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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones this is 7am.

The billion dollar Tasmanian salmon industry promotes itself as environmentally friendly, healthy, and good for the state.

But when you look a little closer, the environmental and social impacts are alarming.

Award-winning Australian author Richard Flanagan has seen the impacts of the commercial fishing industry first hand, and has spent years investigating the murky relationship between big business and the government.

Today, Richard Flanagan, on the real impacts of Tasmania’s salmon farms and the failures in regulation that have allowed them to keep growing.

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RUBY:

Richard, your new book is an investigation into the commercial salmon industry in Australia. Can you tell me why you decided to explore this topic? Where does this all start for you?

RICHARD:

Ah well, about nearly 25 years ago now, I bought a shack on Bruny Island and that was a very, you know, rundown old place and just a tiny little cottage. But it was such a beautiful world there, it was. It just crawled with life.

There were so many you know, there were 40 spotted pardalote. You know, there's only about 500 of them left. You know, quolls used to run across the deck in the night.
And the sea there was just so rich with all these extraordinary creatures, sea dragons, seahorses, stargazers.

None of these are unusual creatures. But they were there in abundance and beautiful.
And then about 17 years ago, there was a little fish farm nearby. And I began to notice noise coming from it. And the noise got worse and the community got upset. And we went to see the government and the government said, the particular department, well, there's nothing we can do, they said, because if we do something, the salmon company will call the minister's office and the minister's office will call us. So there's nothing we can do. And the best thing you can do is just deal directly with the salmon company. And this struck us as very strange.

RUBY:

Mm.

RICHARD:

But nevertheless, for the next 15 years or so, we tried to work with the salmon company to quieten the farm down. And in all that time, what happened was that slowly it became ever more industrialised.

Slowly things started disappearing, that the abalone disappeared, the crayfish disappeared, the sea dragons disappeared, and then the penguins and dolphins were hardly ever seen anymore.

Strange brown froth would wash in and I realised the water there was dying in this place, which had once been so magical and so rich. And, you know, this was a heart place for my family and for me. And that's where I went to write my novels. And it was dying.

RUBY:

And so what exactly is it that commercial salmon farming is doing to the environment? How is it that the things you’re describing have come about?

RICHARD:

Well, commercial salmon farming is factory farming of a quite extraordinary type, so that you have these huge floating feedlots in which hundreds of thousands of fish are crammed, where they swim in a sort of putrid mess of faeces and ammonia.

I mean, these are big industrial complexes. They've got massive factory ships, huge compressors.

And the big problem with these huge fish farms of which they're ever more in Tasmania is the massive effluent outflow from them.

Now, what that sewerage does with all its dissolved nutrients is it creates algal blooms and these algal blooms have a devastating effect on the marine environment.

And so that, because of these fish farms, you're starting to see a whole range of species vanish. And in fact, salmon farming has actually driven one species quite close to the brink of extinction. That's the Maugean skate in Macquarie Harbour.

I started talking to scientists, I started talking to people who'd had experiences of salmon farms elsewhere, discovering one horror after another. And I started discovering that salmon is, in fact not clean, not green, and nowhere near as healthy as people think that it is, in fact, just one big lie.

RUBY:

And Richard, what has happened when you - and others like you - people in Tasmania who live near these salmon farms, when you’ve tried to raise concerns about the practices and the problems you’re seeing in the industry?

RICHARD:

Well, what really happens is people. People go through something like the process I describe, but it goes on, so they become concerned about what the salmon farms in their community are doing. They begin to see the evidence of the destruction with their own eyes.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified person:

“Initially, they were just a few farms and everyone was sort of saying, oh, it's just a great industry, people are getting employed and there was just a huge enthusiasm for it. But after a couple of years, people started looking around saying geez we’re getting invaded and it was just this rapid expansion.”

RICHARD:

They go to the government. They discover that the regulators don't seem to regulate.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified person:

“This has moved from being just a quiet, tranquil, peaceful part of the world to being an industrial site. We didn't ask for it. We would asked if it was okay with us....It's just been done despite the local community”

RICHARD:

If you talk to the commercial fisherman, the surfer, the Shack owner, the abalone diver, just the recreational fishermen, you'll start hearing story after story, which you will find profoundly disturbing.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified person:

“You've got harvest vessels that I hear sucking the salmon out of the pens to take the market. This goes 24/7. There's constant noise. And so when you insert mechanised noise 24/7, it just drives you mad.”

RICHARD:

Then they start speaking up. Then they find that they become subjected to. A pattern of behaviour which seems quite disturbing.

And I kept on meeting people who had stories of receiving phone calls late at night and which, their jobs or their professions or businesses would be threatened. I met public servants who had threats made from higher up in government, if they'd done something as a private citizen. So that is very concerning stories.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified person:

“Since we’ve been speaking up and asking questions we’ve had had out ducks killed and slaughtered and one skinned and put on the letterbox, had threats to string me up in a tree, to run us out of town, we were close to suicide, both my wife and myself.”

RICHARD:

We met person after person whose lives have been broken by their experience of living near a salmon farm or a salmon hatchery and seeking to try and get redress for some of the worst problems.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified person:

“I can't afford to move. That's why I stay and it's my home. I shouldn't have to move because people that are a law unto themselves can drive people out of their homes.”

