Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I am told that being undecided is not quite right! Let me try, lest your decision, Senator Xenophon—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—not be in support of us, to urge upon you some reality checks. Senator Siewert quite rightly and graciously said the marine planning process was all put in place by the Howard government, and the coalition is not intending to trash that process. I was very much involved in the south-east marine protected area process, in the south-east of Victoria. After a lot of negotiation, consultation, and working and talking it through in meetings with conservationists, fishermen, boating people and anyone else concerned, we got to a stage where there was a multi-user marine protected area in place, and it brought the whole community with it. Once it was implemented, it was followed without compulsion being necessary because it was a consultative process. The fishermen and conservationists were all involved. Whilst at the end of the process not everyone was 100 per cent happy, 100 per cent of the people were 80 to 90 per cent happy. That is the coalition’s position, and we are not going to change that.

This bioregional process that is in place is a result of the process put in place by the Howard government some years ago. The process for the bioregional planning for places including the Coral Sea is already in place. It will indeed continue—I just pause while Senator Brown interrupts my conversation with all senators, including, particularly, Senator Xenophon. That process will continue. It is already happening.

Do you know what that kind of process should involve? Consultation, taking people with you, making sure at the end of the process you have everyone on board. You also find out that, by consulting with people, you get a result that gets rid of some of the unintended consequences. I regret to say, in relation to green zones on the Great Barrier Reef—and Senator Boswell will hate me for this—that the end result was a good conservation measure, but we got into all sorts of problems because we did not properly consult on it. The consultation that occurred with the department at the time was, I regret to say, not always truthful. Because of that, we have had years of battles in court. The process started off with a compensation bill of $10 million and has now added up, at the last count, to over $300 million. That all happened because there was not sufficient consultation. We learnt our lesson there, and with the south-east marine protected area we got consultation going and we got a pretty good result. That is how this process should happen.

What happened in this particular instance? Without explaining to those who were involved, we woke up one day and found that there had been a proclamation to declare a conservation zone—not a multi-user reserve or anything—in the whole of the Coral Sea. Most Australians waking up and hearing that on the news would think: ‘The Coral Sea—that’s the coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef. Yeah, we like that—good idea.’ But of course the Coral Sea is anything but the Great Barrier Reef; it is nowhere near the Great Barrier Reef. It is beyond the Great Barrier Reef. It is hardly fished at all. I think the estimates answers told me that less than 500 tonnes of fish were caught from the Coral Sea in the last year, and it has been going down. The fishing impact on the Coral Sea is negligible.

What does happen on the Coral Sea is that the charter operators—they were called ‘marlin boats’ in the old days—go out there. They are the boats that put Cairns on the map, and currently there are hundreds of them in Cairns, providing employment and investment returns for those who have invested in the Cairns tourism industry. I remind senators, as I have done in this place before, that Cairns currently is suffering a 17.5 per cent adult male unemployment rate. Across the board, unemployment in Cairns is about 14 per cent, the highest for a region anywhere in Australia. I was in Cairns the other day and was privileged to be staying at the Shangri La Hotel, right on the waterfront. I went for a walk in the morning past the marlin boats that were all lined up there. I thought it would be interesting to wander into the marina and talk to a couple of deckhands there. I asked them: ‘What are you doing? Getting the boat ready?’ ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘we have got three people flying in from America in about two hours time. They will come straight out from the airport and jump on board.’ I did not ask how much they were charging them, but my understanding is that it would be $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 to go out marlin fishing for the day. I said to these young fellows, ‘You go out to the Coral Sea.’ ‘Of course,’ they replied. I said: ‘You go out beyond the Great Barrier Reef, where the marlin are. It is the thing that put Cairns on the map.’ I then asked, ‘Did you hear about the conservation act?’ They said: ‘Yeah, we heard about that. We’ll lose our jobs.’ I said, ‘Perhaps not,’ and they said, ‘Yes, we will.’ Whether they are right or wrong, I do not know. I suspect they are right.