Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak this evening on the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Amendment Bill 2017. Anyone who has visited the Great Barrier Reef or seen pictures of it can't help but be amazed by its crystal clear waters, its picturesque tropical islands, its beautiful sandy beaches, its abundance of marine life, its colourful tropical fishes and the most spectacular coral formations in all colours of the rainbow. Anybody who sees that simply cannot help but fall in love with our Great Barrier Reef. No wonder it's considered one of the wonders of the world. We all in this parliament want to do everything we can to protect it. If we think it's in danger, all of us want to do everything we can to protect the reef.

But its breathtaking beauty is a double-edged sword, because it makes the Australian public highly susceptible to misleading and emotional scare campaigns about the reef, similar to what we just heard from the member for Watson. On these misleading campaigns, we only have to go back to last year and some of the headlines that were being put out across the internet about a bleaching event that occurred. News.com said—this is the headline—'The Great Barrier Reef is dead at the age of 25 million years.' The Independent in the UK said, 'The Great Barrier Reef is declared dead after a long illness.' Perth Now wrote, 'The record coral die-off wastes 70 per cent of the reef.' The ABC, our ABC, had a headline saying, 'Two-thirds of the northern Great Barrier Reef is wiped out. The Barrier Reef dead after being clobbered by the worst bleaching event in history.' We saw the ABC use pictures of what they claimed was bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, it was a picture of a reef in American Samoa.

This scaremongering sends the message out across the world that the reef is dead and is not worth visiting. It harms our tourism sector. It harms all those Australians working on the reef that rely on international tourists wanting to come and see the reef. Some people are out sending a message 'The reef is dead.' What did the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority say about some of these headlines? I quote: they said they were 'ridiculously exaggerated' and 'irresponsible'. Dr Reichelt, the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said, talking about these misleading scare campaigns: 'I don't know whether it was a deliberate sleight of hand or a lack of geographic knowledge, but it certainly suits the purpose of the people who sent it out.' It was a completely misleading campaign. It was fake news. Yes, there was a bleaching event on the reef, but the claim that the Great Barrier Reef was dead was simply fake scaremongering news designed to mislead the Australian people and to get them to make emotional and irrational decisions. When we are dealing with the reef, we need to deal with the science and the evidence.

What was not reported was that the Great Barrier Reef is actually divided into four separate management areas: the far northern zone, the northern zone, the central zone and the southern zone. When they talked about bleaching of the reef, they were actually only talking about the northern zone, which is only 11 per cent of the area of the Great Barrier Reef. So, while it's true two-thirds of that part of the reef was bleached, this only accounts for seven per cent of the reef in total being bleached. What is not explained in any of these articles is that 97 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef's tourism is located in the central and southern zones. How were they affected by the bleaching last year? Remember, 97 per cent of tourism activity takes place in these zones. Well, only one per cent of the southern zone, which is 44 per cent of the reef, suffered a bleaching event—one per cent. In the central zone, which is 22 per cent of the reef, only six per cent of the reef was affected. In total, 98 per cent of the southern and central zones, which is a total of 64 per cent of the entire reef and where 97 per cent of the reef's tourism activities take place, was not affected. So only two per cent of the area with all of the tourism industry was affected from the bleaching event last year, and yet we had claims and stories going out worldwide that the reef was dead.

We can learn from past events, because the Great Barrier Reef did suffer a significant decline in coral cover from 1985 to 2012. This was caused by various things. There were the severe tropical cyclones, there was damage from the crown-of-thorns starfish, and there were also two previous bleaching events in 1998 and 2002 that were associated with El Nino patterns. The comments of Professor Ridd, an expert in the area, on those bleaching events back then are interesting. He said the findings did not take into account one of the worst cyclones to hit and affect the reef—Cyclone Hamish, in 2009, which wiped out half of the reef. Professor Ridd wrote:

Coral recovers fast; six years on and more than one-third of that total loss would be alive and flourishing. And guess what, cyclones are part of life’s natural cycle.

Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort owner Peter Gash said:

The scientists made out the Reef is half dead, but they picked a moment in time when a fierce cyclone had tracked down the length of the Reef and did enormous damage.

I challenge anyone to go out to where Hamish hit—it has almost all completely recovered.

In fact, it has. The science tells us that, between 2012 and 2015, the Great Barrier Reef recovered and actually increased in size by 19 per cent. So the gains that we had in coral growth between 2012 and 2015 were greater than the bleaching losses we had in the previous year.

A second important point, if you read the headlines, is that bleaching is not the death of coral. Again, I quote Professor Peter Ridd:

Bleaching is one of coral's defence mechanisms and should be regarded as a strategy for survival rather than a death sentence. Gradually it stops them—

the coral—

from dying. Most corals that bleach fully recover … A survival mechanism such as bleaching indicates that corals have adapted to periods of unusually high temperatures in the past.

They are the words of Professor Peter Ridd. Yes, Mr Deputy Speaker, if you went out to the Australian public today and asked them, 'Does bleaching coral mean that coral dies?' I would say that 90 per cent of those people would say, 'Yes, that's what it means.' But the science tells us otherwise. Professor Ridd—and I quote directly from him—also said:

Mass bleaching also occurred on the Reef in 1998 and 2002, but the vast majority of the corals on the Reef have recovered and survived.

Bleaching is not just a recent event. Again I quote Professor Ridd:

Bleaching was first recorded early last century by Sir Charles Maurice Yonge in the first major scientific study of the Great Barrier Reef.

He noted:

… there are 26 records of coral bleaching before 1982.

Professor Ridd concluded:

Due to the remarkable mechanisms that corals have developed to adapt to changing temperatures, especially the ability to swap symbionts, corals are perhaps the least endangered of any ecosystems to future climate change—natural or manmade.

That's the science—not the misleading scare campaigns that we hear from the opposition.

The coalition government is working to ensure that we do everything we can to protect the reef. We can't stop rising sea temperatures, we can't stop cyclones but we can do a lot of things to ensure the reef's viability. Here are a few things. On 5 July, the World Heritage Committee unanimously endorsed Australia's Reef 2050 Plan and the coalition's progress in implementing it. The World Heritage Committee has not put—I repeat: the World Heritage Committee has not put—the reef on their endangered watch list. This decision recognises Australia's significant efforts—that is, the coalition's significant efforts—in investment and the early, effective implementation of the reef's 2050 plan.

We, the coalition government, are investing $2 billion, jointly with Queensland, under the Reef 2050 Plan, to improve the health of the reef. Our investment continues to target water quality improvements such as reducing nitrogen, pesticides and sediment run-off, as well as the culling of the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish. We can compare this to Labor's past track record when they were in government. When they left office after six years, which included a partnership with the Greens and the Independents, they had five massive dredge disposal projects planned. The World Heritage Committee put the reef, under Labor, on the watch list as 'in danger'. It was the coalition, when we came to office in 2013, who took unprecedented action. We ended all those dredge disposal plans put in place by Labor. As a result of our actions, the World Heritage Committee removed Australia from the endangered watch list and praised Australia as a global leader in reef management. That's what we on this side have done. We are concerned about the science, the engineering and the economics of looking after the Great Barrier Reef. In contrast, we've seen on the Labor side misleading, scaremongering ideology, which has nothing to do with protecting the reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is a vitally important asset to our nation. The coalition has the runs on the board when it comes to protecting it. We have the plan to go forward, our 2050 reef plan, which has been endorsed by experts around the world, including the World Heritage Committee. This legislation merely deals with small technical issues to make sure that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority continue with their good work. I encourage members of the opposition: when you are talking about the Great Barrier Reef, please do not continue to engage in this misleading scare campaign, because what you are doing is harming the very people that you represent. If you go out and mislead about the Great Barrier Reef, and run stories about death and coral bleaching, you are harming Australia's tourism industry. You are wrecking jobs and you are causing untold harm to people that work hard, put their investments into the reef and love and protect the reef. I commend this bill to the House, and I plead with members of the opposition: don't harm our nation and don't trash our nation with misleading claims, because you are hurting the very people that you claim to protect.

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