Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the remarks made by the committee chair and I want to strongly endorse the conclusion in the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties that the health of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway for migratory shorebirds continues to decline. I also want to endorse the committee's hope that the treaties between Australia and China, Japan, and Korea for the protection of migratory birds and their environment will, in the near future, begin to fulfil their intended purpose of protecting species using the flyway.

Migratory shorebirds are truly a miracle. They fly around the world and back each year, yet some of them are no bigger than my hand. But, in flying around the world, they depend on suitable habitat being available when they arrive and at certain feeding spots along the way. They are vulnerable to the disappearance of any of this habitat. If you remove any link in the chain, it guarantees that some will not successfully complete the journey and their numbers will decline. Unfortunately, this has been happening. Coastal development in Australia has been damaging the habitat of migratory shorebirds.

The situation is considerably worse in China and Korea where large areas of coastal land have been reclaimed for various urban developments, with catastrophic impacts on migratory shorebirds. Between 2000 and 2010, more than 40 per cent of the tidal flat area within six key habitat areas in the Yellow Sea was reclaimed. Losses of such magnitude are the key drivers of declines in biodiversity in the intertidal zone of the region. Observed rates of decline of waterbird species of five to nine per cent per year and of up to 26 per cent per year for the critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper are among the highest of any ecological system on the planet.

I acknowledge the work of the Global Flyway Network who do field work in the Yellow Sea and in Bohai Bay, in particular. It is very distressing to read some of their work, such as their report from May. It says:

Zuidong, an area where we conducted a large proportion of our scanning during our early visits to Bohai, is now flanked by a six-lane highway and building work on reclaimed land is well underway. The small fishing village on the banks of the river is unrecognisable. To the north, birds are almost completely absent from Beipu.

They add, very poignantly, that:

The stretch of mud where we estimated 80 000 Curlew Sandpiper in 2011 no longer exists.

I want to acknowledge the work of BirdLife Australia and people like Paul Sullivan, Sean Dooley and Samantha Vine who are doing their best to save these remarkable little winged adventurers. They are working to get the eastern curlew and curlew sandpiper nominated for listing under the EPBC Act. They also did work to help BirdLife International get the Philippines government to nominate the great knot as endangered.

Reclamation and development of tidal flats in South Korea, where 25 per cent of the global population of great knots used to stop over, has led to dramatic declines. For example, there has been a loss of 90,000 great knots. The birds did not simply move to other sites. The great knots continue through South Korea to Australia's north-west coast. In Australia, there was a 24 per cent decline from 2001 to 2008 in the largest non-breeding site at Eighty Mile Beach. The species is no longer present at some sites along the south coast which it used to visit. Intertidal mud flats in the Yellow Sea have declined by 65 per cent in the last 50 years. Alarmingly, it is predicted that the global population of great knot will halve within four years.

Between 1983 and 2006 across south-eastern Australia, migratory shorebird populations plunged by 73 per cent. In July this year, I wrote to the environment minister, Mr Hunt, referring him to the Save our Shorebirds online petition and asking what the government was doing to establish a wildlife conservation plan for migratory shorebirds and develop a national wetlands policy which takes into account the cumulative effects of multiple threats to Australia's shorebirds. He recently replied to me, and I thank him for that and urge him to continue with this work, such as the draft Wildlife Conservation Plan for Migratory Shorebirds which he said will soon be out for public comment. I also urge the Chinese and Korean governments to do much more to uphold their obligations, and ensure that all remaining shorebird habitat is properly protected so that these plucky little adventurers can continue their epic journeys to the joy of many generations to come.

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