Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the first speeches I made when I came to this place was about the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef in my home state of Queensland. I thought it was about time I made some more comments about this wonderful and vulnerable part of our environment and how we should protect and value the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is a very special part of Australia and the world and has been acknowledged in that way by being considered an international icon. One really important challenge for all of us is maintaining its health and beauty. Maintaining good water quality in the Great Barrier Reef park is essential to ensuring that it remains one of the most beautiful, diverse and complex ecosystems in the world. We love and we look at the beauty of its wonder. I do not think there is an Australian who does not have either a wish to be there or a wish to return.

Since about 2001 there was been consistent study of the reef and its quality. A lot of that has been done through the wonderful work of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in Townsville, which was formed in the 1970s to look at research and science around maintaining and valuing the reef, and also AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, which is located very close to Townsville. They are important to the research and scientific knowledge of the region. From about 2002 there has been consistent review of the quality of the water and the life that is within the reef, and it is incredibly important that we do not let the water quality degenerate. It has been generally accepted—although there is a range of scientific argument and there can never be absolute agreement; no-one pretends that there is—that there has been damage caused to the quality of the water. We struggle to know what causes the decline in water quality.

Activities in the Great Barrier Reef catchment are the primary source of pollution to the marine park. The land, rivers and coastal regions adjacent to the marine park are known collectively as the Great Barrier Reef catchment. The catchment supports a variety of urban and rural land and increasingly, as always, more people want to live in this magnificent part of the world. With growth in population comes extra challenge to protection. We need to work effectively with the people who are living there, who choose to be there, not in a punitive way but in a cooperative way so that we share the goal to protect the reef.

Most importantly, we need to protect the habitats of the range of marine life. Declining water quality affects the habitats of the marine park in a number of different ways. Nutrients encourage growth of small algae known as phytoplankton and this leads always to decreased water clarity and light. Phytoplankton growth encourages filter feeding organisms such as sponges, tube worms and barnacles to grow and then to compete for space in the existing coral community. The nutrients encourage algal growth that can cover the coral communities. What we see as the beautiful coral, something that is wonderful to observe, is actually a vibrant living organism.

Excessive phosphorus weakens the coral skeleton, making it more vulnerable to storm damage, and then the sediment reduces the amount of light available for photosynthesis, smothers the coral and seagrass and disrupts the recruitment of coral larvae. Those are some of the problems, but it is not a cause which has gone unnoticed. A range of activities are being done to improve water quality and they demand the cooperation of both the Queensland and Australian governments.

Certainly as a result of an election promise this government is committed to the Great Barrier Reef and has argued in that way over very many years, but a particular commitment was made by the Rudd government to look at the protection of the Great Barrier Reef and the development of a $200 million Reef Rescue project. This project was the largest single commitment ever made to address the threats of climate change and declining water quality in our reef. The key of the whole plan is an effective partnership of seven Queensland natural resource management bodies, six peak agricultural industry groups and the World Wide Fund for Nature. This is a partnership of willing participants, all of whom share the passion to protect the reef.

The Reef Rescue project already has the backing of more than 900 farmers as well as the tourism, fishing and aquaculture industries, the very important Indigenous communities who have a special relationship with the reef and has been acknowledged by a particular partnership with local Aboriginal communities, conservation groups and researchers, all of whom have developed a cooperative working relationship, despite significant differences in backgrounds and the issues they bring to the table. One thing that remains paramount is the open commitment to protect the reef. With the $50 million which were committed in July 2009, it is expected that more than 2,000 additional farmers and graziers will join the project to further improve farm management. The core issue is that things done in the catchment impact on the reef itself. Increasingly the runoff from the major agricultural industries which are flourishing in catchment areas on the mainland has an impact on the reef itself—it is without question. The degree and the process can be argued but there is no argument about the fact that work on the land has an impact on the reef itself.

In 2008, there was a scientific consensus statement on water quality in the Great Barrier Reef agreed. This followed on from previous statements made in 2003 and earlier. That consensus statement had a number of key points. Water discharged from rivers to the Great Barrier Reef continues to be of poor quality in many locations. We know that pesticide residues, particularly herbicides, are present in surface and groundwater in many locations in the catchments—these substances do not occur natural in the environment and lead to a concentration of nitrate elevated in groundwater in areas under intensive agriculture. A portion of this groundwater is believed to enter coastal waters. They are not natural to the area but have immediate impact.

There is a range of issues which scientists are considering and continue to study. We know that land derived contaminants, including suspended sediments, nutrients and pesticides are present in the Great Barrier Reef at concentrations likely to cause environmental harm. The way this is occurring is being monitored, looking at what we can do to minimise the effect. There is strengthened evidence of the causal relationship between water quality and coastal and marine ecosystem health. We know there is a relationship; we need to study it to ensure there is not further damage and impact on the reef itself. The health of fresh water ecosystems is impaired by agricultural land use, hydrological change, riparian degradation and weed infestation—all of the things we know about in our agricultural industries which are not limited just to agricultural health but also go to the reef.

Current management interventions are not effectively solving the problem and climate change and major land use change will have confounding influences on the Great Barrier Reef health. Effective science coordination to collate, synthesize and integrate disparate knowledge across all disciplines is urgently needed. We need to turn what is in the agreed statement into action.

The Reef Rescue project is part of bringing that into action and we need to face up to it and take responsibility ourselves. Certainly the WWF has an ongoing campaign about what we can do to minimise the impact of pesticides on the reef. There is currently a review into the role of the Australian pesticides watchdog, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, the APVMA, which is looking into the way that the organisation operates and how it can continue to operate within our community and, particularly for my purposes this evening, in relation to the Great Barrier Reef.

A proposal is due to be delivered to the Primary Industries Ministerial Council at its meeting on 22 and 23 April this year and then it will go through to COAG, because, as I said, this is a national priority. It is not just limited to the people who are fortunate enough to live in that beautiful part of North Queensland; it belongs to all of us. This is our natural wonder. The COAG process, which involves cooperation between state and federal governments, is an important element of the Australian commitment to protect the reef.

We all have a responsibility to protect this wonderful reef. We need to do find out what we can do to help preserve it and to work effectively with people across industry bases so that there is no punishment, no blame but rather cooperative ways to protect this wonderful part of Australia.