George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an absolutely insane proposal which is to do with the legislation. We are talking about monitoring the fishing industry and the data we can get from the industry. Yet this proposal we have is not based on any data whatsoever. It is going to lock up vast tracts of water from our fishing industry when the data, the science, the people from the government backed research and development body, say there are no unsustainable practices taking place in this country. Locking up the Coral Sea, an area half the size of Queensland, is a perfect example of dumb policy that has ignored science, ignored data and reacted to misguided perceptions about the sustainability of our fisheries.

I was at the Australian Institute of Marine Science the other day talking to a few scientists, including Dr John Gunn who heads the research facility there. I said to him: 'John, tell me about this Coral Sea proposal and what the science behind it is from your point of view.' His view is that there is very little, that we do not have a great understanding of what is out there and therefore we do not know what needs to be conserved, and therefore any push to conserve it is based on no information whatsoever. That was the view of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, another government backed body. What has driven this policy is not science but the radical green American group called Pew. That is where this government is getting its policy advice from. The lockout is not proposed because the fishery in any area of this country is unsustainable. It does not come because species are endangered; there is not one single species that is endangered. It does not come because there is any damage to any reef or any impact on the marine environment at all. In fact, in promoting the closure the government itself says the area is in pristine condition. This closure comes only because the American green organisation Pew said they want the government to do it. They would not do the same thing in American waters, I notice. In Fishing World magazine there was an article on 29 June this year which said:

The US-based anti-fishing organisation Pew has admitted that it pressured the Australian Government to lock anglers out of vast areas of the Coral Sea but would not take the same action in American waters because it would harm the US economy and disadvantage local fishermen.

I tell you what, they came to the right government if they wanted to harm local fishermen here and disadvantage our economy. Confirming that what was good for Australia was not good for America, Pew's director of federal fisheries policy, Lee Crocket, went on to say that closing the Gulf of Mexico to fishing would not make sense because those waters were 'a major US economic driver'. So it really does not matter how much e-monitoring you have, the facts are on the table for the government to see in relation to fisheries management.

I quote another scientist here, marine biologist Walter Starck. I want to talk about the Coral Sea for a split second. He says that the fishery harvest rate we have here in Australia is actually one-30th of the global average. He points out that Australia has got the largest per capita fishing zone and the lowest fisheries harvest rate in the world. We have got the most restrictive and costly marine resource management in the world. No marine species in Australia is threatened with extinction by fishing, and that is backed up by the Fisheries RDC, and there are already some protections in place for a lot of Coral Sea islands and reefs. When you look at the Coral Sea itself, again quoting from Walter Starck in the report he has done, he says that the Coral Sea is one of the world's prime yellowfin tuna fishing grounds. We produce a few hundred tonnes from the Coral Sea where Japanese fishermen have previously produced around 30,000 tonnes annually for many years. The border of this Coral Sea is in conjunction with PNG's EEZ, the exclusive economic zone they have. Fish, as has been said before, are not like cattle where you can herd them into a certain area. They swim and they do not see lines on maps, so they swim right across the line that the government might want to put on a map and they swim into PNG waters. PNG license Asian fishing companies to fish those same migratory stocks in their waters. They currently catch about 750,000 tonnes of tuna while all of Australian tuna fisheries amount to about 15,000 tonnes. We import some $165 million worth of canned tuna into this country every year. We save our fish so that the fishermen in other countries can catch it and sell it back to us. It is crazy.

So it does not matter how much data you collect, it does not matter how much you have or how much science, because this government simply will not take it into account. Rather than listen to the science, rather than look at the data, they listen to extremist organisations from the other side of the world and their mates in the Greens.

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