Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this legislation and to follow the member for Fremantle who has just spoken. This is an important matter. Whilst I do not intend, in my remarks, to go to too much of the detail of the legislation, I want to go to the principle of what this legislation is all about. It is an important matter because pollution of our oceans is a serious matter wherever it occurs. Our oceans are interconnected. Regardless of where the pollution occurs, it then flows on through the waters into other parts of the world—sometimes on the other side of the world.

Every day our oceans are being polluted by discarded plastic products, residential water run-off, discharge from polluted rivers and discharge from farming land—water that ultimately ends up in the oceans—all washing into the waters chemicals and waste products that are doing the waters harm. Indeed, when I was mayor of the City of Salisbury we carried out a study into the coastline of our city with respect to the damage caused by polluted stormwater run-off. For some 10 kilometres of coastline and for some four kilometres into the water, the seagrass had died as a result of that kind of pollution. When we put into place a different practice for the stormwater so that it was no longer going into the ocean polluted, the seagrass began to regenerate. That just proves the point that it does make a difference. Pollution can damage the ocean and whatever lives within it.

Every day tens of thousands of ocean vessels, large and small, are out there in the waters, doing whatever they are doing, but simultaneously in many cases discharging products into the oceans. In the last 25 years I understand that the number of vessels in our ocean waters has quadrupled, and the numbers continue to rise. As we saw earlier today in other legislation dealing with the ballast water from ships coming into Australia, there is a problem in maintaining and managing our ocean waters. I understand that each year in Australia alone some 200 million tonnes of ships ballast water is discharged into Australian ports by some 13,000 ships. Multiply that many times over by all of the other countries and all of the other ships, and we start to have an understanding of the damage that is being done.

Unfortunately, not all ocean pollution is visible, nor is the damage it causes. The risks are real—whether it is risks to fish stocks, to human health or to the marine environment itself. I will quote just a few of the facts and figures put out by UNESCO. It suggests that land-based sources such as agricultural run-off, discharge of nutrients and pesticides and untreated sewerage, including plastics, account for approximately 80 per cent of marine pollution globally. According to those statistics, there are now close to 500 dead zones covering more than 245,000 square kilometres globally, which is equivalent to the surface of the United Kingdom. Another of those facts which I find interesting is that the United Nations Environmental Programme estimated that in 2006—this is 11 years ago—every square mile of ocean contained 46,000 pieces of floating plastic—and plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. The last point I want to make—and this one surprised even me—is that plastic materials and other litter can become concentrated in certain areas called gyres as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. There are now five gyres in our oceans. The North Pacific Gyre, known as the great Pacific garbage patch, occupies a relatively stationary area that is twice the size of Texas.

Those are the invisible sources of pollution within our oceans that most people never get to see and are unaware of because they are not easily detected. But they are there and, sadly, because they are not detected, very little is done about them. We know that, even here in Australia, around 1500 seals and sea lions become entangled in marine debris and die; and that government sponsored studies have reported that between 8712 and 11,937 tonnes of litter gets into Australia's marine environment each year, in addition to 6000 tonnes of waste related to fishing and other types of marine activities.

That brings me to the point of this legislation. Effectively, we are dealing with legislation that goes to the heart of this very matter, because it is about trying to protect our oceans. Over recent years several cases of extensive ocean damage have been caused by large vessels and mining operations. Only three weeks ago, on 4 March, a cruise ship, the Caledonian Sky, caused extensive damage to a pristine coral reef in Radja Ampat in Indonesia. It does not stop there: as we heard a couple of years ago when debating fishing trawlers in this place, the damage and destruction caused by large fishing trawlers around the globe is truly concerning. Again, it is damage that we have not been able to measure properly, because in many parts of the world there is no-one doing that measuring and in many countries there is no authority to take any responsibility or provide oversight for what those fishing trawlers do. The reality is that there are now places in the world where the trawlers do not go simply because the fishing stocks have been wiped out. We do not want to see that happen as a result of their activities or other activities that arise because of poor management of our ocean waters.

We now have the added concern of global warming. Climate change and global warming, as other speakers have alluded to, are having a disastrous effect on the Arctic and Antarctic areas. Again, it is a matter that is not easily managed because we cannot simply say, 'We will do this or that' and overnight things will stop. When you combine all those risks together, you can understand why it is important to do what is within our power to try to minimise the detrimental impact on our ocean environment. One of the concerns I have had for some time is that there are shipping operators around the world who operate under what I would call questionable operational methods. These operators have little regard for the environment—

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