed to protecting the environment as they should be, salmon farming in Long Bay would be discontinued, but instead the government is allowing farms to continue in these fragile ecosystems to make money at the expense of what was once a pristine and species‑rich environment. The decision to extend the licence is evidence of the broken regulations of this government that are failing to protect the marine environment, failing to protect coastal communities and designed to put salmon farming companies’ profits and interests ahead of everybody else.
The Greens will keep fighting for the community. It is very heartening to see the statement that the AMA released yesterday, which finally acknowledges the science and draws together, in a very serious report, the reality of the impact of antibiotics, which are used broadscale by salmon companies. Instead of taking other alternative options to reduce disease, they are dumping so many tonnes of antibiotics into our marine waterways. 5.3 tonnes of florfenicol was dumped last summer through an emergency‑use permit and the AMA says about that fact that:
The use of florfenicol may contribute to the emergence and persistence of multi‑drug resistant organisms. That antibiotic use in open marine agriculture is well documented to carry risks of environmental persistence, development of resistant bacteria and eventual spread of resistance genes into human, animal and environmental microbiomes.
They say:
Antibiotic use in fish farms encourages the proliferation of resistant bacterial strains. That resistance genes can then transfer horizontally between marine bacteria and bacteria that are associated with human disease, undermining the effectiveness of antibiotics.
There is another way of doing things and at the back of their statement the AMA draws together the evidence and makes recommendations that the Tasmanian government changes to end the approval of emergency antibiotic fast-track approvals. This is what this government supported the salmon industry doing last year, and it is the reason that we had 5.3 tonnes of antibiotics dumped. Mandatory reporting of these things – this is the sort of changes that we need to protect the marine environment.
