Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for the question. There is a lot at stake today in terms of whether or not Australia continues to be the world leader on protecting the oceans and whether or not we continue a process which has been going for 20 years, and had been supported under the Howard years but has had a complete backflip under this Leader of the Opposition.

On the weekend I saw a big article in The Australian that told me that there were going to be up to 1,000 people rallying in Torquay who were going to be very angry about this process. After The Australian article—and I will table it—there was no media coverage of it at all. Then I discovered the reason must be the funny way 1,000 people was calculated. Those numbers were in some way short—they used the shadow Treasurer to do the figures, clearly. Why would so few people turn up to the rally?

What the shadow minister for the environment did not tell them was that when they were making their speeches from the tinny they were speaking from—they spoke in a tinny, though admittedly it was on land—they did not let people know that if you wanted to go from that rally to an area where you are not allowed to fish, you would have to go out, turn left, go across the Bass Strait and, after 460 kilometres, you would get to the first place where you could not fish, a place where the no-fishing zone was put in place in 2007 when the member for Wentworth was the minister for the environment. The nearest restriction on recreational fishing was put in place by the Howard government when they were in charge.

This is a process where the science it has been based on was commenced under the Howard years. Some of these plans on the inside cover have the happy smiling face of the member for Wentworth and the member for Dawson for science. As for the process of consultation when they say, 'No consultation happened at all,' there were five separate rounds of consultation and three-quarters of a million submissions engaged—in a process that works. What we found for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park work which has now come back with restrictions put in place by the Howard government that they now conveniently forget, is that fish stocks do improve. Coral trout numbers are six times what they used to be. Crown of thorns starfish are at a quarter of the levels in the protected zones that they are in the rest of the park. It is a process which for 20 years had had bipartisan support, and which the opposition are hoping will come to nothing tonight.

See this speech in context