Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment and Water (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

It's all very well for you to say 'Oh, rubbish!' but that is what your marine park rezoning allows. You are stripping back the marine protection that Labor put in place, and you can see it on a map. Labor went through a very comprehensive process where we layered places to have complete marine protection and where other zonal use would be allowed. You have completely stripped back the protections and allowed mining, commercial fishing and other uses into areas where they should simply not be allowed.

In our marine reserves network Labor supported dedicated areas for recreational fishing, including 18 per cent of the Coral Sea, the largest area in the world zoned in this way. The blue and yellow zones of the Coral Sea maps, which I can't show you because it's not appropriate to show you in the chamber, have been removed by Minister Frydenberg. Minister Frydenberg has opened Labor's rec fishing zone area up to longlining, to midwater trawling. These are the same fishing methods used by super trawlers. Additionally, in the Coral Sea, where you can't rec fish, you'd have to travel 200 kilometres, and that's a long way to go in a tinnie. So Labor's network does not impact on mums and dads and their children who want to go fishing.

The government are running a scare campaign to try to distract people from the fact that they're letting commercial fishers fish in more of our waters. I implore the chamber this evening to support this disallowance motion. The government is claiming that its network allows rec fishing in 97 per cent of waters from within 100 kilometres from shore. That may well be true, but I can tell you that Labor's network allowed rec fishing in 96 per cent of waters within 100 kilometres of shore. The difference is this: you are trying to make yourselves champions of recreational fishing, but the simple fact is recreational fishers will be competing with commercial fisheries. Labor's marine parks are substantively better for Australia's rec fishing community, and that's why they received such strong support. We see such absolute environmental destruction in your marine parks. We see that you have put forward the largest-ever wind-back of areas under conservation. No government in history anywhere in the world has ever removed from conservation protection an area as large as you are removing right now.

I want to say to you: the government put out misinformation about the finality of Labor's marine parks, but they were absolutely final. Tony Abbott himself spoke on and voted on, I think, six disallowance motions in the House of Representatives. I can remember those opposite seeking to move disallowance motions on our marine reserves many times, so any claim that we haven't done the work or that we have somehow squibbed at the last minute, which is another completely false set of accusations that has come from the other side, is completely wrong. Instead, what you have sought to do is through absolute misinformation—I want to be able to call it lies but I'd have to withdraw that immediately. But I am just so utterly gobsmacked at your complete vandalism of our nation's marine parks.

We had the most comprehensive set of consultations that this nation has ever seen when it comes to deciding on our marine parks zones. How do I know this? I know this because I was part of them and met with stakeholder after stakeholder. I took issues from the environment movement, from recreational fishers, from commercial fisheries, from APPEA and from others. I took those issues to the minister and I was part of the deliberations to balance out what went where and what was important to keep in and keep out. There were more than 200 meetings. That was way above and beyond what the government has done in putting forward its alternative proposals.

You have completely caved in to—I'm not even sure what—your own right-wing, internal, anti-environment agenda. I cannot see anywhere the logic for what you are seeking to do. There have been no big industry calls for this; there have been no recreational fishing calls for this. I can only put it down to some kind of innate anti-environment agenda coming from the other side, because what you are doing is completely irrational. It has been a completely inadequate process, it has had completely inadequate consultation, and it completely strips back the environmental protection that our nation's oceans deserve.

Now, you should recognise that, globally, our oceans are in absolute crisis. What our oceans need to see globally is more, not less, of this kind of protection. Right around the world, we see fishery after fishery being stripped back, putting our globe's food security at risk and putting our world's biodiversity at risk. So I make this plea to this place: please, let Australia continue to be a leading example on marine and environmental protection. Our nation should have a proud record in marine protection, and what the government is doing in its alternative marine park plans, which should be protected by supporting this disallowance motion, is incredibly important to our nation.

Senators opposite might roll their eyes at this, they might talk about how they intend to maintain Australia's environmental record, but the facts speak for themselves. Over 50 per cent of the marine national park zoning is being stripped away by the government. That's like halving our national parks on land. But, after question time this week, maybe we're getting a taste of that, where the government refused to rule out logging in national parks.