George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hope the member for Kennedy will stick around because I want to respond to some of the things he said. When the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park green zone system was introduced, I was actually working for a member of parliament, the former member for Dawson, De-Anne Kelly. De-Anne remained inside the tent with the coalition and we fought that long and hard. I was one of her key advisers, and it was done by regulation; it was not done by legislation. I have got to tell you that I was one of the people who went and saw the fishermen, saw the heartache that this great betrayal of the farmers of the sea was causing them. It tore you to pieces. Blokes whose livelihoods for generations had depended on farming the sea, fishing, were destroyed by the stroke of a pen with little real consultation, with little real science. What it was was a push from an overseas organisation called Pew dictating to Australia. It is to my great shame as a member of the National Party that it was the National Party in coalition that allowed that to happen. We were fighting against it, make no mistake. But there was no convincing the environment ministers at the time.

Now we are faced with the same situation once again where more of our marine area is going to be locked up and fishermen locked out—recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen. The member for Calare and the member for Paterson have both spoken on this motion and spoken very well outlining a number of facts, but I have to tell you that there is no doubt in my mind that these marine parks, and certainly the management plans associated with them, need to be disallowed. We do not have the opportunity to disallow the marine parks themselves. The people in this place, the representatives of the Australian people, should have that say. Unfortunately we do not, so we are resorting to disallowing the management plans here, the things that will give the marine parks the teeth. These management plans, indeed the marine parks that this government has imposed, are opposed by just about every representative of recreational and professional fishing organisations in Australia: the Australian Recreational Fishing Foundation, the Australian Marine Alliance, the Commonwealth Fisheries Association, Sunfish, Tuna West, the Australian Fishing Trade Association, Recfish, the Australian Sportfishing Association, the Game Fishing Association of Australia—I could go on and on with names of representative organisations in the recreational and professional fishing game that are against this marine park proposal. You name it, when it comes to fishing they are against it. They are against it because of what is actually in these management plans.

Let us have a look at what this marine park proposal will do. It will effectively lock up 1½ million square kilometres of marine environment around this nation. There is no scientific integrity at all about this process. The science was kept secret—secret from the industry and secret from recreational fishermen. When they wanted to see it—

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