Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 deals with the overlap between the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and various pieces of Queensland legislation. It does this by establishing the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act as the authority for environmental impact assessments and approval arrangements. In doing so, this bill eliminates duplication, reduces compliance costs for business—which is always very important and which the Rudd government is committed to—and ensures that the Great Barrier Reef will receive strong legal protection as a matter of national environmental protection. This bill also improves investigation and enforcement powers through the EPBC Act. It includes a civil penalty regime, expanded infringement notices for minor offences and administrative enforcement. These are very sensible approaches in terms of having a continuum. These penalties strike an appropriate balance of adequate deterrence while ensuring that penalties are not excessive for minor offences.

I also welcome the measures in this bill to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their environmental impact. This is a cultural debate that should have occurred 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it is now up to the Rudd government to inform the community about the importance of this. The bill introduces an environmental duty requiring marine park users to take reasonable steps to avoid or minimise any environmental harm. This is a common-sense approach. This bill also delivers on our election commitment to reinstate a requirement for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to include an Indigenous member. This measure is out of respect to the more than 70 traditional owner groups along the Queensland coast, many of whom are represented very ably in the federal parliament by the member for Leichhardt. These 70 traditional owner groups have a continuing relationship with the Great Barrier Reef. These measures build on our comprehensive strategy to protect and manage the Great Barrier Reef for the future, including our $200 million reef rescue plan and action to help protect the reef from the impacts of climate change.

As I mentioned earlier in my speech, there were many missed opportunities to address the environmental damage of climate change in the 1970s. However, we cannot rewind time. This bill is part of a suite of responses to climate change. It is appropriate at this moment that I ask: what have the opposition done? I heard in question time today some suggestions about shadecloth, and I did a bit of research to find out what that referred to. It was in the context of the government talking about its green paper on climate change which is to be released next month. I looked at the ABC News online webpage for Thursday, 2 November 2006, which said:

Federal Tourism Minister Fran Bailey says using ‘shade cloth’ over parts of the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland could protect it from the harmful effects of global warming.

Earlier this week, Britain’s Stern report said climate change could cause a global economic downturn and bleach the reef.

Skipping forward a few paragraphs:

One of the suggestions is to attach the shade cloth to pontoons, which is an idea Ms Bailey says is worth considering if it will help protect the reef.

I would like to have the contract for that 2,500-kilometre-long pontoon. It certainly would do a lot for manufacturing in Queensland and for Labor on the coast. It would certainly keep the member for Leichhardt’s electorate happy for a while. The Rudd government is realistic and has a green paper. Those opposite have some green shadecloth. That is their approach. Under the Rudd government an emissions-trading scheme will be a reality. The fear and smear campaign launched by the Kyoto sceptics opposite—the ‘missing in action’ group when in government—will come to nothing. Hopefully, people will understand that the cultural change that we need on carbon will produce some real results.

When releasing the Stern report, which was referred to in this article, the author made the point that the failure of the Western world to put a price on carbon is the greatest market failure of all time. We in the Labor government, strangely enough, are much more believing about the role of the market than those opposite. I wonder what the carbon charlatans on the other side believe in. Will they just go with a fear and smear campaign—talking about petrol and the like—or will they really try to address the future of the planet?

Surely the Great Barrier Reef is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. My three-year-old son went to North Queensland to meet my in-laws when he was a two-year-old. He is yet to go snorkelling or diving on the reef or to experience many of its great wonders. For his sake and for his children’s sake it is hoped that the opposition will embrace the fact that the world has changed. I am very pleased to support a bill that will help ensure that the reef can be enjoyed for generations to come. I commend the bill to the House.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I regret that I will not have the opportunity tonight to complete my speech as I have to be in Brisbane tomorrow because of a sickness in the family. So I will just go to the hot spots of my presentation.

I think the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 is good legislation as a framework—as far as it goes. It is essentially the Howard government’s legislation, but I do not want to make it partisan, and I am sure the Labor Party, had our roles been reversed, would have supported it. Nevertheless, there are aspects of this that need to be looked at. The real test of this legislation will come in the near future when we consider the rezoning of the reef. That will be the test of the integrity of this system and the equity it delivers.

I have a lot of fishermen in my area. Fishermen are very decent, ordinary people. They are not like other farmers, who can grow their wheat and chaff and husband their cattle and sheep. The fisherman has to engage with the sea. He cannot just go out into the paddock in the morning. All sorts of things have to come his way, be they restrictions or weather conditions or the like. He has to deal with built-in difficulties. The one thing that we have not done over recent years is look after fishermen. They have been put to one side as if they were irrelevant. By any measure, they have not been compensated properly. You might say that this is as much the fault of the former government as it is of this government, but, no matter who is to blame, some of the cases are still outstanding and equity needs to be applied.

With the east coast trawl plan, which was a device brought in by both the Commonwealth and Queensland governments, the number of trawlers was reduced from 750 to 500. A short time after that it went as low as 460. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the various wings of government said, ‘The reef is now sustainable.’ And we all celebrated that. But within two years we were told, ‘We have got to have a bit more of the reef.’ One figure that was bandied around early in the piece was about another four per cent but, when it got down to tintacks, GBRMPA was asking for another 20 per cent. So they went out and devised various zoning systems. The three major systems were light blue, dark green and gold. The gold, or yellow, was the recreational fishing areas. In the end, it was not 20 per cent; it was 34 per cent.

Neither side of the parliament said: ‘Wait a minute. That is okay but make sure you leave sufficient fishing grounds.’ And they did not. Even worse, in the southern part of the reef, off Gladstone, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay, the closures were about 73 or 74 per cent. Some say 60 per cent, but fishermen I talk to say around about 73 per cent. That gutted the fishing industry in my area from about 80 trawlers to 10 or fewer. Similarly, in Hervey Bay, it went from 50 or 60 down to a small number—I have not been able to get the actual number that survived.

Some dreadful things happened. The spanner crab fishery, which a year or two before was celebrated as the icon fishery of Australia, was put five kilometres inside a green zone. In other words, they just closed it down. One of the best prawning grounds—the area between Red Rock and Wreck Rock, north of Bundaberg—closed down.

Some people express the sanguine view: ‘That’s good because it will protect the reef.’ And let me emphasise to honourable members that I am as much for the protection of the reef as anyone. But you can both protect the reef and still have equity in these things. They are not mutually exclusive. We have allowed the zealots in the ‘green industry’ to let that become the case. The circumstance that many fishermen find themselves in is very sad. I will mention one, Sid McKeown, who is a fish processor in my area. He once had 30 to 33 trawlers servicing his fish works, but after the east coast trawl plan came into effect it went down to seven or eight trawlers. Then after the RAP, which was the zoning of the Great Barrier Reef, it went down to about three or four trawlers. My staff spoke to him today and he said that he has not had a trawler for three months now. That is appalling.

The zealots always say, ‘Paul, you are probably right but we are saving the reef, so it is all okay.’ But are we, or are we just shifting the effort somewhere else? I went into either Coles or Woolworths recently to buy a block of mixed fish to make some spaghetti marinara. I took my customer number docket and, while waiting, I looked along the shelves. There were nine big trays of fish and eight of those nine carried a ‘foreign product’ tag. In other words, we have stopped a bit of fishing on the reef but we have shifted it somewhere else. If you go to the Tokyo markets you will see the extent of that.

In the short time available to me tonight, I am calling for equity for fishermen as we move to the next phase of regulating the reef.

Debate interrupted.