2015-11-24
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I am really quite perturbed that it seems that the Labor, Liberal and Nationals parties will be getting together to all but eliminate an option for Victorian consumers who love fish to have fresh, flavoursome, locally produced and sustainable fish from Port Phillip Bay on the menu. It is very disappointing that so few consumers of fish here in Melbourne even understand that this is happening.
This morning I was able to table in the house a petition of 6635 signatures — collected in fairly short order — involving all people in this industry, not just the 43 commercial fishing licensees but right up through the whole value chain from wholesale to retail, fish marketing, restaurants and consumers themselves as well as 1000 or more signatures collected in various other ways, including electronically, that were not able to be tabled so far as part of that early tabling.
In the last few months, as regular fish lovers have started to learn more about this proposal, I have been struggling to explain to many of them why this is happening. The question put in this bill is something that should be receiving a great deal more scrutiny before we even consider finalising the bill. It is for this reason that I am proposing that the bill be referred to one of our upper house committees. I have circulated a copy of that motion to the other parties in the Parliament.
There are many questions to be asked, but at the centre of this bill is the proposition that if we get rid of commercial fishing there will be a greater volume of larger fish to be caught by recreational fishers. If I understand it, that is the central proposition. That alone should be something that is tested by this Parliament. I am a consumer of fish and a recreational fisher myself. There is nothing I would like more than to see a growing and sustainable fishery, but there seems to be almost no debate here about the share of the fishery that should occur between commercial fishers and recreational fishers, and for that matter by anybody who loves eating fish. It is equally disappointing that some of the research on the Corio Bay and Port Phillip Bay fishery that has been initiated in recent years is only just now starting to be published. In fact some of that research just arrived in the last month or so. It was funded by and out of the licence fees of recreational fishers, and yet disappointingly that research has been pushed to one side because the two old parties — the coalition and Labor — made a promise to a group in Geelong during the election, when the blood was rushing to many people's heads, and they got a resounding cheer.
The bill is now before Parliament, and there will be no, or very minimal, scrutiny over its provisions. It is simply not possible to stand up during the committee stage of the bill, using the entire resources of the chamber, and start going through all the many questions, including the science, the health of the fishery, the economics of the two different calls on the resource and the social impact on those who have been commercial fishers for, in some cases, many generations and who have built up a sense of craft and the pride that goes along with it. For that matter, there is the question of the different groups in Victorian society and how they consume fish. Many varieties of different fish that are hauled out of the bays are served by different ethnic groups in different ways according to their preferences. Some of us are learning how to cook different types of fish that in the past people thought were almost completely unpalatable. Now they are being cooked and served up to us by our multicultural communities. One of the great benefits of multiculturalism is to learn about different people's cultures, which often starts with sitting down for a meal.
It is very disappointing that we cannot consider the totality of all those questions in a cool-headed way and then consider whether some compromise could be worked out. It is very disappointing, if the government or the coalition parties are not willing to support my motion calling for an inquiry, that politicians will not have a chance to sit on a committee and hear from the various groups themselves. Members would not hear from me as a Greens MP bringing some of this material before the Parliament but they would hear it from the people themselves, all of whom have a stake in this industry. As I say, I am seeking to send the bill off to an inquiry, which could deal with it within a few months, obviously with Christmas in between.
As it stands, the Greens are opposed to this bill and will be voting against it if it is pushed through the house today. Assuming that we even get that far through the second-reading debate, there are provisions in the bill that relate to compensation and I wonder whether the 43 commercial fishers are getting a fair deal out of this. I would have thought that would be an area where the coalition at least would be willing to provide the microscope. If this were 43 land-based farmers who were having their livelihoods taken away, coalition MPs would be lined up like the Spartans at Thermopylae, trying to defend to the last man those 43 farmers. In fact if it was 4 farmers, that is what they would be doing. And yet at a stroke of a pen we are going to get rid of an entire industry, which even environmental groups are willing to put a stamp on and say is sustainable.
Acting President, you and I often have a lot to say about a bunch of industries that are unsustainable and how we would like to change them and in some cases eliminate them. If we were talking about the native forest woodchipping industry, for example, members of The Nationals would have something to say about that! What amazes me is that they are coming in here today with the proposition of getting rid of a sustainable industry based on natural resources. I am going to be puzzling over that for a very long time. In fact the next time coalition MPs rise in this chamber in defence of another industry that depends on natural resources — and we all as human beings ultimately depend on the ecosystem for life support — it is going to be somewhat more difficult for them to make those arguments.
In terms of a sustainable biomass, fishery is a sustainable industry. In the absence of fish labelling laws I cannot always be confident knowing where my fish is coming from. If it is coming from overseas or from another fishery, I do not know whether it was farmed or caught, if it is the species I am being told it is or which country it may have come from. But if I am confident that it is Port Phillip Bay whiting or flathead or snapper, or, as I say, for the preference of others, everything from anchovies to mullet and the rest of it, then it is about as sustainable as you are going to get. And you can be as confident as you are going to get that we are acting sustainably.
I understand that a whole range of matters have been put to me in relation to seagrass and in relation to bycatch, but it has been very hard to get any evidence apart from 'Trust us; we know; we're out there' from the recreational fishing side. Whereas from both the commercial side and in fact from the government itself — from its own fishery experts and the projects it has funded — the emerging body of evidence is backing up the proposition that this is a sustainable fishery.
In fact an entire project was funded to look at the whole range of questions around social, economic and environmental sustainability questions which it seems that some of the representative groups around recreational fishers are now not interested in.
I am starting to have my doubts about the representativeness of people who write to me and say that they represent 790 000 recreational fishers. I am a recreational fisher, and they are not representing me in this matter, nor do I believe that anyone can honestly say that they understand the minds of 790 000 people who no doubt in some seasons buy their fish from the market and in other seasons catch it themselves.
But in one of those reports we see, I think fairly definitively, that for recreational fishers the catch-per-unit effort has not been declining. In other words, going out there you will get as many fish as you would have got 10 years ago per time spent fishing. That was based on quite a comprehensive dataset, which is a major survey of people at boat ramps. It is a body of work that was set up by governments with some funding from the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and only just now is the research itself coming to fruition.
Various statistics have been thrown around about the commercial take, but it is a lot harder to get statistics on the recreational take, because by necessity that is a harder thing to keep a handle on. But in terms of what we might expect purely from the point of view of the consumer, it may well be that we find it harder, or at least more expensive, to get some species down at our local fish market. From quite detailed information provided to me by Dr Kirsten Abernethy, an environmental scientist who has come back from the UK, where she did a lot of work with fishing dependent communities, the statistics may very well be as follows — that is, that a significant portion of the fish, particularly species by species, that we are getting here in Victoria are coming not just from Victoria's own waters but from the bay itself and, as we move further out of Victoria's waters and out into the open ocean or, as I say, overseas, we become less and less confident that the fish we are getting have been harvested sustainably with the best possible practices that could be put in place. Some of this material has started to receive some publicity now, but I think the minds of coalition and Labor Party members on this question are closed.
I have had the opportunity to talk to some recently very politically active shop owners, fishmongers and those who spend their time down at the wholesale market, most of whom seem to barely see the light of day. I also know those in the electorate of Prahran. The Greens have been talking to people out in the western suburbs; my colleague Ms Hartland has been kept in touch about this issue by her local fishmonger. It will be disappointing if we do not get to hear all of these voices during a parliamentary committee inquiry.
Further, there is still the question of — if this bill is to proceed, and then in the committee stage — whether we are getting a fair and equitable exit strategy for those commercial fishers who are affected by this decision. The government will say yes. A letter dated as recently as 5 November — from Seafood Industry Victoria, the representative body — says no, and that organisation has various precedents to rely on in terms of other fishery buybacks that have occurred. The legislation itself brings in new provisions, not the provisions that have been used in the past, and therefore a different structure.
Other measures not associated directly with buyback or at least compensation, but in terms of which areas can be fished and which methods can be used, are being brought to bear in order to pretty much squeeze these people out, not over eight years, as I think was the promise of both coalition and Labor MPs, but really for most of us within one or two years. The impact will be quite dramatic.
We should always pay attention to those who are affected by economic change. Speaking more generally, there is a great need for economic change in this country of ours. We always need to be modernising what we do, and if the sense is that some people will be victims of that change while others reap the benefits, of course it just makes it so much harder to address the need for economic change when some people think they will be taking the lion's share of the cost. That is a point that I would make in relation to a whole range of economic issues that come before this Parliament. We should all be willing to share and justly compensate those who are impacted by the changes that this Parliament makes, because not only is it in and of itself a moral value, but in fact it is important for cohesion of society in times of great change that we all look after each other and share both the benefits and the burdens together.
Rather than take up more of the Parliament's time, I will put it to the house that these issues should best be dealt with through a parliamentary inquiry. As I understand it, the promise from the coalition and the Labor Party was to phase this out over eight years, yet we are being told this bill must be pushed through the house and that these arrangements must be put into place straightaway. There is no time for any further consideration of any aspect of the bill through a more public process. Perhaps these parties are now starting to understand that there is something of a campaign involving all Victorian consumers of fish that is welling up and starting to put a different slant on the whole issue. Perhaps that is why the parties are in such a rush to get this passed, but the Greens will certainly be making sure that, if the bill is not sent off to a parliamentary inquiry, we will be looking at certain key aspects of it during the committee stage of the bill, clause by clause.
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