Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) to a question without notice asked by Senator Whish-Wilson today relating to maugean skates.

The once pristine waters of beautiful Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania's west coast have been turned into a turgid and increasingly lifeless soup by industrial development. This awful transition was historically driven by the mining industry, but in recent decades it's been driven by salmon farming. One tragic outcome of that transition is for the maugean skate, a magnificent Gondwanan relic marine species that has been around since the Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the earth.

A recent study by the University of Tasmania has found that that species is now confined to Macquarie Harbour, and has dropped in population by 47 per cent from 2014 to 2021. Scientists are now extremely concerned that the maugean skate is one extreme weather event away from extinction. The rapid decline in population has resulted from a general decline in dissolved oxygen levels in its habitat that, completely unsurprisingly to the Greens and many other people, has occurred at exactly the same time as a rapid expansion of marine farming operations in the area. Salmon is currently being factory farmed in Macquarie Harbour by Huon Aquaculture, Petuna Aquaculture and Tassal. For people listening who are buying farmed salmon from Huon, from Petuna or from Tassal, you are directly subsidising the potential looming extinction of the maugean skate. That beautiful skate is slipping into extinction.

What is the government's response? Minister Plibersek, as we found out today from Senator Wong, has written a letter to the Tasmanian government. That letter requests that the Tasmanian government take an extreme interventional approach in order to address the critical situation facing the maugean skate. What's the Tasmanian government done? What is the critical intervention of the Tasmanian government? They've set up a few committees.

I say this to the Tasmanian government and to Minister Plibersek: not good enough. If you want to save this skate, which is slipping into extinction on our watch, get farmed salmon and the aquaculture industry out of Macquarie Harbour. They should never have been let in there in the first place and they should be booted out and booted out now.

Question agreed to.