Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to touch on the amendment that has just been put forward—the industry representative—but I also want to touch base on something else that was shared just before about the convictions of some people up in Queensland, which was alluded to by Senator Macdonald. To remind people of this issue, there were at least 115 and up to 324 fishermen who were deemed to be criminals by the previous federal government for innocently dropping a fishing line in waters that were part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. I think everybody accepts that copping a fine for straying into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park green zone is fair enough, but there was nothing really fair about these hundreds of fishermen having a criminal record against their name. If they did the same thing today they would not have a criminal record. So we have here a situation in which people were previously caught under a law that was not right and in December 2006 it was changed—