RICHARD:

Those lives recorded no weight in the system of economics that we have. And it seems to me grossly cynical that a product that is sold as healthy, as clean is the same product that has led to these people feeling their lives have effectively been destroyed, that there is a profound disconnect.

We saw it with the forest industry, which was allowed to go rogue. And essentially what you've got with the salmon industry is they've gone rogue and they've become, you know, more powerful than the state itself. I mean, if you stand up against the salmon industry within the bureaucracy, it's no secret that there are consequences for you.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Richard, we’re talking about the commercial salmon industry in Tasmania, and the way it’s impacting people like yourself. But just how big is the salmon industry? How much and how quickly is it growing?

RICHARD:

Well no one ate salmon. I'm old enough to remember when no one had ever tasted salmon. In 1985 Tasmania produced 55 tonnes of salmon; this year, it's on track to produce 80,000 tonnes. It has to keep growing because to keep its share price up, it has to have a constant story of growth.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified reporter:

“The regulator, the EPA, has told Four Corners…in the past year alone…21,000 tonnes of fish feed… has ended up in the harbour.”

RICHARD:

And really if you look at the history of salmon farming in Tasmania

Archival Tape -- Unidentified reporter:

“Consumer groups want better labelling for salmon that has been artificially coloured through the use of special diets and chemicals.”

RICHARD:

it's survived scandal after scandal after scandal.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified reporter:

“They discovered up to twenty protected fur seals trapped in a salmon pen allegedly left without food for days.”

RICHARD:

And the industry now is looking at a massive sea grab. They are now looking at the north west coast, the north east coast and putting in more farms around Port Arthur, and the problem with this is that the government is effectively the enclosure of public waters, its public waters being privatised, and the privatisation spreads out from - it's not just the areas that are enclosed in these floating feedlots which are now ring worming their way around Tasmania - it is all the damage that flows out all around into the various ecosystems, far from the fish farms.

RUBY:

You say the government is ignoring this, but how so? And where is the regulator, the Environmental Protection Authority?

RICHARD:

The industry started out as a state sponsored industry and we've got very weak governance here, and that's that that's the fundamental problem Tasmania's always had.
There is so much that's unregulated around the salmon farms, noise is pretty well unregulated, they can make whatever noise they want. Their massive factory ships exist outside of any regulation. So the whole industrial heart of these farms, these huge boats, and yet because they are boats, the EPA chooses not to regulate them. This all seems very strange.

So these well boats carry massive amounts of fresh water, up to 13000 tons in which fish are regularly bait for the diseases that come in consequence of them being overcrowded. Now, those boats are allowed to dump that water into a marine environment wherever they want. There is no monitoring. There is no science. They're just allowed to dump this polluted water wherever they want. There are so many examples like that that you can just multiply endlessly.

RUBY:

And Richard, what are the parallels here? Earlier you mentioned the forestry industry - and there does seem to me that there could be a comparison between what happened with logging and what is happening with commercial fishing. I'm wondering if you see a pattern here and, if so, what that pattern tells you about the things that are valued and prioritised in Tasmania?

RICHARD:

The similarities are that governance is weak and powerful companies quickly find through bullying and through duchessing, they can pretty well do what they want and with the salmon industry, you suspect similar patterns. So that's similar in that way, it's different in that really with the logging industry, they never pretended they were about anything other than, you know. Chopping down a lot of trees and making money out of them. So I don't think the forestry industry ever lied about what it was doing. The salmon industry, as I said at the beginning, is one big lie, and that's a big difference.

But what it says about Tasmania is that we have a political class that will always value its relationships with big corporations and highly destructive corporations. Over its citizens and over the values its people hold.

And I find that immensely sad because I think Tasmanians are so much better than the government that we have.

And I think people want leadership that values other than those of the profit and loss ledger of the most powerful corporations.

You know, Tasmania has always been a poor state, but it's been rich in beauty and in a certain way of life, and people really valued that life. And a lot of that life revolved around the sea and the coast. And that was very special to Tasmanians.

And even if you had no money and you were poor, you still had that endless bounty of the sea that belonged to you. That was the public wealth. And that has been taken from the Tasmanian people.

RUBY:

Hmm. Richard, thank you so much for your time.

RICHARD:

Thanks, Ruby Cheers.

RUBY:

The voices of Tasmanian locals in this episode are from the documentary Paradise Lost by Justin Kurzel and Conor Castles-Lynch.

You can watch the documentary and read an extract from Richard Flanagan's new book, Toxic: the rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, on TheMonthly.com.au

RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Federal defence minister Peter Dutton has criticised the Western Australian government over a recent leak of Covid-19 in hotel quarantine.

Dutton said the state government had made a mistake using the Mercure Hotel in Perth as a quarantine facility. Perth is currently in the middle of a three day snap lockdown after the first new community transmitted case of the virus in a year.

And Tokyo has entered its third state of emergency since the start of the pandemic, just three months before the Olympic Games are scheduled to begin.

Residents of the city will be asked to remain at home for at least the next two weeks.

The Olympics are set to start on July 23, after being postponed last year.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.