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ASH:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ashlynne McGhee, this is 7am.

If you’ve bought salmon for dinner, there’s a pretty strong chance it came from Tasmania. On the island state, salmon’s a billion dollar industry. And at Macquarie Harbour, where Booker Prize winning author Richard Flanagan grew up, the waterline is now dotted with net pens and thrashing salmon. But the Harbour is also home to a 60 million year old creature and it looks like it's about to be wiped off the face of the earth… under the watch of the Federal Government.

Today, writer and contributor to The Monthly Richard Flanagan on how corporate greed, political inaction and our taste for salmon… are all choking the Maugean Skate.

It’s Monday, May 20.

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ASH:

Richard, take me to Macquarie Harbour on Tassie’s West coast. When did you first visit and what's it like there?

RICHARD

Well, I’ve been going there all my life. I actually grew up on the west coast in a little mining town called Rosebery and it's a very large and remarkable inland waterway, about six times the size of Sydney Harbour. It has this remarkable human history and then it just feels a beautifully majestic and wild sort of place. It's bounded by rainforest all around. But you also have flowing into it, from the east, some of the most extraordinary wild rivers in the Southern hemisphere, the Franklin and the Gordon Rivers. And in fact, it's so unique and extraordinary that a third of it is actually designated as part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. And one of the reasons for that is because it is the habitat of an extraordinary creature, the Maugean Skate, which is part of the skate and ray and shark family. It's 60 million years old. so it goes back to the time of the dinosaurs. And as far as we know, it is now only found in Macquarie Harbour. So it’s a very evocative place and it is a place that Europeans have tried to impose themselves on again and again, first with their penal systems, then with their minds, and now in this latest manifestation, with their salmon farms.

ASH:

And so with the salmon farms there - what’s it like now?

RICHARD:

The Macquarie Harbour salmon farms account for about 10% of Tasmanians’ Salmon production, more or less and, Salmon farming has been happening in Tasmania since the mid-Eighties, but it really only scaled up in the last 20 years. And since that expansion started, we have seen a catastrophic environmental collapse in Macquarie Harbour. Salmon farming is the very worst form of factory farming. What you get are these floating feedlots, a sort of slightly ominous fortified, plastic piped and nylon netted structures that increasingly have a warlike feel with them. And that's necessary because they're actually waging a strange sort of war with the natural world in order that they can continue to grow the amount of salmon that they do. People always notice when a salmon farm arrives near them, how everything changes. The water starts to go murky, the smell of the sea changes. You start to get slicks and brown froth on the water. It got so bad in Macquarie Harbour. I've talked to people who work on the farms there. There would be methane balls erupting at certain times of the year from these metre thick mats of waste at the bottom on the seafloor, methane balls the size of soccer balls erupting on the surface from the rotting shit underneath. So it creates what is up close, a fairly unpleasant environment and what we can't see is the way the water underneath has almost no oxygen in it, and it's hypoxic, and on the seafloor, sometimes what they call anoxic, that is, it has no oxygen whatsoever. Both those conditions are fatal we now know to the Maugean Skate.

ASH:

So it sounds like a really critical point with this skate. How have scientists told you they’re feeling about its chances of survival?

RICHARD:

I think, at best, very frightened and at worst despairing. Leonardo Guida, a scientist with the Marine Conservation Society describes their fighters swimming around in a vortex of swirling shit, trying to breathe through a straw.

Audio Excerpt – Leonardo Guida:

“Salmon farming, the fish production and the fish waste and fish feed chews up what little oxygen is naturally in the harbour.”

RICHARD:

They can't breed in that sort of environment. They lay their eggs in the sediment, and it's now believed that the eggs can’t survive in the sediment when there's no oxygen. And the population has collapsed. According to a report issued last year by 47%. The now under a thousand of these creatures left the fear is that the creatures that are left, many of them might be past breeding age or incapable of actually reproducing.

Audio Excerpt – Leonardo Guida:

“And we are one extreme weather event away from extinction. And with El Nino bearing down on us, possible storms on the front, we really need to make sure the harbour is as resilient as possible so that it can get their oxygen levels back up. And a key component of that, in fact, the primary threat to that is intensive salmon aquaculture within the harbour.”

RICHARD:

When the industry began flagging that it wished to expand in 2011, scientists warned the federal government, who had responsibilities under the EPBC act, to protect the World Heritage Area waters and to protect the Maugean Skate. It warned the Tasmanian government. environmentalists issued similar public warnings. And not only that, the leading salmon farmer in Macquarie Harbour talked at that time, who's a small scale Arsenal salmon farmer, Ron Morrison. He warned that if the expansion went ahead, the ecosystem, the marine ecosystem, Macquarie Harbour would collapse within several years in the federal Environment Department's report to Tanya Plibersek last September, it was made very, very clear that the primary cause of this extinction was salmon farming and, what I find really extraordinary about this whole story is that this creature that survived 60 million years looks like it won't be able to survive one decade of three tax evading, foreign owned multinational companies greed and the cowardice of politicians who, rather than to act to regulate them and clean this industry up, have have allowed them to destroy to the point to extinction.

ASH:

After the break - Meet the big fish in Macquarie Harbour’s little pond.

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ASH:

Richard, so who owns the salmon feedlots in Macquarie Harbour? And what do we know about those companies?

RICHARD:

Those companies are interesting. There's three. There's only three companies that produce all of Australia's salmon. The smallest is Petuna, which is owned by the New Zealand company Sea Lord, which is half owned by an ex Japanese whaling company called Nissui.

Audio Excerpt – Petuna Advertisement:

“Petuna, unique and personalised. A culture that evolve from one Tasmanian family’s intense desire to strive harder, to push further, to grow and to lead as the world market sorting food products and greater sustainability”

RICHARD:

The next biggest is Huon Aquaculture that's owned by one of the most monstrous corporations in the world, JBS.

Audio Excerpt – Huon Advertisement:

“For Tasmania’s Huon Aquaculture, one of the world’s premium salmon producers, a new era in sustainable salmon farming is underway…”

RICHARD:

JBS, a Brazilian family owned company who have the dubious honour of being responsible for the biggest corruption scandal in world history.

Audio Excerpt – Newsreader:

“Brazillians were shocked when President Michel Temer was caught on tape apparently endorsing the payment of hush money to obstruct a major corruption probe”

RICHARD:

In 2017, the two brothers who owned it went to jail for bribing over 1800 politicians and public figures.

Audio Excerpt – Newsreader:

“They even made a 500 million dollar profit on their only testimony by buying and selling dollars right before and after the story broke, knowing the Brazilian currency would plunge.”

RICHARD:

Today Huon Aquaculture is run out of Hobart by none other than Wesley Batista’s Son, Andre Batista. That was the Australian Financial Review that dubbed him the Kendall Roy of salmon farming. And there was, a secret donors dinner with the Tasmanian Liberal premier, at which it was said some of the Batista family were present and it was alleged they made demands of the Premier. When he was questioned about these allegations...

Audio Excerpt – Jeremy Rockliff:

“I, of course, attend as all political parties do fundraisers, that’s a matter for the Liberal party organisation.”

RICHARD:

…he refused to answer the question.

ASH:

Ok, so what’s the third company?

RICHARD:

The third company, Tassal, is owned by a company called Cooke Aquaculture. That was so bad and its environmental record so bad that it was thrown out of Washington state.

Audio Excerpt – Newsreader:

“Net pen fish farming will no longer be allowed in our state.”

RICHARD:

According to the public commissioner of lands there Hillary Franz, their, salmon farming practices had put the entire marine ecosystem of Washington state in peril.

Audio Excerpt – Hilary Franz:

“Today we are truly freeing Washington state owned aquatic lands from enclosed cages.”

RICHARD:

So they’re the companies I mean, it's a gallery of rogues, to say the least. At the beginning of this year, we had Anthony Albanese fly into Tasmania for one purpose only. He did one thing and that was to appear at a Tassal plant, with a Tassal baseball cap on, embroidered with his nickname on one side and Salmon Tasmania on the other.

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“90% of Australia's salmon comes from Tasmania, and it's a major export industry. Some might argue it's Tasmania's second major export industry, only behind the export of queens.”

RICHARD:

But what Anthony Albanese was there for was to reassure the industry, essentially, that nothing really was going to happen about Macquarie Harbour.

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“My government supports jobs. We support regional economic development and we support sustainability. And this industry has a vital role to play.”

RICHARD:

And he said jobs and the environment can coexist. And he quoted this number that there were 5,000 jobs in the industry. And even more indirectly.

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“This is an industry that produces some 5,000 jobs, but many more jobs in that indirectly as well.”

RICHARD:

The real number, according to the Tasmanian government's own salmon report in 2021 is 1,734 jobs. That is as reported to the government by the industry. The industry, Labour politicians, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton, all these people have come out and said that the hundreds of jobs at stake with Macquarie Harbour were salmon farming to be stopped there. The figures, according to the Tasmanian government's own statistics, there are less than 81 workers on the west coast of Tasmania. And those jobs are important and they're particularly important in struggling little communities. But I do not think it is beyond a nation to find other equally good work for less than 81 people for something of this consequence, particularly when we know, too, that these waters are warming rapidly, that salmon can't survive in warmer waters, and that the industry will inevitably shut down and Macquarie Harbour within ten years.

ASH:

So it begs the question why politicians at the state level, at federal level, continue to support the salmon industry? Why do you think it is?

RICHARD:

We have to reflect on that and wonder, and we should be very concerned about that. It speaks to, a mentality amongst the political class that is completely lost the sense of what its role is and the believe its only role is to enable corporations to do their business, that think the public good is identical to corporate profit. I think the other question this begs and and I've thought about this a lot…we wonder why we have all these problems with climate. And it's very easy to think it's a few bad people that it's this wicked politician, this terrible corporation. But ultimately, why this is happening in Tasmania is because not enough people care and very few people act. You know, everyone listening to this can have an effect. Don't buy salmon, because every time you buy salmon, you are helping drive this extraordinary creature to extinction. I think so much of what’s wrong in the world happens not because of the bad people but because the good people think they can do nothing. Good people can always do things. At the end of last year, I went with some of the groups working to try and reform the salmon industry, and I met with leading Woolworths executives who have a great power to tell the industry it should clean up. And there've been some meetings a few years before, and this meeting was completely different in tone, because we realised very quickly that they had no arguments they could make, that they knew the industry was rotten to the core, but we also knew that they were never going to do anything about it. Although they had titles like Head of sustainability words, and words like ethics and so on. They could have agreed as a block to go back to their board and say, it's rotten to the core and we can act to change it, but they won't do that. They'll never do that unless everyone in their different positions takes some responsibility and all of us can do things. Change has to come from within us. And first of all, we have to change ourselves.

ASH:

Richard, thanks so much for your time today.

RICHARD:

Thank you.

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ASH:

Also in the news today,

A group of pro-Palestinian protestors attempted force their way to the floor of the Labor Party’s Victorian state conference on Saturday, with the doors of the conference room having to be barricaded. Premier Jacinta Allan accused the protestors of brining “violence, homophobia and anti-semitism to the front door”. Later on Saturday afternoon, Victorian Labor’s rank and file members carried six non-binding motions calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

And,

Australian captain Sam Kerr’s club Chelsea has won its fifth-straight English premiership title, with an injured Kerr joining her teammates on the pitch to celebrate. Kerr was set to appear in court on Monday for a preliminary hearing over charges she allegedly caused “racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a police officer” – but the case will now certainly take longer, with the judge setting a trial date for February next year. Her legal team intends to argue an abuse of process by crown prosecutors.

That’s all from the 7am team today, thanks for your company. We will see you again tomorrow.

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