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As disease ravages Tasmanian salmon farms, killing thousands of tonnes of fish and threatening other species, the government’s pledge to protect both the industry and the endangered Maugean skate is being called pork-barrelling. By Mike Seccombe.
The politics of Tasmania’s salmon disaster
It was about 9.30am on Sunday two weeks ago when Jess Coughlan got the first call, alerting her that thousands of stinking, oily globs had washed up on Verona Sands beach, about 60 kilometres south of Hobart.
Her caller suspected it was fish food from one of the salmon farming pens that dot the sheltered waters off Tasmania’s south-east. He said that his dogs, as well as flocks of gulls, were “in a frenzy, eating it”.
Coughlan, a campaigner with the group Neighbours of Fish Farming, quickly sterilised a jar that she would use to take a sample. Thirty minutes later she arrived at the beach and saw for herself the innumerable balls of stuff “scattered all along the tideline, running the entire length of the beach”.
At the instruction of an industry source, a retired diver, she broke some of the larger ones open. They were pink inside and contained scales. The balls were not fish food but rather the rotting remains of fish. The diver told her they were called “popcorn” in the industry. They formed when fish died, rotted on the bottom of the pens, and flesh and fatty oil then floated up to the surface.
Given the location of the balls of fat and flesh, Coughlan and her anti-fish farm colleagues suspected they came from a lease operated by Huon Aquaculture.
Later that Sunday, workers from Huon turned up to begin cleaning the beach, although they did not identify themselves and would not answer locals’ questions about the source of the material.
The blobs have continued to wash up elsewhere and across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel on Bruny Island, where employees of the other big aquaculture company, Tassal, have also been clearing up the mess, Coughlan says.
Even before the salmon remains began washing up on that Sunday, February 16, though, activists opposed to industrial fish farming knew something was wrong. The previous week, Huon had revealed it was using antibiotics at its Zuidpool lease near Bruny Island.
On February 14, the Bob Brown Foundation obtained and released drone footage of hundreds of dead and decomposing fish and fish remains being vacuum-pumped from a Tassal lease further north, near the Tasman Peninsula, onto a barge, some of it slopping overboard and attracting seals.
Pretty clearly there had been a major outbreak of disease, but for at least a week, probably several, neither the state Environment Protection Authority nor the companies provided details on the number of fish deaths or how widespread the outbreak was.
Finally, last Friday, under pressure from media and environmental groups, the EPA put out an anodyne statement, saying it had begun an investigation of “how a quantity of biological material washed up on Verona Sands beach last weekend”.
It said laboratory analysis showed the material was “likely derived from the elevated fish mortalities that have been affecting multiple pens at Tasmanian fish farms over recent weeks”.
In response to questions from The Saturday Paper, the EPA provided a little more information this week: unusually warm water over recent months had created a proliferation of pest species “which are a known irritant of salmon gills”, and that this, along with bacterial disease, had contributed to the fish deaths. The statement also revealed the companies were dumping fish in landfills.
A marine ecologist specialising in aquaculture, speaking on background, explains in more detail the complex causation of the mass mortalities. His starting point is that Atlantic salmon are a cold-water species, not native to Australia. The Australian salmon industry, he says, is marginal because of the warmer water here, and increased mortality is a regular occurrence in summer. It is becoming more marginal due to climate change.
In addition to, and likely because of, warmer water this year, there had been a bloom of Noctiluca scintillans, a dinoflagellate.
“That’s appeared down here over the past 20 to 30 years. It glows in the dark. A lot of people kind of like it, call it sea sparkle. It forms big pink sticks on the surface sometimes,” the ecologist says.
“As well as that, there have been lots of aurelia or moon jellyfish about. Both can damage the gills of the salmon, so they can’t breathe.”
Even if they don’t kill the fish outright, he says, these species weaken them and make them more susceptible to disease.
“So now an infectious disease has broken out amongst the fish – a variety of rickettsia bacteria – that’s spread rapidly to a number of locations.”
There are many strains of rickettsia. The EPA suggests the one infecting the salmon is endemic to Australia, and therefore not a danger to native species.
Some fish farm opponents are not so sure and worry about potential transmission to other fish.
They worry also that the antibiotics used by the industry end up in native fish that scavenge antibiotic-laced pellets below the salmon cages. It has happened before.
Back in 2022, flathead caught two kilometres from the boundary of a Tassal lease were found to have antibiotic concentrations in their flesh above the reportable threshold. A Guardian Australia report cited EPA data revealing more than four tonnes of antibiotics had been used by Huon and Tassal in the four years previous.
The peak body representing the salmon industry has been more forthcoming about the scale of the disease outbreak than the EPA. In an emailed response on Tuesday, and a subsequent interview, the chief executive of Salmon Tasmania, Luke Martin, said the industry was “dealing with unprecedented mortalities in the South-East”.
