Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to take note of a number of the responses to the Senate resolutions, but specifically I would like to take note of Minister Hunt's response on the shark motion.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the response by the Minister for the Environment (Mr Hunt) to a resolution of the Senate of 14 May 2014 concerning the Western Australia shark cull.

I note the response by the Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, to the passing of the Senate's resolution on the Western Australian government's Shark Hazard Mitigation Drum Line Program, commonly known in Western Australia as the shark cull. He makes several points, but in particular he talks about how he has now requested an assessment of the environmental impacts of an extended so-called shark mitigation program for three years. He should never have exempted the last shark cull in Western Australia, which did not catch any great white sharks but did catch an excessive number of tiger sharks. I will come back to that point in a minute.

Finally, he has required an assessment of the three-year program, which the state of Western Australia is carrying out under the bilateral agreement. Here you have the state of Western Australia, the proponent of the shark cull, now being the body responsible for the assessment of that program. If you look at the public environmental review document that was released, comments are due for the four-week comment period on 7 July. If you look at some of the fundamentals of this program, I do not see how the minister can do anything else but reject this program.

The program is predicted to kill 300 tiger sharks annually. That is 900 tiger sharks. The report acknowledges that they will probably only catch around 25 great white sharks over that three-year period. We are sacrificing 900 tiger sharks. There is no formal stock assessment of the tiger shark population found off WA. We also know from the 2014 shark cull program that there were three female tiger sharks caught for every male tiger shark caught. We do not know what impact that program—taking that many female breeding tiger sharks—is going to have on the tiger shark population. Great white sharks have been the shark identified for those fatal shark attacks off the coast of Western Australia, so there is no justification for taking 900 tiger sharks through this culling program. We know that the great white sharks are highly migratory, so even if they do catch one it is not going to reduce the possibility of individuals being taken or attacked by a great white shark.

We know that the great white shark population off the coast of Western Australia has not rebounded, contrary to some of the extraordinary claims made in the PER about the number of great white sharks and the population of great white sharks. Suddenly, they are making ridiculous claims of 5,400 individuals, when research shows that there are around 700 mature breeding animals. All of a sudden, with no justification, the government is now claiming that there are over 5,000 great white sharks.

The other great concern with the PER is that they are acting as if these shark culls and drum lines are the only possibility in terms of dealing with shark hazard mitigation. For example, the PER does not adequately assess environmentally friendly shark barriers, personal safety devices or the shark spotters from South Australia. There are great holes in this PER. It is predicated on the fact that they think that a cull is actually going to stop great white shark attacks. It also puts forward to the public a false sense of security.

This program not only is a waste of money but is based on fallacious information. It will kill nearly 1,000 tiger sharks, which are not the target species. It is a population that has not been adequately studied. It will not improve safety. The majority of Western Australians do not support the shark cull. They want to look at alternative methods. The government claims that the shark attacks will reduce tourism, when the overwhelming feedback that we have had is that in fact it reduces tourism because people do not want to come to a state where they are killing sharks—where they are killing tiger sharks and where they are trying to kill great white sharks.

The government claim that they did some monitoring and tagging of the sharks that were caught and released. They also acknowledge that they cannot guarantee that those sharks that they are catching and releasing will actually survive. The tagging that they did was putting plastic tags—most of them were just plastic tags—on the fins of the sharks that they released. As I said, they do not even know if those sharks survived.

The government also claims that they will carry out this shark cull in a humane manner. If what they did over the months of January to April in Western Australia in 2014 is an example of their 'humane treatment', they have a lot to learn about humane treatment. There are photos of sharks with hooks through their heads, through their mouths—the way they were brought onto boats. In nobody's wildest imagination could anyone think that those sharks were dealt with humanely. There are photos of contractors over the side of the boat stabbing sharks that were on drum lines. For a start, if you are being humane, you do not use the hooks that they use on the drum lines; you use circular hooks that do not damage and kill sharks. Sharks were left on hooks, dangling for hours on end, and were attacked by other sharks. That is not humane.

This program did not work this summer. It will not work next summer or the summer after that or the summer after that. The government seems to have forgotten one of the key facts as well: of the seven attacks that they reference, five were in periods when they do not intend to put drum lines in the water. This is another expensive PR exercise from the Barnett government. The federal government should never have facilitated it in the first place. They should not facilitate it any further. They should uphold their responsibilities to protect the marine environment, to protect the great white shark, and to protect the other species that are covered by the various conventions and responsibilities under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

This is a flawed policy. It is not supported by Western Australians. They do not do this in our name. We urge the federal government to carefully assess this PER and reject it. By any standard, this is a substandard PER; it does not protect the great white shark and it does not protect humans. The Barnett government needs to think again. It needs to come back with a mitigation program that does not rely on killing nearly 1,000 tiger sharks, and that will kill great white sharks. I remind people that the great white shark is listed as a vulnerable species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and should therefore be protected; as should the other species—for example, there were some shortfin makos caught during the last cull and they could be caught again. They have been nominated as a vulnerable species. They are recognised on the red list internationally—as are tiger sharks, by the way—by the IUCN.

This is a flawed policy. It should be abandoned and the federal government should not facilitate it for one further minute.