Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are many difficult issues that arise in politics and there is no doubt that West Australians dread hearing of shark attacks in our waters. It is also true that there has been a spike in shark attacks and fatalities in the last couple of years and that this has caused understandable alarm among beach goers and West Australians who engage in water activities. There has certainly been a sense of concern amongst the many of us West Australians who love to have recreation in our oceans. Over a 10-month period from July 2012 there are five people who are thought to have been killed off the WA coast by sharks and in the 12-month period to March 2013 there were eight shark attacks. This is in contrast to the annual average for the decade leading up to that, which was 4.4 attacks per year. So I do understand that Premier Colin Barnett wanted to be seen to be doing something.

But I have to say that his diving hook-first into the shark cull policy, a program to set up a string of baited drum lines to capture large sharks, was a big mistake. The Premier has seriously underestimated the intelligence of the electorate in playing to their understandable fears and concerns. He has also underestimated what I can only describe as wanting a fair go for sharks. Now, it is not a perspective that comes to me instinctively; I must say I am more of the 'let them eat flake' brigade. But people have a very strong sense of what is fair out there in the oceans. I do acknowledge that there is a sector of the community who do support the cull policy, but my sense is that the majority of people see it as a fruitless exercise that will kill a lot of sharks without making us one bit safer in the water.

The federal environment minister has played Pontius Pilate here and given Colin Barnett an exemption from the federal environmental laws to undertake the cull. The environment minister has used a clause in the national environmental law that was intended for circumstances involving defence, security and national emergencies, a very dubious use of that power here. There is also a case that this decision is contrary to our obligations under the UN Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. A recent correspondence from the convention secretariat said that the convention prohibits the taking of such species except under extraordinary circumstances and that 'the extraordinary circumstances clause in paragraph 5D of article 3 of the convention has not been invoked by a CMS party to the best of my knowledge'. This is a first that we have got.

Mr Barnett in my view has shown some of his legendary political autism here. He has misread the population. I do not just mean the usual suspects from the conservation groups and the western and inner suburbs but indeed, from my conversations with people right across Perth, there is a great resistance to this policy. So the Premier decided he was going to play a tough, decisive action man presenting the public with a decision that is largely considered a joke. It would have been much better to have a serious public dialogue before embarking on a response to the spike in attacks.

The majority of people I speak to across Perth say three things. They say, yes, there is a risk, but with seven fatalities over the last three years it is a ridiculously small risk to that which we face each day. They cite the deaths on roads in Western Australia; there were 524, compared to the seven over that same period. A study published in the Australasian Medical Journal found that the risk of being bitten by a shark while swimming off Perth in summer is just one in three million, or about the same odds as winning the lottery three times. Indeed, 21 Australians die in rips each year. So people get that. They know there is a risk, but they know that the risk of being taken by a shark when you utilise the waters is, really, when you consider it, a tiny risk.

The second point they make is that this is the sharks' domain, and they make this point very strongly. It is a quintessentially Australian live-and-let-live approach, and I have been quite surprised at the strength of this value in the community.

Finally, and probably most importantly, they say that it won't work. Indeed, it is hard to see how it could. Firstly, no sharks caught have been great whites, although it is that endangered species that is implicated in the vast majority of attacks. So we are capturing sharks but they are not the ones that are implicated in the attacks. We do recognise that there are seasonal factors there, but we believe this will continue to be the pattern.

If you look at the shark culling that was carried out in Hawaii between 1959 and 1976, over 4,500 sharks were killed and yet there was no significant decrease in the number of shark bites recorded. They looked at culling practices in New South Wales over the last 60 years, and even with the use of shark nets they found that 23 of the 139 attacks have occurred on netted beaches. Indeed, there is concern that baiting may even be creating a more dangerous environment. Small sharks are being left on hooks overnight, bleeding and potentially being attacked by other sharks. Even the Premier admits that at least one shark was eaten by other sharks while on a hook. Conservation groups claim that they have video evidence that this attraction of sharks—sharks eating the sharks on the hooks—is in fact occurring more frequently.

So what should we do? We need to maintain our commitment to aerial patrols. They are expensive but they do work. We need genuine and sophisticated research so that we know the habits of sharks. We need to educate the public about what they can do to reduce their risk. And we need to invest heavily in shark-deterrent capability, be it personal devices or the devices used by those in the fisheries industry, particularly abalone divers. So I would urge the Premier and the federal Minister for the Environment over the next few months to sponsor a state debate and a dialogue with the community so that we can establish some common ground on the way forward.