ALP must end threat to jobs in salmon fisheries
A year after Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek launched a review of salmon fisheries operations in Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast, the drawn-out process has left workers, their families and the community dangling about their future livelihoods. Ms Plibersek is yet to announce a decision arising from the review, which was started at the behest of green-left activists such as The Australia Institute, Bob Brown Foundation, Australian Marine Conservation Society and the Environmental Defenders Office. In pandering to would-be Greens voters in inner-city seats, the situation has parallels to the Albanese government’s approach to Israel’s existential war against Hamas. Its actions in the UN, which are a major departure from established, bipartisan practice, are a pitch to Muslim voters in a handful of Labor seats. Industry Minister Ed Husic let that cat out of the bag on Monday.
But pandering to narrow sectional interests is bad policy and bad politics, as former Tasmanian Labor premier Paul Lennon and Dick Adams, who represented the Tasmanian seat of Lyons for a decade, said in Thursday’s paper. The state’s Labor elder statesmen, who sided with John Howard in shielding forestry jobs at the 2004 election, warned Anthony Albanese to put 5100 salmon workers and the $1.46bn industry ahead of votes in soft green seats. Mr Lennon cautioned against repeating the election-losing mistakes of Mark Latham in 2004, and Bill Shorten in Queensland in 2019, when he alienated mining communities over the Adani coalmine.
Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Paul Farrow also urged Mr Albanese to put the livelihoods of salmon workers ahead of “inner-city activists”. But Jim Chalmers, an AWU member, sat on the fence, stating decisions would be made “in the usual way” by environment ministers weighing up all the considerations. A more robust intervention from the minister in charge of the economy would have helped.
The row centres on the endangered Maugean skate that lives freely in Macquarie Harbour. As Mr Lennon said, the salmon industry was subject to strict environmental controls and “the starting point shouldn’t be that they have to shut down”. It was “mind boggling”, he said, that some people think a small number of salmon pens in Macquarie Harbour could be causing the environmental outcome that was being alleged when the harbour was six times the size of Sydney Harbour. Quite reasonably, he raised the issue of a large copper mine operating nearby for more than 100 years, discharging waste into a river that spills into Macquarie Harbour.
Peter Dutton, sensibly, has pledged to reverse adverse decisions impacting Tasmanian salmon workers. In August, the Prime Minister floated a potential solution to the standoff, Matthew Denholm reports, granting Macquarie Harbour fish farms a “national interest exemption” from federal environmental laws. The move is usually reserved for emergencies such as disaster responses and endangered species interventions. But the industry fears that would prolong uncertainty, invite green litigation and allow critics to tarnish salmon products as environmentally damaging. The issue would then drag on for another three or four years, Salmon Tasmania chief executive Luke Martin warned.
Mr Albanese would do better to prevail on Ms Plibersek to accept the industry’s “win-win” plan. Under that blueprint, she would declare fish farming a non-controlled action, and allow it to continue subject to updated conditions reducing salmon numbers if oxygen levels in the water dropped below certain trigger points. Good government demands that Mr Albanese and Ms Plibersek look beyond the obsessions of inner-city green-tinged voters and put aside lingering resentments over his kiboshing the minister’s deal with the Greens over Nature Positive reforms. They must put Tasmanians’ interests first or pay the price.