South Wind

It was possible to feel sorry for Jeremy Rockliff last week as he sought to bat away an insistent Greens leader, Rosalie Woodruff, wanting to know if he had “actually read” Tasmania’s 2024 State of the Environment (SoE) report. 

“There is significant information to absorb,” he told Woodruff – well over 600 pages of it. And absorb it he must.

Fifteen years have passed since the previous SoE report – three times what it would have been had the government and the responsible agency, the Tasmanian Planning Commission, adhered to the 1993 legislated mandate of a report every five years. 

The report’s foreword notes “the complex challenge of communicating environmental information” so as to shape policy and influence outcomes “amidst changing national and global contexts and growing environmental pressures”.

The pain of its birth is testament to that. In 2002 then-planning minister Michael Ferguson, persuaded to act on the 13-year absence of an SoE report, gave the commission less than two years to produce it.

And the commission delivered, producing a document that’s a cut above any of its three predecessors in 1997, 2003 and 2009. This is an admirable blueprint for dealing with challenges which, as the report makes clear, are daunting.

“The mutual dependency between Tasmania’s economic prosperity and the health of the natural environment cannot be over-emphasised,” said the report.Tasmania’s “defining challenge” is to meet the sometimes-conflicting objectives of ensuring the environment is properly cared for while social and economic needs are met.

We’re starting from a low base. The report lists numerous issues demanding urgent attention including degraded marine habitats from warming waters and invasive species, rapidly declining numbers of migratory shorebirds, fragmented native vegetation cover and other threats to native species, declining river health, and poor progress on reducing greenhouse emissions.

The SoE report calls for better monitored and protected marine habitats and coastlines. Faced with a growing list of endangered species, we need better mapping of native plant communities, measures to stop illegal land clearing, coordinated culling and other measures to control deer, cats and other feral animals. We need an expanded and well-funded system of reserves and a permanent statewide soil monitoring program. 

The condition of waterways including inland rivers, lakes, wetlands, and estuarine waters has been degraded by discharge of farm nutrients to waterways, the demands of a growing irrigation network and urban water issues. The SoE calls for an ongoing statewide water monitoring and analysis program.

Environmental issues have been creating political martyrs ever since my old Mercury colleague Hugh Dell lost his ministerial adviser job over the flooding of Lake Pedder 50 years ago. Labor minister Andrew Lohrey was sacked for being too outspoken on the Gordon-below-Franklin hydro scheme, which also saw the end of Doug Lowe’s premiership. Early this century the forest wars dogged the career of Labor premier Paul Lennon and saw off the Labor-Green government under Lara Giddings in 2014. 

All through these times the Greens under Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Peg Putt, Nick McKim, Cassy O’Connor and now Rosalie Woodruff, have been working away, sometimes within government but mostly outside it, to “keep the bastards honest”. Now, a bevy of independents in both houses pursue the same aims.

In 2022, at the start of this SoE process, a request for extra resources to meet the tight deadline drew a blank. But somehow the commission and the scientific and technical experts employed for the 2024 SoE got the job done.

While relying on voluntary citizen science out in the field, these people were paid for their work, but their level of remuneration would not count as pocket money in another project of state significance, the proposed AFL stadium in Hobart – a project for which both major parties have declared their undying support.

Serious action on the far more critical SoE recommendations seems a remote prospect, but it shouldn’t. Given that it was Ray Groom’s Liberal government that set the SoE process in motion 30 years ago, it ought not to be a stretch for Jeremy Rockliff and his 2024 Liberal team to commit to implementing SoE recommendations in full.

Written in the plain, honest style of all good science, this is a document for our time. Its authors – many home-grown, many from elsewhere – have one thing in common: a deep love of their island home. In particular, they care for the natural values that are our island’s signature, the things that set Tasmania apart from everywhere else in the world.

These special values are what the State of the Environment report is asking Tasmanians to protect. It demands to be taken seriously, because not to do so is not to care about our island home, and for a government that is unforgivable.

American democracy has survived slavery, the Civil War and political skulduggery thanks to an ingenious arrangement of checks and balances – and plenty of goodwill. Then along came the 45th president.

Donald Trump has dominated the affairs of his nation like nothing or no-one in living memory. And in this election he has seemed unstoppable, at least until Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate.

US presidential debates used to be staid, structured, largely predictable affairs, but Trump’s arrival on the scene changed everything. From the day he stepped up to debate his Republican primary rivals in 2015, his complete disregard of formal limits has turned politics into a spectacle that no serious student of humanity can ignore.

The 2015-16 Republican primaries were like nothing the party had ever experienced. A record field of 16 opponents was utterly defeated by Trump’s ability to steal the limelight with outrageous personal insults and a complete disdain for the truth.

They and conventional media treated Trump as a political novice, a fringe-dweller and a simpleton who would eventually self-destruct. That was their first mistake. Throughout that long primary campaign he crushed experienced opponents by breaking all conventions and constraints of traditional conservative politics. 

Among his many political positions, the one that stood out then and now is cultural grievance. He was and remains a mouthpiece for every base prejudice against difference: people whose skin colour, language, religion, birthplace, gender – you name it – aren’t the same as his. 

Against the background of a chequered past with women, leading into the general election he debated the Democrats’ battle-hardened Hillary Clinton, an event marked by his standing close behind her and talking over her.

The consensus that Clinton won that debate missed some critical markers. What Trump lacked in wisdom and verbal acuity he made up for in forceful behaviour and brutally simple messaging. Central to that is a personality trait which according to his niece, psychologist and author Mary Trump, was well known in the family from his childhood.

“The kids in the neighbourhood alternately despised and feared him; he had a reputation for being a thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids but ran home in a fit of rage as soon as somebody stood up to him,” she wrote in her family memoir, “Who Could Ever Love You”. 

