Comment

Bob Brown
Murray Watt a net gain for the salmon industry

Anthony Albanese has chosen corporate welfare over environmental wellbeing for Australia. His appointment of Murray Watt as minister for the environment highlights his determination to grant corporate demands for more environmental sacrifice in this age of ecological crisis.

Watt can be charming and articulate, as well as ruthless. As Albanese’s previous minister for agriculture, he was oblivious to alarm about the widespread flattening of wildlife-filled woodlands in his home state of Queensland. Thousands of hectares, including koala habitat, were razed in what environmentalists plaintively called an “Amazon-like” destruction of the woodlands by the beef barons.

Watt rebuffed new European Union laws banning produce from such deforestation. He demanded a two-year exemption period for Australia’s beef industry. When this was initially refused, along with requests for other exemptions, an Australian trade agreement with the EU fell through.

Watt is now tasked with fixing the problem of the Atlantic salmon industry in Tasmania. It is difficult to be hopeful he will do anything other than grant the wishes of the companies that profit from the destructive pens.

In the months leading up to the election, millions of fatty globules from rotting salmon carcasses washed up on the island’s pristine southern beaches. Drone footage taken by the Bob Brown Foundation showed live salmon being packed into boxes with dead salmon before the lids were sealed. The RSPCA withdrew industry accreditation. Thousands of irate locals turned up at beach protests.

The federal election saw a big swing to Labor in northern Tasmania, fuelled by the unpopularity of Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff, who has been intransigent on the billion-dollar AFL stadium proposed for Hobart and his government’s bungling of a new Bass Strait ferry terminal in Devonport. The swing to Labor was greatest in the three northern electorates: Braddon (15 per cent), Bass (9 per cent) and Lyons (11 per cent).

Down south, where bits of salmon were still being collected from the beaches in the seat of Franklin, the swing to Albanese’s minister for fisheries, Julie Collins, was less than 2 per cent. Challenged by independent Peter George, who had led the campaign against the Atlantic salmon industry, and the Greens, Collins’s two-party-preferred vote went backwards by six percentage points.

All three of Tasmania’s Atlantic salmon corporations are foreign-owned. The profits end up overseas, where boardroom concern for Australia’s environment is remote. About 10 per cent of the salmon industry profit comes from its cages in western Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour where, before the industry, the unique Maugean skate had been safe for millions of years.

As battery salmon cages proliferated in the harbour, scientists became alarmed that the consequent pollution and depletion of oxygen in the water was driving the skate to extinction. They advised Albanese’s previous environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, to remove the cages.

Under corporate urging, Albanese flew to Tasmania, donned industry-branded clothing and made it clear that, wherever the Maugean skate might be going, the industry cages were going nowhere. He offered the international billionaires who own the industry $28 million in taxpayers’ money to install equipment to pump up the harbour’s low oxygen levels: that is, to rehabilitate some of the damage they had caused over the past 13 years.

Just before the election, Albanese enlisted Peter Dutton’s aid to amend the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to protect the Macquarie Harbour salmon industry but not the Maugean skate.

Plibersek’s decision was put off until after the federal election. Last Tuesday, Minister Watt put off that decision again: it is likely to come after the Tasmanian state election on July 19. It is a safe bet he will then back the salmon corporations, with some new requirements regarding the fish cage pollution threatening the Maugean skate, and funded again, if necessary, by taxpayers.

Notwithstanding Albanese’s rushed changes to the EPBC Act, the Bob Brown Foundation has mounted a Federal Court challenge to the refusal by the minister to reconsider the 2012 licensing of the disastrous spread of salmon cages in Macquarie Harbour, the eastern half of which is in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Watt’s delayed decision will not alter the thrust of that challenge.

Watt, however, had bigger fish to fry. Having already consulted Woodside Energy, he flew to Perth to meet the Western Australian Labor government and other key mining promoters, though not Woodside’s First Nations opponents in the group Save Our Songlines, before agreeing to let Woodside process gas at Murujuga in the Pilbara until 2070. Expert opinion that the gas works threaten the world’s largest and most extraordinary collection of rock art at Murujuga was swept aside. Due to the threat of aerial acid pollution causing erosion of the million rock etchings, UNESCO held off listing the Murujuga rock art as World Heritage. Watt is flying to Paris in July, essentially as an advocate for Woodside, to get that decision dropped.

Back in Tasmania, the state election that nobody wants, triggered by a growing state debt to be enlarged by that second Hobart football stadium most Tasmanians also don’t want, is now just three weeks away. Last week Labor leader Dean Winter tried to leapfrog the Rockliff Liberals in environmental bastardry by announcing he will “streamline” approvals for major new projects.

Winter said the EPBC Act has been “gamed” by the Bob Brown Foundation and other activist groups to obstruct and stop developments. He wants to give other industries the exemption from the federal EPBC Act that John Howard afforded to Tasmania’s loggers, who can legally destroy the habitats of rare and endangered birds and animals as a result.

As in Western Australia, Labor in Tasmania is working with Canberra to weaken the nation’s already-weak environmental laws. Meanwhile, under state Liberal- and Labor-backed laws to criminalise peaceful protesters, seven forest defenders have been arrested near Lake St Clair in the central Tasmanian highlands in the past two weeks, and some summarily placed under all-night home curfews.

Winter’s Labor would exempt salmon cages, housing developments, new energy schemes and mining from federal laws, as Albanese rapidly heads down the path of United States President Donald Trump and British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer in freeing corporations from long-held environmental safeguards and appointing faux ministers for protecting the environment.

After roundtable discussions with corporate chief executives, Albanese and Watt will deliver new national legislation to ensure major projects are approved with minimal community or scientific input, delay or obstruction, just as the corporations are demanding.

Plibersek also delayed until after the federal election a decision on the controversial Robbins Island wind farm in north-west Tasmania. On Tuesday, Watt extended that delay until after the state election. This $1.6 billion project for the Philippines-based company ACEN awaits Commonwealth approval due to its potential impacts on the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, giant Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, rare migratory shorebirds and Robbins Island’s unique population of Tasmanian devils. Post-election, Watt will approve ACEN’s project.

Albanese’s anti-environmental trajectory will face growing public reaction, even in the face of both major parties criminalising peaceful protest.

Bruny Island resident Sandra Van Den Berg was arrested last week after defending the forests near Lake St Clair from logging. Her bail conditions included a nightly curfew from 10pm to 6am for three months. “It made it quite difficult to get to and from my work, at night, legally,” she said. “It’s a really outdated law to make me stay locked up in my house all night. It’s fired me up to get involved with more protests. I’ll be back.”

A magistrate removed the police-imposed night curfew on Van Den Berg.

The July 19 state election looks like returning a hung parliament in which neither Liberal nor Labor have a majority. The Greens, led by Rosalie Woodruff, have a high likelihood of winning five or six seats. Adding to the growing cross bench, Braddon’s incumbent anti-salmon independent Craig Garland, and Peter George, now standing for the state seat of Franklin, look like shoo-ins.

The obvious solution to another hung parliament is for a grand coalition of Rockliff’s Liberals and Winter’s Labor. They agree on most contentious issues, including taxpayer finance for the AFL’s unnecessary Hobart stadium, the even more expensive Marinus Link cable under Bass Strait to facilitate work for ACEN and others, a mining acid waste dump in the Takayna rainforest and the expansion of the polluting salmon cages into Bass Strait. It’s a pity they didn’t think of getting together earlier.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Watt you see is what we’ll get".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING