John Watson (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tasmania’s mismanagement of Macquarie Island has become an international embarrassment in the scientific community, in ecotourism circles and across networks of people who care about the environment. This reflects badly on Australia, which has a high reputation for its role in Antarctica.

The UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris has expressed a deep interest in the situation on Macquarie Island and the extent to which World Heritage values are being compromised there by the current plague of rabbits and rodents. The Director of the Centre, Mr Francesco Bandarin, and the head of the Asia-Pacific Unit at the centre, Mr Giovanni Boccardi, met with NGOs as well as government representatives to discuss this issue during a visit to Tasmania on 13 and 14 February this year. The issue of the eradication plan and the urgent need to implement it will be brought to the attention of the World Heritage Committee at a meeting to be held in New Zealand in June-July this year.

International ecotourists have signed petitions in protest, and Tasmania’s conservation values are being questioned. As you know, Mr President, this is a disgrace. The eradication plan is time-critical and must be implemented immediately. If it is not implemented in the next month, and it needs to be begun in winter, it will be another year before the work can begin. The only impediment to implementation is the Tasmanian Labor government. Their inertia—no, their shameless neglect of their responsibilities—in an attempt to force the Commonwealth to step in is deplorable. It is as if the Commonwealth government now exists to provide a safety net for a greedy, lazy and incompetent state Labor government in Tasmania.

I applaud the attempts of the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, to progress a funding resolution for the eradication campaign; and I would welcome anything that might expedite the situation which many Tasmanians see as a clumsy attempt at political brinkmanship by the Lennon Labor government. The plan for the eradication of rabbits and rodents on subantarctic Macquarie Island has been prepared and has been sitting on the Tasmanian environment minister’s desk since November 2005—not 2006 but 2005—and it was paid for by the Commonwealth. It originally required around $16.5 million in funding, but now the total funding which needs to be committed before the plan can be implemented is $24.6 million. The federal government has graciously come in and offered to meet half of that cost.

As far as I am concerned, the foremost and overriding issue is that funding must be resolved and the eradication plan must start as soon as possible. The problem is not going to go away. It will continue to get worse, and the more it is delayed, the more expensive it will become. The plan is a large and complex operation requiring a lead time of something like two years; hence the urgency for a funding commitment and action from the Tasmanian government.

I would like to examine the offensive nature of the Tasmanian government’s action—or rather inaction. Firstly, the Tasmanian government knows that Australia has international obligations to protect and conserve World Heritage properties under the World Heritage Convention. So the Tasmanian government has been prepared to quietly allow Macquarie Island to reach a point of crisis. It has been prepared to be deaf to the concerns of its own steering committees, public servants and other experts. They have been prepared to mislead the public with their deliberate and highly political strategy to use the federal election year as leverage, and it has been prepared to disgrace the good people of Tasmania and damage Tasmania’s reputation both nationally and internationally.

Why has the Tasmanian government not put forward a proposal to the Commonwealth that Macquarie Island join the Heard and McDonald Islands group as an Australian territory—with day-to-day management becoming the responsibility of the Australian Antarctic Division? It is because Macquarie Island earns them a dollar, and it will earn them many more dollars in the future because of Tasmania’s ecotourism industry. In fact, the island is advertised on the Tasmanian government’s tourism website as ‘the gateway to Antarctica’. The island is seen as the last true wilderness, one of the most popular of the Southern Ocean’s remote islands, and cruise ship operators are facing a growing demand for Antarctic voyages by travellers seeking a unique frontier adventure. The island is home to a staggering array of wildlife and is considered an outstanding example of the major stages of earth’s evolutionary history.

The island, along with Heard and McDonald Islands, was listed as a World Heritage Area in 1997 in recognition of its outstanding qualities and unique geological features. It is the only place on earth where rocks from the earth’s mantle, six kilometres below the ocean floor, are being actively exposed above sea level. So it is a cradle of information for geologists studying the earth’s formation. Macquarie Island is also home to nearly four million seabirds. Of course, many of their young are being eaten by the rodents. The island provides a critical breeding habitat for two threatened albatross species—the wandering albatross and the grey-headed albatross. It is a breeding ground for about 850,000 pairs of royal penguins and 100,000 seals.

The recently screened Stateline Tasmania TV program, on 16 February 2007 on ABC TV, highlighted the fact that tourists are paying big sums of money to visit Macquarie Island but are now having their experience negatively affected by the effects of rabbit damage. The staircase boardwalk at the Sandy Bay landing site, which was purpose-built in 1990 to allow tourists to access an inland breeding colony of royal penguins—a species only found on Macquarie Island—had to be closed from the beginning of last summer because of the recent damage.

Macquarie Island is an important part of our culture and history. It has been designated by the international community as a jewel. It has been a part of Tasmania since 1825, unlike Heard and McDonald Islands, which were transferred from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1947. In 1933 Macquarie Island was proclaimed a wildlife sanctuary under the Tasmanian Animals and Birds Protection Act 1928. Today it is the site and subject of a vast amount of important research by mainly Tasmanian resident scientists and public servants, of whom we are very proud.

For over 50 years, Australia has operated a research and Antarctic support station at the northern end of the island. In addition to the Australian Antarctic Division, the CSIRO, the University of Tasmania, Geoscience Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Biodiversity Branch of the Tasmanian DPIW, the Department of Primary Industries and Water, all use the island for their important work. The base station was built in 1948. It is home to over 40 people over the summer and around 15 to 20 through winter, where they take residence for periods of three to 16 months at a time. Through these connections, the island has become part of the living identity of Hobart and southern Tasmania.

My own interest stems back to the 1940s, when a young scientist who had done cosmic ray research on Macquarie Island joined the science staff at my school. His work with a number of colleagues in the science faculty of the University of Melbourne was really pioneering stuff at the time and lit up my imagination. Years later, the late Mr Speedy—who I attended a memorial service for recently—asked for my help when he wanted to return to the island as an octogenarian.

Until eradication can proceed, rabbits and rodents will continue to damage the island. Interim measures may help in the short term, but they are not a solution and they may prove to be a costly and time-wasting exercise if implemented over the long term. If no action is taken, the problem, unfortunately, will continue to get worse. The majority of the steep coastal slopes are now affected, some seriously, with the removal of tussock and Macquarie Island cabbage and resulting slope instability and erosion. The steep slopes in the south of the island are particularly badly damaged, and this is where the only breeding colony is for the threatened grey-headed albatross. A number of light-mantled sooty albatross nests have been recorded as simply falling off the side of the hill on the heavily grazed slopes just north-east of Hurd Point. (Time expired)