Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As has been said, the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 gives effect to the recommendations of the 2003 Commonwealth fisheries policy review and to work done by the Natural Resource Ministerial Council. I am speaking on this bill because I want to highlight some of the problems Tasmania has been facing recently with the negotiations on the maritime protection areas, the MPAs, which are covered under another piece of legislation which deals with sustainable development.

This bill talks about the economic efficiency principle. There has been concern for some time among commercial fishers about the meaning of the economic efficiency principle in Commonwealth fisheries legislation. Currently legislation requires AFMA to pursue the objective of maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of fisheries resources. This has led to some confusion and a number of court cases. Some commercial fishers have read the objective as requiring AFMA to maximise returns for the fishing industry rather than to maximise net returns to the whole of the Australian community, as was originally intended. The objective has been reworded in this legislation to ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’. However, this is still a little ambiguous, because one would have to ask which part of the Australian community is meant.

Those who rely on fishing and the fishing industry for their living are those who buy and eat the fish or those who spend a lot of time worrying about whether there will be any fish left in the sea to catch and eat. To my mind, there are some difficult priorities here, and, once we start trying to legislate between them, we are going to run into trouble. The key word here is ‘management’; if that is correctly spelt out, I believe this could work.

Obviously, we want to have economically sustainable development—ESD—of our fisheries. However, outcome 3 of the 2003 fisheries review found that, while current Commonwealth fisheries legislation requires that fisheries are managed in a way that is consistent with the principles of ESD, there is no legislative guidance on how this objective should be interpreted. It is believed that this concern is addressed in this bill by including ESD principles consistent with those contained in the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, the EPBC Act.

AFMA was required, in its management of the Commonwealth fisheries, to attempt to balance the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social outcomes for fishers. In Tasmania, we know this as the three-pronged stool. It is an approach that we have used in forestry; it has been effective as long as there are no wild interpretations or misinterpretations of the concept.

Finally, we have the offshore constitutional settlement, the OCS proposal. The offshore constitutional settlement is the jurisdictional arrangement between the Commonwealth and the states and territories which sets out responsibilities for offshore fisheries, among other matters. The OCS provides for state and territory law to apply inside three nautical miles and for Commonwealth laws to apply from three nautical miles to 200 nautical miles.

It is here that we in Tasmania are having a problem with the development of the environmental side in the maritime protection areas. The consultation has not been done. In 2003, the Commonwealth fisheries policy review highlighted a number of concerns about the operation of fisheries agreements under the OCS and noted that there is currently no provision for the amending of fisheries agreements. This bill will allow for the amendment of fisheries agreements without having to terminate the original instrument and create an entirely new instrument.

In addition, this bill will allow for the management of multijurisdictional fisheries under state or territory law, where appropriate. At present these fisheries can only be managed under Commonwealth law, even in cases where it is entirely appropriate and sensible that they be managed under the law of a state or territory. Now we are told that, in future, when states, territories and the Commonwealth are involved in regional fisheries, they will jointly decide which party or parties will have legal jurisdiction to that fishery. In practice, this will work by defining areas within the fishery to which each law would apply. The areas would be adjacent to each other but could not overlap. This is fine in principle, but it seems that with this legislation we start getting overlays that appear to take precedent, such as with the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, which comes under the federal government, as it arbitrarily sets up these maritime protection areas without consideration of the economic returns to the Australian community.

Management is one thing but prohibition of fishing is another, and that is what is being proposed in Tasmania by the habitat protection zone that just happens to have popped up in our east coast fisheries through other legislation. And it is not only on the east coast; the south-east fisheries and the west coast fisheries are being targeted too.

All this so-called negotiation has been going on with who knows who, where few details have trickled down to those who are most affected—the fishers and their families. Suddenly they are faced with what appears to be a decision without any consultation whatsoever. It appears that Minister Campbell is trying to curry up some green brownie points on the carcass of poor old Senator Macdonald, who I believe was trying to do the right thing but who got the sack.

Now I want to ask some questions on all this; in fact, I want to ask a lot of questions. Firstly, what exactly have we signed up to under the World Conservation Union, the IUCN? What exactly are we trying to achieve by doing so? As far as I can make out, there are no targets for allocation of MPAs to any particular IUCN category. Under the act, all MPAs are assigned to an IUCN category and must be managed according to principles specified for each category. There is no mention of the regulations under which they are to be administered. But if there are no targets, it makes it hard for anyone to know the potential impact of the activities on conservation values as well as on economic and social values. So why are we doing it? What is going to be achieved?

Is the argument: we will lock it up and see what happens? Is that the principle that is at work here? I find this a bit like the climate change or global warming argument—this is something that has a doomsday feel about it without anyone really sitting down and going through the science to make it a rational argument. One scientist says that the ice cap at the North Pole is melting; another says that the ice is getting thicker. Plenty of work has been done but there has been no definite conclusion, which leads me to think that although we are applying the precautionary principle we should not go overboard with draconian legislation which prohibits ordinary working folk going about their chosen and often hard fought for business. Particularly in the case of maritime protected areas there is the possibility of voluntary participation together with sensible management of those areas that are still to be fished and reasonable and just compensation for those who have to give up their livelihood.

The problems are not only in Tasmania. I note the article in the Australian on 28 February this year entitled ‘Trawling for answers’. The locking up of the Great Barrier Reef has been an unmitigated disaster. The areas that can be fished have shrunk to the point where they are overfished and recreational fishers can no longer be guaranteed a catch. This has put hundreds of Queensland fisher folk out of work and is now costing the federal government millions of dollars in compensation that cannot really cover the cost of the loss of the industry. No-one had estimated what the rezoning of the reef could do both to the fishing industry and to the compensation projections. There was a mistaken prediction that the expansion of the no-go areas would only have a modest toll on commercial fishing. But no-one has done the sums or the science—we just made decisions. That is not good decision making.

Even one of the government’s own backbenchers, Warren Entsch, the member for Leichhardt, was disgusted with the outcome. He says in that same article:

We have destroyed the livelihoods of so many people, and these people are traditionally the eyes and the ears of authorities ...

We have to consult; we have to include people who are being displaced by this type of legislation. Compensation has to be on the table at this time, too. People cannot be expected to throw away their lifetime of work and experience for nothing. As we have proven in the forestry industry, proper management of a resource is a lot better than locking it up and forgetting about it. If a natural resource is not managed after it has been intensively used, then it becomes more of an environmental problem than one that is sustainably harvested.

See this speech in context