“That is one of the most damning and dangerous things about Donald Trump,” she added in a CNN interview last week. “He’s never evolved from that. That’s still who he is… This is a man who has spent his entire life pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with, and as soon as he realises nobody’s going to stop him he pushes the envelope far more.”

Trump, who likes to give his opponents derogatory descriptors, has called Harris Comrade Kamala (alluding to her liberal politics) while deliberately mispronouncing her name. 

At the start of last week’s televised debate Harris, who had not previously met him, approached him, shook his hand and made a point of pronouncing her name. During the 90 minutes of debate she would often mention him by name and turn to face him. But Trump could never bring himself to look in her direction and referred to Harris only as “she” and “her”. 

Harris also called out his lies, as did the debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The speed and accuracy of the latter’s fact-checking – conventional media doing what it should always do – unsettled Trump, used to riding roughshod over questioners. 

One of the “facts” they corrected, using a rebuttal from the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, was Trump’s false claim that “illegal” Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating Springfield residents’ dogs and cats. 

Trump and running mate JD Vance later doubled down on those claims, extending the lie to include an equally discredited allegation about Haitian migrants snatching geese from parks. The claims have had a devastating impact in Springfield, which had provided asylum to legitimate refugees who are now in fear for their lives.

Trump’s career still has a way to go. Even if he loses the election, he and his acolytes have already flagged their intention to do what they did four years ago and seek to overturn a negative outcome, except this time with far more preparation. We should take that as seriously as we would an approaching cyclone. 

Early this month Trump spoke scathingly of climate scientists as “poor fools” who “have no idea what’s going to happen”. The driver of political chaos is also a driver of climate chaos, one more reason why he should never step inside the White House again.

Labor’s Dean Winter has worked hard to build his brand as an alternative premier, positioning his party at a distance removed from the Rockliff Liberal government on matters of the moment. 

But on at least one issue he and Jeremy Rockliff are in lock step. As soon as anyone raises questions about the salmon farming industry, the two leaders respond with one voice. Any and all such criticism, they say, is a dagger in the heart of our state’s economy.

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy Rockliff said a negative federal verdict on the environmental impact of Macquarie Harbour salmon farming would have a ripple effect across the state and could be “catastrophic” for many small towns. Not to be outdone, on Friday the Labor leader declared that the industry “provides safe, secure, well-paid jobs, and underpins the success of many other industries too.”

Both leaders have repeated assertions by Salmon Tasmania that the industry is responsible for a total of over 5000 jobs – an amalgamation of claimed totals of 2100 directly-employed full-time equivalent positions and a further 3000 full-time indirectly-employed positions.

A November 2023 estimate by the Australia Institute, based on 2021 census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, indicates much more modest totals: direct employment of 1097 full time equivalent (FTE) positions and a “best case” 1722 FTE taking in support for indirectly-employed positions. 

The same analysis pared down the Salmon Tasmania claim of 17 per cent of West Coast employment, putting the number of West Coast salmon industry jobs at 54 FTE, or 2.5 per cent of the total West Coast workforce, with a best-case total including support for indirect employment of 76, or 3.6 per cent. 

All this has been sparked by fears for the Maugean skate, a fish species unique to Macquarie Harbour. Multi-year monitoring by marine scientists David Moreno and Jason Semmens, of Hobart’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), found that numbers had halved over seven years and predicted the species’ effective demise by the early 2040s.

The same two experts found that the species’ plight was overwhelmingly due to declining levels of dissolved oxygen in the harbour caused by salmon pen pollution. That research underpinned official advice to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek that salmon farming in the harbour should be “paused” pending further approvals.

Salmon Tasmania promptly engaged University of Tasmania ecologist Barry Brook to do a “scientific-based critique” of that advice. He determined that the chosen parameters for the Moreno-Semmens study skewed its findings, and that “the whole exercise should be redone from the ground up”.

Brook’s analysis and a contemporaneous IMAS finding that artificial oxygenation of harbour water was working were seized upon by Salmon Tasmania and its political cheer squad. Winter and Burnie mayor Shane Pitt attacked Canberra for its apparent antipathy toward the industry, and Environment minister Nick Duigan announced an “independent scientific” review of modelling used to establish the species’ viability.

In lashing out at Canberra, Martin, Pitt, Winter and Rockliff have all been hammering economic benefit for a local audience always focused on jobs, pointedly leaving out of their tirades the precarious state of the Maugean skate.

That may come back to bite them. Australia is a party to international legal agreements to protect endangered species like the Maugean skate. Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development binds Australia to applying the precautionary approach where there are threats of “serious or irreversible damage” to natural systems and species.

That principle says in part that “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Calls for the Moreno-Semmens modelling to be redone “from the ground up” ahead of any precautionary measures are out of step with that agreement.

SIX (Sustainable Investment Exchange), the activist share trading platform founded by Adam Verwey and Sophie Hall, announced last week that it was lodging resolutions on behalf of Woolworths and Coles shareholders to stop the supermarket chains from procuring salmon farmed in Macquarie Harbour. Salmon Tasmania CEO Luke Martin immediately launched into what he called “stunts” by “faceless mainland activists … putting pressure on our customers.”

Calling them faceless is more than a bit rich. Verwey and Hall are readily identifiable on SIX’s website, and while Martin is well known in Tasmania, his foreign paymasters, owners of the three non-Australian companies behind Salmon Tasmania, are not exactly household names here.

Last Saturday, National Threatened Species Day, Minister Duigan announced a $2.1 million fund supporting captive breeding of the Maugean skate. But the acid test is survival in the wild, and right now that looks like a big fat fail.