Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Not being of a legal mind myself I would be very happy to defer to the senator's comments there about the veracity of this bill in legal terms and just say that our proposition a few days ago to bring in a disallowance motion which would make this quota illegal would have been a much simpler solution to putting this on ice and dealing with the propositions that we have in front of us.

I just want to explain where this debate started today. It started with a question, a question that was put up by a number of rec fishing groups and environmentalists at a working group with the Labor Party two months ago. The question was very simple. It was: what impact would we expect if a supertrawler took 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000 tonnes of fish from a small area which our fishing spot was close to? And how long would it take that area to repopulate in terms of these small pelagics, which we know are very mobile fish?

The lack of answers surrounding that very simple question was what led to rec fishing groups walking away from that working group, which they had entered into with good faith in terms of the government trying to come up with a fisheries management plan. They also would not accept the voluntary plan; they wanted something legislated.

Once again, contrary to what Senator Abetz said today, they approached the Greens with these concerns and asked us to go in to bat for them, which is exactly what we have done. In the last few days we have arrived at the extraordinary circumstance where we now have agreement from the government that all our concerns over the lack of science in a very specific area—localised depletion—were valid; and that a management plan to manage the risks of localised depletion—let us call it 'uncertainty'—was also valid.

So I think that it is very rich to be saying that the Greens are antiscience. We have always supported the scientists—AFMA, CSIRO and IMAS are the groups. I would like to get it on the record also, for Senator Abetz's and everyone else's attention, that I have never said that the science does not matter or that the economics do not matter. The context of my comments were made very clearly at a forum, and also on ABC morning radio in Hobart the following morning. I had done a trip along the east coast of Tasmania, visiting hundreds of fishermen, personally and at a forum, and my comments were made while I was talking about our disallowance motion to put in place the chance for a management plan. The fishermen and the people who I spoke to were not interested in hearing about science or economics; they simply did not want the trawler, and they could see that no good would come of this to them. So suddenly, the Greens and I are antiscience and anti-economics.

Another thing about the science that is going to be fascinating following on from this debate is the proposition of marine protected areas. It is my understanding that Senator Colbeck has a bill before the House to give the parliament the chance to disallow the Commonwealth Marine Protected Areas program, which I may say is not based on just a few years of science but on 20 or 30 years of science. And a lot of the scientists behind that marine protected areas program are the ones who Senator Colbeck quotes supporting the lack of risks on localised depletion. I think it is also worth pointing out that the only science we received on localised depletion—and the quote was very clear to me when I was listening to Senator Colbeck a few weeks ago—was commissioned by him; if not paid for by him, certainly it was asked for by him. And that arrived on the day of our disallowance debate. We had no science in localised depletion to look at at all until that day.

I do not blame the scientists for that; I blame that on a lack of funding. I certainly hope that when the government reviews AFMA and fisheries management in general that they will look at the funding for this group which, incidentally, is provided by the industry. It is a user-pays system. Unless we have one of the world's biggest supertrawlers in Australia, we do not have the funding to do the scientific research—talk about putting the chicken before the egg! All these things need to be sorted out, and the Greens feel very clearly that, given a lack of public interest in this debate and the lack of trust, we would rather see a ban put in place on supertrawlers, with the onus of proof being that the ban is overturned once the science, economic and social concerns are proven— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.