Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise proudly to support Senator Whish-Wilson and the rest of the Australian Greens. I want to say very, very clearly that I do not support lifting the ban on night fishing for the Geelong Star. There has been a lot of discussion in this place this evening about dolphins and seals. These are beautiful, magnificent creatures. They are top predators of our marine ecosystem. As Senator Whish-Wilson said, they are protected because the Australian people have a relationship with them, because we as a people love these beautiful, magnificent creatures. It is important that we all understand this and understand that actually parliaments exist, in significant part, to give expression to the will of the people that we represent in this place. That is what democracies are all about. Yes, it is important that we listen to advice from scientists. It is important that we listen to advice from bureaucrats, administrators and experts in the various fields of life that exist in Australia. However, the buck stops with us, and it is important that we listen to the views of the people we represent in this place. If we are not going to give effect to those views, we had better have a very good reason why we are not going to give effect to those views.

I want to put it very firmly on the record, in response to some of the minister's comments, that we are not talking here about food for Australian people. This is not about whether, when people open a fridge in Australia, they can get a bit of fish out of the fridge. The point has been made by Senator Whish-Wilson that the fish that are harvested by the Geelong Star from the Small Pelagic Fishery are exported from Australia. We do not know how many Australian jobs are created on the Geelong Star. We do not know how much tax the company that is operating the Geelong Star pays in Australia. There is arguably very little benefit, very little upside, to the Geelong Star fishing in Australia, but recent history shows us there has been quite a significant downside to the Geelong Star fishing in Australian waters, particularly the deaths of a significant number of dolphins.

I cannot avoid reflecting on the fact that the minister describes dolphin deaths as 'interactions'. Let us call spades spades in this place. Let us be honest about what we are talking about here. We are talking about dolphin deaths. It is true to say that not every interaction will result in death. However, the words 'dolphin deaths' or 'killing dolphins' did not pass the minister's mouth in her contribution. We need to be very clear here that we are talking about a vessel that was supposedly regulated according to the best science and the best regulatory advice, and it slaughtered its way through dolphins and seals. It carved a swathe through dolphins and seals. It got four dolphins in a single throw of its nets. That is what we are talking about here. This move-on condition, the exclusion from zone condition, is potentially doing nothing more than spreading out these deaths. That is what we are dealing with here.

Like Senator Whish-Wilson, I have been lucky enough to spend a fair bit of my time interacting with the ocean. I have done the Sydney to Hobart and spent a lot of time in waves around Tasmania's magnificent coastline. Like so many Australians, whether it be through sailing, surfing or fishing—which I have done a fair bit of as well—I feel a connection with our marine environment and our coastline. We should not devalue that connection in the conversation we are having about the way the Geelong Star fishes and whether or not it should be banned from fishing at night. That connection should not be devalued; it should be highly valued because, as human beings, our connection to place is one of the most important things that we have. That is why people will fight passionately to defend places they love against inappropriate developments. The people I represent, the Tasmanian people, are renowned for fighting passionately to protect the places they love, the places they have a relationship with, from what they consider to be inappropriate development. That relationship with place goes to the very heart of what it is to be a human being. Our relationship with the marine ecosystem—those places on the coastline that we love, the waterways that we love—should be highly valued, because just as our connections to places on land define in large part who we are as people so do our connections with the marine ecosystem.

Quite frankly, whilst we should consider advice from scientists and experts and factor all of those things into our decision making, they are not the only things that we should consider when we make these decisions. Otherwise, we could have a board of scientists or bureaucrats running the country; however, we do not because, as people, we have made the decision to have a democracy where people come from all walks of life—and I look around this chamber and I see people with myriad backgrounds and skill sets, and that is how it should be—in a parliament, because we should reflect the people who elect us to this place. So I accept the importance of science and expert advice but I reject any assertion that science and expert advice should be the only considerations as we go about our decision-making processes in this place.

I want to say something about ecosystems—in fact we heard the word ecosystem mentioned in the context of innovation this morning in the Senate by a couple of government members. They talked about the innovation ecosystem—and that is a very fine description and one I have used myself in this place in the innovation context. However, I can only hope that the government understands the innovation ecosystem better than they understand the environmental ecosystem. There are serried ranks of people in this country and the world who believe correctly that old-style political parties do not get ecosystems. They do not understand that ecosystems have a level of interconnectedness that we cannot hope to fully grasp. They do not understand that, when you interfere unduly with one part of an ecosystem, that can have significant ramifications around the whole ecosystem. Exhibit A in that case of course is global warming—how humans, by simply emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, are now seeing feedback loops kick in around the planet that will result in ever-increasing problems; not only environmental problems but human problems. Humans are a part of the global ecosystem, and in fact we rely on the complex global ecosystem for our very survival, the health of our families, the health of our communities and, for that matter, for the health of our economy—and that is a simple fact that old-style political parties do not get.

While the science may offer some level of surety to some members in this place and they may come in and make their arguments on the basis of the science that they believe is in place, I am here today to say there is more to life. There is more to our deliberations in this place than simply science. I want to express my concerns—ongoing concerns, notwithstanding the comments of the minister—around localised depletion caused by these vessels, and to equate one massive super trawler with a fleet of smaller boats catching the same amount of fish does the minister no credit at all.

While the Greens are here, we will continue to stand up for our ecosystems. We will continue to stand up for sustainable management of a range of fisheries and other natural resources in this place. But we will take the long view, unlike many others in this place, that looks not only at the impact of our human actions in the next year, the next electoral cycle or the next decade: we will sit and ask ourselves—as we all should—what is the impact of our actions today going to be on people who are alive in 50 or 100 years? Intergenerational equity is something that drives us in the Greens. It drives me as a Greens member of parliament, because I often lie in bed at night wondering what sort of a world we are going to hand over to our children and their children and their children. And, unfortunately, if we keep going on the business-as-usual scenario with our climate and with our management of natural resources, we are going to hand over a world where our kids and their kids have far fewer opportunities than we have today. That, to use an Australianism, is simply not fair. It is not fair on them. That is why we need to make sure that the decisions we make in this place consider human life and the functioning of our ecosystem into the long-term future.

So I want to congratulate Senator Whish-Wilson for bringing this matter before the chamber today. I want to say to members that I will proudly stand with Senator Whish-Wilson and, I might add, proudly stand with the large number of Tasmanian people who have attended rallies and have campaigned against this vessel and previous iterations of the supertrawler and will no doubt continue to stand strong and continue to fight to ensure that the ecosystem functions in the long-term future and that, in the context of recreational fishing, their children and their grandchildren can still throw a line into the water in their childhood and have a reasonably similar expectation of catching a fish as we did in our childhood.