Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

If anything were to endanger the jobs and job security of workers and the investments in the Tasmanian salmon industry, it would be parliamentary stunts like the one Senators Duniam and Colbeck and the Liberal Party are engaging in. There are processes here. There are processes here that industry relies upon and that, indeed, the interests of the environment rely upon. Stunts in the parliament undermine that process, and that is one of the reasons that the Labor Party, the government, will be opposing this proposition in this place—not because our commitment to the salmon industry and the environment is anything but unequivocal.

I want to try and attempt in this place to open up the minds of senators in the opposition to a set of concepts that Tasmanians reflexively understand. Tasmanians deserve an industry and good jobs in the salmon industry, and they deserve a clean marine environment at the same time. Both of those things are the objective of the Albanese government and indeed, from what I understand of it, of the salmon industry itself. It is the crudest political trick—it's played by every sort of backwards political character—to try and pit industry and jobs against the environment. Whose interests does that sort of crass, bottom-feeding—I don't know where the maugean skate feeds; I don't know whether it's a bottom feeder—political approach suit? It suits the interests of the Liberal Party, and it suits the interests of the Greens political party. But it's in no way in the interests of salmon workers or the environment.

Motions in this place achieve precisely zero. Indeed, if debates and committee hearings are conducted in the way that Senator Duniam, Mr Dutton and all these other Liberal Party characters, silvertails, want to conduct them, they undermine the industry. If you were serious about the interests of the salmon industry in Tasmania and the interests of the environment, you would back Senator Anne Urquhart for Braddon. You would back Senator Anne Urquhart for Braddon.