Tasmania Is Fully Against the Fish Barons and Governments that Don't Listen to Citizens

See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2052031015025722/permalink/3259729280922550/.

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Today in the Mercury Talking Point:

Parliamentary report into fish farming industry can’t be ignored

Recommendations from a Legislative Council report on fin fish farming in Tasmania leaves salmon companies no where to hide, writes Peter George

A TURNING point in the debate about the future of Tasmania’s farmed salmon was reached about a week ago with the tabling of a parliamentary report into the industry.

Its 194 findings and 68 recommendations leave the salmon barons nowhere to hide.

They draw a stark picture of an industry out of the control of its regulator, an industry that gets what it wants even before the essential research is complete and an industry so arrogant that social licence is a meaningless concept to the salmon barons who control it. The report makes for appalling reading amounting to a litany of damning evidence that industry, government and regulator are locked in an embrace that pursues the industry’s interests over those of Tasmanians.

Couched in the dense language of a parliamentary report, it marks the first time that conclusive evidence and soaring community concern have been heeded and addressed.
Full credit to the independent members of the Legislative Council. It takes courage to speak truth to powerful entrenched interests, especially industrydominating Huon Aquaculture owned by the $50bn Brazilian multinational, JBS, with its track record of corruption, bullying and bribery. Core to the report is a halt to any form of expansion of the industry without a complete revision of the overarching “growth plan” to include genuine stakeholder consultation; environmental, social and recreational values; and transparent, evidencebased decision-making.

On that recommendation alone industry and government fail.

Perhaps more significant is recommendation 3: priority is given to stopping all salmon farming in inshore, sensitive, sheltered and biodiverse waterways.

That means an end to fish pens in – at least – Macquarie Harbour, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, the Huon River and estuary, the Tamar River and Long Bay, right next door to World Heritage-listed Port Arthur.

If this important recommendation were adopted it would spell an end in its current form to the salmon industry along with an end to its coastal depredations, its cruelty to and destruction of marine life and the slow asphyxiation of its own livestock in rapidly warming waters.

No wonder the salmon barons are demanding access to the last of the state’s coastlines still free of open-net salmon cages. By clamouring to expand into Bass Strait, the industry implicitly acknowledges warming waters make its in-shore operations increasingly unsustainable.

Now the MLCs are saying it does not even have justification to be there.

In almost embarrassing detail the report eviscerates the whole edifice that supports the industry: lack of real science underlying decisionmaking; opaque processes allowing the industry to do what it wants; failure of fresh water quality management for salmon hatcheries; the regulator’s lack of resources; failure to produce just returns to the community for the use of public waters; failure to properly penalise industry violations; risible fines for littering foreshores and waterways with marine debris; and even the failure to set proper limits for the amount of filth and faeces salmon cages are allowed to spew into public waters.

A disappointment is the MLCs’ failure to investigate obvious alternatives to opennet fish farming, just as last month’s so-called Salmon Symposium also ignored the blindingly obvious. Landbased salmon production in closed-loop facilities would be economically attractive if the salmon barons were paying their way for the use of our waters, for the impact on environment and community, for the cost of regulation, monitoring and policing, for the mistreatment of livestock and for their huge carbon emissions.

The Federal elections have revealed what happens to governments and politicians who fail to heed the electorate.

Tasmania will not long remain immune to the mood that generated the so-called “teals”.

In an expanded parliament, the major parties will need to cock an ear to what increasing numbers of Tasmanians want – not to what the salmon barons demand.

Peter George is a former ABC foreign correspondent, the president of Neighbours of Fish Farming and co-chair of the Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection.