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

I rise tonight to speak about our oceans—again. We are often reminded that more than 80 per cent of Australia’s population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast, and that our love of the beach is deeply ingrained in our national character. Australia is legally responsible for an area of nearly 11 million square kilometres of ocean. That is significantly larger than our land area. From these waters we draw around a quarter of a million tonnes of sea life every year. This feeds into an industry worth more than $2.2 billion annually, one which is literally the lifeblood of some coastal communities.

The main agencies, state and federal, dealing with our marine environment try to paint the picture that we are enjoying a golden age of abundant sea life, that we have coordinated management plans and that healthy oceans are brimming with life. In some quarters it is well understood that this is, unfortunately, a long way from the truth in many areas.

On 1 August the managing director of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority gave a lecture at ANU. The transcript quickly disappeared from the website, but the title of the talk was ‘Turning a financially failing and environmentally struggling industry around: policy and resource management development in the Australian fishing industry’. As has been fairly well publicised, there was a significant revelation in his speech. It was the confirmation that up to 40,000 tonnes of southern bluefin tuna is finding its way onto the Japanese market each year, when the international quota is around 15,000 tonnes. That quota is headed for a reduction over the next year or two.

I say that it was confirmation because, as long ago as February of this year, at least one member of the Australian tuna industry was reported as demanding government action on the huge amount of illegal tuna being dumped on Japanese markets. The official response was nothing. I put a question about this to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage on Monday. Unfortunately, he dodged the issue and managed to turn it around into an attack on the Greens, saying we wanted to shut down Australian fishing operators who are obeying the law.

For the sake of clarity, Australia has several clear-cut options for action that would tackle the overfishing without shutting down Australian operators. My point was that, if we do not take some action now, the southern bluefin tuna will be gone for good. We need to act now to conserve this industry and this species. Last September, the minister for the environment ignored the advice of his Threatened Species Scientific Committee, which urged him to list the southern bluefin tuna as threatened under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This was a sad example of blame-shifting, wilful failure to take action and scientific ignorance. Unfortunately, it is just a microcosm of what has been collectively happening around the planet.

A key paper printed in the journal Nature in 2003 estimated that large predatory fish biomass was only about 10 per cent of the pre-industrial level. For some species it is in fact much lower. It can take as little as 15 years of industrial fishing to reduce a fishery to 20 per cent of its original biomass, which means that unsustainable operations can impact pretty quickly. Hence my oft-repeated concern about the unregulated high seas fishing industry.

It is sad to note that, earlier this year, IUCN released its latest list—which it calls its red list—of threatened species around the planet. It found that 20 per cent of the shark and ray species it looked at are threatened with extinction, and I suspect that many others are very close. We have a precedent for this, with 300 years of whale hunts that brought species after species to the brink of extinction. Most of the whale species hardest hit have still not recovered, which magnifies the tragedy of Australia’s rather limp response to Japanese fishing. Let me remind you that last week we had reports that 90 per cent of the whales taken by the Japanese during the last season were killed in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary. In some ways, overfishing is the easiest of the marine issues to face up to, because most fishing communities should understand full well that you have to protect the source of your livelihood.

We are also facing a range of other abuses of our shared seas. Seismic testing and naval sonar are flooding the oceans with noise, leading to mass whale strandings and cetacean mortality. Just last month a US court stopped naval exercises in the US because of its potential impact on whales and the link between this activity and strandings. We still treat the sea as though it were the world’s largest waste dump. We dump plastics, sewage and hypersaline discharges from desalinisation plants, and there is nutrient run-off. This run-off is leading to oceanic dead zones that are growing year by year. Encompassing all these linked abuses is the most important and intractable abuse of all. Global warming from carbon pollution is changing the way the oceans work, from the flow of large-scale currents to the distribution of species and the patterns of migrations.

Looming large over all that is the phenomenon of ocean acidification. Nearly half of the CO we emit is being absorbed by the oceans, which is rapidly making the oceans more acidic. This inhibits the shell-making activity of many creatures, including corals and the smallest phytoplankton at the very foundation of the food chain. I think that anybody hearing this will be automatically aware of the repercussions of this. By mid-century, the creatures that build the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo—the two great reefs of our nation—may no longer be able to do so. That will impact directly on the number of shells that we see every day at the beach. If bleaching, due to rising temperatures, has not done the job of destroying the reef, basic chemistry may well do so. Contemplate the fact that we are having increasingly frequent episodes of coral bleaching. If the shell-building by shells and accumulating carbonates is impossible, how can we possibly repair the reefs?

Unfortunately, we are continuing to hear a lot of talk about whales and tuna but we are seeing little real action. Researchers say we need a lot more work in many areas. In particular, a large caseload of work is needed in order to address the acidification issue. Australians now want less conversation and more action—for example, more legal action taken over whaling, more sanctions and stronger legal frameworks, with criminal penalties for the kind of piracy that was revealed this week. The community is ready for solid action on climate change, whaling and many other issues that relate to oceans. Above all, we actually need some leadership.

The same scientists and NGOs that are documenting this catastrophic slide to extinction in many of these areas are fortunately also suggesting solutions. Intelligently designed sanctuary zones are a part of this. We need to set aside a minimum of 30 per cent of the marine environment as no-take areas to allow the kind of recovery that will sustain our marine environment and our fisheries into the future. I note with interest today that the Minister for the Environment and Heritage issued a release that talked about the effectiveness of the sanctuary zones on the Great Barrier Reef. We applaud that and encourage the minister to try and extend this thinking on protection and recovery to other areas around our great nation.

We are still behind the recognised standard for the protection of our oceans and for the setting aside of marine protected areas and sanctuary zones. It is essential that we address these issues with a sense of urgency because, with all the issues that I have listed, we do not have time to sit by and let years go by. In my own state of Western Australia, in 1994, a list of recommendations for marine protected areas was released. That was 12 years ago, and yet since that time we have had one new marine park. We have seen no action in 12 years. It is time to put inaction behind us and move with a sense of urgency to work both nationally and internationally to protect our oceans and our marine environment.