Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

What a serious embarrassment! The previous speaker talks about a 'victory for the little guy' and yet the legislation that this government has introduced impacts on every single fisher in Australia. So much for the little guy!

Just before question time, the government rushed into the other place an amendment to their amendment. Why? Because they realised they had screwed up: they had screwed the recreational fishing sector yet again. Minister Burke said yesterday that this was about new occurrences, but when you read the legislation you find it impacts on every single fishing activity—not new activities but every single fishing activity. It impacts on commercial fishing, it impacts on charter boat fishing, it impacts on recreational fishing. In fact, any fishing activity that interacts with a listed species can be impacted, not just in the ocean but also in fresh water. So today they have brought in an amendment in the House to the bill they introduced yesterday afternoon to list this declaration against commercial fisheries only. But the question is: when is a recreational fisher not a recreational fisher? The answer is: when they are on a charter boat, because a charter operation is regarded under the act as a commercial operation. So they have completely stuffed it up again. They cannot get this right.

This legislation is a huge overreach, a huge overreaction to the issue before the government—and, I might say, it is an issue that the government themselves invited. When Minister Burke—now the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities—was the minister for fisheries he signed off, not once but twice, on the Small Pelagics Harvest Strategy that said:

That is exactly what the FV Margiris/FV Abel Tasman is—a large-scale freezer vessel. Tony Burke, as fisheries minister, effectively invited this vessel to Australia. What he has since done, in bringing this legislation into the parliament, is move a vote of no confidence in the commissioners of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, AFMA. The ridiculous thing is that Tony Burke himself appointed those commissioners and gave them the responsibility to oversee fisheries management in Australia and yesterday he intervened to take away their powers by giving him the power, on the basis of green scare campaigns, to intervene in a fishery. If he gets enough emails based on a green scare campaign he will intervene in a fishery. That is the mess that has been created here.

The government have hugely overreached, and today they are scrambling to resolve the problem they themselves created. But they have not fixed it because the charter boat operators, who are very important in the tourism industry and the recreational fishery up the east coast of Australia, are still caught in the web. So the minister has only half fixed the problem. He has completely messed it up. At a time when we should be seeing extreme confidence in our research and development corporations and our research institutions, the government have trashed their reputations and trashed the work that they have been doing.

Then we find today that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry has let the board of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation expire. It is not the first time he has done this—he did the same thing to the Grains Research and Development Corporation last year. You really wonder how much attention this minister is paying to his portfolio. Obviously the rest of the cabinet do not have much faith in him because he has been rolled twice now: once on live cattle and then yesterday on fisheries management. There is no confidence in Minister Ludwig within the cabinet. He comes in here and tells us that he has reappointed the board today. I bet he has gone back to his office to look for the briefing note so that he can sign it off this afternoon so he has not misled the chamber. I bet that is what he has done. I hope he does sign off on it today, because this is a time when fisheries management and fisheries research is at its most important yet this minister has not even signed off on the board and is completely incompetent.