The precise numbers were for now commercial-in-confidence, he said, “but the normal mortality rate over summer for salmon farms, the global benchmark is 5 per cent”.
“Given there are tens of thousands of tonnes of fish being produced across the state, if you’re talking over 5 per cent – and unprecedented in some places – you’re talking a large number of fish.”
Another indicator of the magnitude of the die-off, Martin said, was the dumping of fish in landfill.
In the normal course of events, dead fish are “used to create by-products like pet feed and fish oils, as well as … fertiliser on agricultural land. Sending this organic material to landfill is a last resort in the waste hierarchy.”
Opponents of the salmon farming industry are, unsurprisingly, less reluctant to suggest numbers. Alistair Allan, Antarctic and marine campaigner for the Bob Brown Foundation and the Greens candidate for the very marginal Labor-held federal electorate of Lyons, says industry sources had told him two million fish had died in a couple of weeks.
“It’s just astronomical,” he says.
Peter George, formerly a senior reporter for the ABC, who founded the Neighbours of Fish Farming about a decade ago, cites a source working on one of the barges that pumped out the fish pens.
“In one day, he took out 70 tonnes – whole bodies, down to the mush that they turn into down the bottom of the nets. He was one of 13 pump boats operating in the area that day.”
By George’s calculation, assuming a fish weighs about four kilograms, that equates to some 350,000 in one day.
These are, of course, rough estimates from partisan sources but are not implausible given what the industry itself is saying.
George is running in the upcoming election as a community independent in the seat of Franklin. He has a campaign war chest of about $100,000, including $30,000 from Climate 200.
Franklin, which includes the beaches affected by the stinking remnants of dead salmon, is one of the few Labor-held seats being targeted by Climate 200, and the only one currently held by a minister in the Albanese government. That is Julie Collins, the minister for agriculture and fisheries.
When comment was sought from Collins’s office about the unfolding disaster in her electorate, a spokesperson declined to talk about it, other than to stress that the salmon farming industry was regulated by the Tasmanian state government.
That is true, although the future of the industry is a federal issue, as evidenced by the fact that last Saturday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese turned up in Devonport to announce a further $2.9 million assistance package for a captive breeding program for the Maugean skate, an endangered species that only lives in Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast.
Salmon farming has been identified as a factor that has pushed the ancient fish to the brink of extinction, by lowering dissolved oxygen levels and increasing “sedimentation” from salmon faeces on the harbour floor where the skate feeds.
Last Friday’s announcement brought total federal government support for salmon farming to $37 million. As well as the captive breeding program, the money has been spent on technology to pump “microbubbles” into the water to improve oxygenation.
There is some evidence of success. A recent study found the skate population had stabilised. Albanese claimed a win-win: the skate protected, along with local jobs in a part of the country where there aren’t many.
Nonetheless, Allan notes, it’s an awful lot of money to save some 70 jobs – roughly half a million dollars per employee.
Politics does not measure outcomes solely in these terms, however. It happens that the current Liberal MP for Braddon, Gavin Pearce, is not recontesting this year’s election. The government hopes its high-profile candidate, Anne Urquhart, currently a senator, can wrest the lower house seat.
Hence the pork-barrelling, says veteran independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie.
“Macquarie Harbour comprises just 10 per cent of salmon production and 5 per cent of the industry jobs across the whole state,” he says. “It is a very small part of the industry. That the prime minister is behaving the way he is can only be explained by raw, cynical politics.”
Labor might, of course, get the extra votes it needs to take Braddon, which has a long history as a swing seat. Still, Wilkie can’t help wondering if it might be a case of swings and roundabouts: if salmon helps Labor win in Braddon, it might also help them lose in Franklin.
The government is not travelling well, Wilkie says.
“Peter George is a high-profile local figure,” he says. “He’s getting the backing of Climate 200. Even before this outbreak he posed a risk to Julie Collins.”
On paper Collins should be safe. She won at the 2022 election with almost 64 per cent of the vote, after preferences. “But she’s actually much less safe than people think,” Wilkie says.
He harks back to the way he first won, in 2010. He finished third on primary votes, with just over 21 per cent; but he took a lot of votes away from both Labor and Liberal and was pushed over the line by preferences flowing from the Greens candidate, who got 19 per cent.
Wilkie notes that in the 2022 election the Greens performed strongly in Franklin, getting 17 per cent of the primary vote. Given the unpopularity of both major parties, he can see something similar happening: if George can just finish third, ahead of the Greens, he could win.
Wilkie concedes it’s an outside chance. “But there’s a lot of recreational fishers who don’t like the salmon industry. There’s a lot of shack owners, holiday house owners, who don’t like the industry, people who live along the coast who don’t like dead fish washing up on their beach.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 1, 2025 as "The salmon or the pork".
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