Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Declared Fishing Activities) Bill 2012, which those listening to the broadcast would assume concerns the activities of the supertrawler Margiris. And I guess, in one sense, it does, except that, when you look at the extraordinary powers that this bill will give to the minister for the environment, you could be forgiven for thinking that he, with his partners the Greens, has taken this opportunity for a giant regulatory overreach.

That regulatory overreach will give the Australian government, in the form of its environment minister, control over fishing activities anywhere, in any capacity, done by any body, organisation or individual on the basis of a new term, 'social uncertainty'. It is a term that I have not encountered in legislation.

Like most people in my electorate of Farrer, some of whom have contacted me today, when I look at images of the supertrawler I do not like what I see. That is an instinctive reaction. It is the kind of instinctive reaction that many people would get when they visit an abattoir or see some of the perfectly legal and perfectly humane activities that are carried out in the farming industry. There are parallels between this issue and the live cattle debacle engineered by this government. But we cannot stand in this place and react on the basis of instinct. We can use our instinct to look again at a situation, to analyse it, and to say to our scientists and departmental experts: 'What's going on here? What really is happening? Do you have any ability to make changes?' We can and we should do those things. I am sure that, up to a point, the minister has done those things. But what has been produced for the parliament to consider today is not that.

If the minister particularly wanted to target a piece of regulation or legislation aimed at the supertrawler Margiris he could have done that. He could, for example, have introduced some provisions to make the ship move on—in other words, not stay in the same catchment area for longer than a certain period of time. He did not do that. He could have, and it has been done, legislated for a particular vessel on a particular occasion. There are many reasons why that would be a bad public policy approach, but he could have done that. In an attempt to address community concerns about the Margiris this minister has gone to the extreme. He has given himself almost unlimited powers, which will impact on every family fishing boat around the country.

I do not represent any ocean. The electorate of Farrer comprises 30 per cent of the state of New South Wales and it is all a long way from the sea. But I do represent recreational fishers and I do represent communities that love angling, that have seen the invasion of the concept of inland marine parks, that have seen a horrible, complicated bureaucracy grew up around just wanting to go out on a Sunday afternoon and throw a line in the waters of Lake Hume, the Menindee Lakes or the Murray River. Those communities are being attacked by the bureaucracy from every side.

The reason I want so strongly to speak against this bill is to recognise not only the appalling principle that is being engineered by this government but the rights of people in my electorate to carry on fishing and angling, and to carry on doing their business. They want to be able to that in a way that does not leave them with a federal environment act overseeing their every single move, an act that has the ability to stop the activity, to limit it and to put in place something so unrealistic that the very Australian activities of recreational fishing can no longer take place.

I have talked about principle. One of the principles we are seeing in this is a government that is making policy on the run. In the process, it has given the minister unlimited powers, but what has really happened is that a social media campaign, very successfully engineered by GetUp! and the green movement, has pushed this government into action. Social media is an amazing opportunity for people to make their point. From relative obscurity they can suddenly be in the public eye. It is something we have to countenance and resist up to a point. It is policy-making on the run; it is quite interesting to see. Every family fishing operator and every recreational fisher will be impacted by this.

Let us look at the language of the minister's bill. Clause 390SD(2) says:

… fishing activity by reference to all or any of the following:

(a) a method of fishing;

(b) a type of vessel used for fishing;

(c) a method of processing, carrying or transhipping of fish that have been taken;

(d) an area of waters or of seabed.

The minister will be able to overturn any fishing activity on the basis of even the slightest social complaint. There does not have to be any evidence. An uncertainty can be created by a complaint from a political source, from a lobby group interest group or from a social media website. This absolute power can apply to economic or environmental complaints. There is no indication what the term 'uncertainty' means in this legislation. It provides scope for the minister to stop any fishing activity without any substantive case. That creates a cloud over our entire fishing industry.

This bill, by stealth, accident or sheer incompetence, will impose the most extraordinarily draconian powers on basic rights, which is why all parliamentarians in this place should oppose it. The minister is saying that he will decide who fishes, and where, when and how they do so. It does not matter what investment may have gone into a pipeline to provide the opportunity for people to work in the fishing industry, what investment there may have been to get a ship, a boat, a trawler out into the waters. I am not talking about the supertrawler; I am talking about any fishing vessel. Nobody can have certainty. You could have gone to all this expense. You could have worked-up the ship and the crew. You could have provided jobs to long-term unemployed, which I understand is what the supertrawler has done and which many fishing vessels do in areas where unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, is quite high. You could have done all those things and you could have a lot of skin in the game as a small business, which a lot of our fishing enterprises are, and see the minister decide that, because of a complaint, because of a whim, it is all going to be ended. There is no point in members of the government saying: 'That's not what this is about. That's not what this minister would do.' That is not the point. The point is that we in this place should not give ministers this undue power. We have the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. We have had the science, we have had the advice, we have appointed independent experts. We appoint independent experts in this place to death because we know that we are not the experts. Yes, we can make decisions based on what they tell us. We should not contract out the decision-making, which is something this government does very well. We should not contract out the decision-making to independent bodies, but we should rely on their advice.

