Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

Hinch's hunch—they're often wrong—is that this matter of public importance could get sidetracked away from the threatened existence of dugongs and sea turtles and instead focus totally on native title in principle. Let me try to clear that up in anticipation. This is not about native title. It's about taking action to try to make sure that in 50 years time Australian kids won't be saying, 'What was a dugong?' and 'What was a sea turtle?' I'm not opposed to Indigenous people going out on a canoe with a spear and killing for food. What I am against is young bucks in tinnies with powerful outboard motors chasing turtles down and killing them with machetes, flipping them on their backs to die in the hot sun or dragging them behind a fast-moving boat to drown them. Some are tied up in shallow water and kept alive, even after having their flippers cut off.

I was on Green Island recently—supposedly a marine park sanctuary. As our boat pulled in, an official voice on the PA system reminded us that we were stepping into a designated marine park. 'All flora and fauna are protected,' we were told. We were warned not to even pick up a piece of coral. The stentorian male voice should have said, 'All flora and fauna are protected, unless you are Indigenous,' because I've seen photos of Aboriginal hunters swerving amongst the swimmers on Green Island, having chased a turtle into the shallows to grab it and kill it. That's part of Indigenous culture?

How about trophy turtles, the ones that have been nursed back to health by veterinarian Jennie Gilbert at the Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre and then tagged and released? These days, they try to release them 50 kilometres out at sea to protect them from the hunters. One had been nursed for 18 months. It was released and killed within 24 hours, and the tag proudly displayed by the hunters.

I had a sit-down with the Mandubarra elders, who also run a turtle rehab centre. The Mandubarra people have banned the killing of turtles and dugongs in their coastal territory. They explained to me that people from the rainforest tribes come down and kill them. In times gone by, they said, the marauding hunters from the rainforest would have been clubbed, speared or even killed for trespassing and hunting where they weren't welcome.

There's the issue prevalent too in whitefella country, and that is the lack of respect for authority—the lack of respect for their parents, the lack of respect for tribal elders from these young bucks. 'I've got my boat, I've got my outboard—let's have some fun!' That conservative conservation warrior up north, the redoubtable Colin Riddell, has campaigned for more than a decade. He's been lied to by politicians, state and federal, for about that long. He's shown me photos of young Indigenous men with a boatload of turtles. In fact, Colin Riddell first alerted me to the dugongs and their plight when I was on 3AW more than eight years ago. Riddell and Steve Irwin's father, Bob, have been champions of wildlife.

When the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion—a staunch critic of us dugong do-gooders—speaks, I'm sure he'll say, 'They only hunt for food.' How does that explain the photos that I've seen of styrofoam eskies on the luggage carousel at Cairns Airport after flights from the Torres Strait Islands? I tell you, that's not chicken meat packed in ice; that's turtle meat. The scuttlebutt is, up north, that turtle sells for $70 a kilo and dugong for about $130 a kilo. I can't vouch for this to be true, but I've been told that some industrious hunters have earned up to $70,000 to $80,000 a year from this 'cultural activity'.

Everybody in and around Cairns seem to know about it—from the local TV reporters to the cab drivers, the tour boat operators and even the flight attendant on my flight to Cairns. When she found out why I was going there, she described how every school in and around Cairns went on project visits to the turtle hospital, to the rehab centres. She said that, before she joined Virgin, she flew on a regional airline and used to recoil at the pile of turtle shells that they were carrying in the cargo hold. If we can't get a ban on the hunting, can we at least, for starters, get some official head counting of how many are left and how many are being taken? Or maybe we could at least have a moratorium on turtle hunting or have a turtle-hunting season.

In my talks with the elders up in Cairns, I mentioned what the New Zealand government did with Maori support when whitebait was under threat. I know that Australians can't understand why, across the ditch, they have an obsession with whitebait. It's a bit like Australians and Vegemite. When I was growing up in New Zealand, during whitebait season the local fish shop's refrigerated window would be a carpet of silvery white fish, all the size of matchsticks. Other countries call small fish whitebait, which is not true. They're really baby sardines. In places like Canada they're called smelts. Whitebait came under threat in New Zealand because whitebait are, in fact, baby inangas that head from the sea to the rivers, and go upstream to spawn. The baby fish, on the way back to sea, are caught in the nets as they head back down to what they call runs to return to the sea.

In New Zealand, to try and save the whitebait, they shortened the whitebait season. They banned unattended nets, even though Maori had been catching whitebait for centuries. They ordered that all nets had to leave an escape space on either side to ensure that some baby whitebait made it back to sea. That concern for baby critters is echoed over turtles by Mandubarra elders that I talked to. They have a new enemy. It's not just thrill killers with outboard motors on their boats. Dune buggies and other four-wheeled vehicles are leaving deep ruts in our beaches. It means that, after the mother turtle makes it up the beach to lay her eggs—remember, turtles don't even start to breed until they are 20; and that's another reason their very existence is under threat—and her eggs hatch, the baby turtles have to scurry down the beach to the sea. Many are eaten by birds. Now, increasingly, they fall into the deep wheel marks and can't climb out the other side. This makes them even easier targets for the birds.

I want to go back to the dugongs, those amazing creatures who are cousins to the American manatee. I didn't know this, but they have more in common in their ancestry with the elephant than the dolphin. If you look closely, you can understand that. These gentle dugongs are among the most endangered creatures in our oceans today. As such, they are, rightfully, protected in Australian waters and can't be hunted, except for that exception that I mentioned earlier. The exception allows Indigenous groups to hunt them on cultural grounds under native title. The hunting and taking of these beautiful creatures, these endangered dugongs, and the turtles, are not happening on a small scale. There is no hunting season for these marine mammals, which other endangered species are afforded. It means they can be hunted at any time of the day on any day of the year. There are no controls, no rules, regulating or limiting what can or cannot be done to these creatures.

The governments admit they have no idea how many dugongs and turtles are actually being killed. Although I saw a federal report from 2000 estimating it was up to 1,600 dugongs and 20,000 turtles being killed every year, the unregulated, free-for-all hunting of these endangered creatures means there's little data on the true magnitude of the practice. The legal loophole results, as I said, in thousands of dugongs being caught, butchered and sold.

When we hear about the slaughter of whales or dolphins by the Japanese, by their fleets, the Australian public is appalled—and rightfully so. So why do we have a double standard for the slaughter of dugongs and sea turtles in our own backyard? That's why I would say tonight: not only is the killing of these creatures wrong; the way they're being killed is horrific. Hunters will chase a dugong until the target is exhausted, then they'll spear it. They'll pull the dugong in by the tail and forcefully submerge the dugong's face and drown it. This process can take up to 20 minutes before the mammal dies.

On my recent fact-finding visit to Cairns and Green Island I met a New South Wales couple who'd been going there every winter for 25 years. The wife told me that these days they rarely see a turtle and this year they did not see one dugong. The Hinch team went out on Steve Davies' glass-walled submarine, Big Cat Green Island. We saw some wonderful schools of colourful fish. I'd not been there for 50 years but I'm sure, unless my memory is playing tricks, that I saw some vibrant pink coral back then. It was very dull coral this time. I was told that bleaching has affected more than 30 per cent of the reef.

So, for the record tonight, we saw from the sub one turtle but not one dugong. I say that unless something is done about this and unless restrictions are imposed, and imposed yesterday, then in 40 or 50 years from now the dugong and the sea turtle will be extinct.