Where this advice tells us, as it has in the case of the fisheries, that this is one quota that will not result in more fish being extracted from our seas and that this is in line with every international and national agreement and piece of policy that we have at this point in time, why would the minister race in here on a whim reacting in a moment of horror in the face of what is just an environmental campaign? It has been writ very large by social media, admittedly, but it is a campaign nevertheless, not based on fact, principle or any good public policy.

We have no idea what the parameters of this 'uncertainty'—and the term in the legislation is 'social uncertainty'—might be. As I asked before, will it apply to a lake in the middle of my electorate? Will it apply to every lake in Australia until the minister's assessment of that uncertainty rests? Does it affect the Murray or Darling rivers, which also flow through my electorate? We have already seen the greatest level of uncertainty since Federation occur up and down the lengths of these mighty rivers with the government's wrecking-ball approach—the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. This has already knocked irrigation communities for six, through the uncertainty created by the government's completely unrealistic water diversion targets.

As other speakers have noted, a similar knee-jerk reaction occurred with last year's live export ban to Indonesia. During the last parliamentary sitting I met with a group from Gulf Horizons. To hear their description of how an entire pastoral region of Northern Australia is on its knees because of that live cattle decision was truly horrifying—another knee-jerk reaction, another reaction of 'Oh, my God, what do we do about this? There's something that has appeared in the media; we have to act now,' without consideration of process, all the facts or just the appropriate rationale. Millions of dollars have been taken out of farming and freight livelihoods forever in one single swoop. Then of course the agriculture minister went, 'Oops!'—it was another of those moments—and he tried to backflip. This is exactly what we are seeing here with this decision.

Under this amendment before the House, potentially we will see every family fishing operator and every recreational fisher waking up in the morning and wondering what sort of social uncertainty the minister might be experiencing on the other side of the country. Rumours already abound through inland Australia about the possibility that Labor's marine park legislation for our coastline could somehow extend and infiltrate into inland streams and lakes.

If recreational fishing takes any more of a hit in my electorate in western New South Wales then that might be more than the small towns that rely on it for tourism and income can stand. It would be the last nail in the coffin for some of them. If you look at the inland rivers now with plenty of water in them and the country blooming, it is a fantastic place for families to take their children to camp, fish, sit in the sun and have a really good-value Australian holiday—not on the coast, not in Bali and not anywhere offshore but actually to support rural Australia when it needs it but also when it can offer so much.

The minister's intention to extend his powers means that he can do that at any time on any whim. We know that when this government gets a knock on the door from their partners the Greens they react—and they react in a way that is not in their own interests either and certainly not in the interests of the people of Australia.

In making a few calls to local fishing groups and businesses around my electorate this morning I found that no-one is really aware of the extent of these changes the minister is planning to foist on them. That is because there has not been any consultation. How surprising! This government is ramming through legislation with apparently unintended consequences. The fisher who pops his boat out on Lake Hume on a Sunday morning with his son can be penalised for pulling out a trout instead of a yellow belly or a cod simply because some fish libertarian felt socially concerned over the removal of non-native fish stocks! Of course they have not been consulted. What would their response have been? It would have been, 'Please do not go ahead with this draconian and stupid piece of legislation.' As one local fisher told me, you would want the minister to have to jump through a few more hoops before they could bring in anything like this. That is the point. There has not been consultation. There has simply been this awful, knee-jerk reaction designed purely to respond to a populist campaign. As we have seen so many times before, when the dust settles, when the truth—as it always does—gets out, people will realise, 'Oops, perhaps we shouldn't have done that. Look at these unintended consequences for our country, for our investment and for our fisheries.'

I will end where I began. Instinctively, I am like everyone else. I look at the supertrawler and think, 'I'm not sure about that.' But that is not what we are talking about here today. Ostensibly what we are talking about is an opportunity to give this government an enormous new regulatory power in the area of the environment. If people think that the green groups that have agitated so successfully for this will stop at this and will stop at a vessel of this size without wanting to go the line and look at vessels of different sizes in different fisheries carrying out different activities for different purposes they are crazy. This would only just be the beginning. We should resist it at all costs.

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