From Schwartz Media. I'm Ashlin McGee. This is seven am. If you've bought salmon for dinner, there's a pretty strong chance that came from Tasmania on the island state. Salmon's a billion dollar industry. And at mcquarie Harbor, where Booker Prize winning author Richard Flanagan grew up, the waterline is
now dotted with these net pens and thrashing salmon. But the harbor is also home to a sixty million year old creature and it looks like it's about to be wiped off the face of the earth under the watch of the federal government. Today, writer and contributor to The Monthly Richard Flanagan on how corporate greed, political inaction, and our taste for salmon are all choking the Morghean skate. It's Monday, May twenty, Richard, Take me to mcquarie Harbor
on Tazzy's West coast. When did you first visit? And what's it like there?
Oh?
There all my life. I actually grew up on the west coast in a little mining town called Rosebery, and it's a very large and remarkable inland waterway, about six times the size of Sydney Harbor. It has this remarkable human history and then it just feels a beautifully majestic and wild sort of place. It's bounded by rainforest all around, but you also have flowing into it from the east some of the most extraordinary wild rivers in the Southern Hemisphere,
the Franklin and the Gordon Rivers. And in fact it's so unique an extraordinary that a third of it is actually designated as part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. And one of the reasons for that is because it is the habitat of an extraordinary creature, the Morgan skate, which is part of the skate and rain shark family. Million years old, so it goes back to the time of the dinosaurs, and as far as we know, it
is now only found in Macquarie Harbor. So it's a very evocative place, and it is a place that Europeans have tried to impose themselves on again and again, first with their penal systems, then with their minds. Are now in the slatest manifestation with their salmon farms.
And so with the salmon farms there, what's it look like now.
Well, the Mcquarie Harbor salmon farms account for about ten percent of Tasmanian's salmon production. More or less, salmon farming has been happening in Tasmania since the mid eighties, but it really only scaled up in the last twenty years. And since that expansion started, we have seen a catastrophical environmental collapse. In Macquarie Harbor. Salmon farming is the very
worst form of factory farming. What you get are these floating feed lots, sort of slightly ominous, fortified plastic pipe and nylon netted structures that increasingly have a warlike feel with them. And that's necessary because they're actually waging a strange sort of war with the natural world in order that they can continue to grow the amount of salmon that they do. People always notice when a salmon farm arrives near them, how everything changes. The water starts to
go murky, the smell of the sea changes. You start to get slicks and brown froth on the water. It got so bad in Macquarie Harbor. I've talked to people who work on the farms there. There would be methane bulls erupting at certain times the year from these meater, thick mats of waste at the bottom the sea floor, methane balls the size of soccer balls erupting on the surface from the rotting shit underneath. So it creates what
is up close a fairly unpleasant environment. And what we can't see is the way the water underneath has almost no oxygen in it, and it's hypoxic, and on the sea floor sometimes what they call anoxic, that is, it has no oxygen whatsoever. Both those conditions are fatal we now know to the Morgan skate.
So it sounds like a really critical point we're at for this skate. How have scientists told you they're feeling about its chances of survival?
I think that best very frightened, and the worst despairing. Leonardo Guider, a scientist with the Marine Conservation Society, describes their fate as swimming around in a vortex of swirling shit, trying to breed through a straw.
Salmon farming, the fish production and the fish waste and fish feed choose up what little oxygen is naturally in the harbor, so the harbor is naturally loyal.
They can't breed in that sort of environment. They lay their eggs in the sediment, and it's now believed the eggs can't survive in the sediment when there's no oxygen, and the population has collapsed, according to a report issued last year, by forty seven percent. They're now under a thousand of these creatures left. The fear is that the creatures that are left, many of them may be past breeding age or incapable of actually reproducing.
And we are one extreme weather events away from an extinction, and with our Nino bearing down on us possible storms on the front, we really need to make sure the harbor is as resilient as possible so that it can get the oxygen levels back up. And a key component of that, in fact, the primary threat to that is intensive and aquaculture within the harbor.
When the industry began flagging that it wished to expand in twenty eleven, scientists warned the federal government, who had responsibilities under the EPBC Act to protect the World Heritage Area of Waters and to protect the Morganscape. It warned the Tasmanian government. Environmentalists issued similar public warnings, and not only that the leading salmon farmer and mcquarie Harbor at that time, who was a small scale arsenal salmon farmer
Ron Morrison. He warned that if the expansion went ahead, the marine ecosystem Mcquarie Harbor would collapse within several years. In the Federal Environment Department's own report to Tanua Plibashek last September, it was made very very clear that the
primary cause of this extinction was salmon farming. And what I find really extraordinary about this whole story is that this creature that survived sixty million years looks like it won't be able to survive one decade of three tax evading foreign owned multinational companies, greed and the cowdice of politicians who, rather than to act to regulate them and clean this industry up, have allowed them to destroy to the point of extinction.
After the break, meet the big fish in Macquarie Harbor's little pond, Richard So, who owns the salmon far a lots in Macquarie Harbor And what do we know about those companies?
Those companies are interesting. There's three there's only three companies that produce all of Australia's salmon. The smallest is Petuna, which is owned by the New Zealand company Sea Lord. Which is half owned by an ex Japanese whaling company called Massui.
Petuna, unique and personalized, a culture that evolved from one Tasmanian family's intense desire to strive harder, to push further, to grow, and to lead as the world market sought improved food products in greater sustainability.
The next biggest is human aquaculture that's owned by one of the most monstrous corporations in the world, JBS.
For Tasmania's human aquaculture, one of the world's premium salmon producers. A new era in sustainable salmon farming is the way.
JVS are a Brazilian family owned company who have the Juvius honor of being responsible for the biggest corruption scandal in world history.
Brazilians were shocked when President Michelle Tamer was caught on tape apparently endorsing the payment of hush money to obstruct a major corruption prob.
In twenty seventeen, the two brothers who owned it went to jail for bribing over eighteen hundred politicians and public figures.
They even made a five hundred million dollar profit on their own lead testimony by buying and selling dollars right before and after the story broke, knowing the Brazilian currency would plunge.
And today here on aquaculture is run out of Hobar by none other than Wesley Patista's son, Enrique Batista. There was the Australian Financial Review that dubbed him the Kendall roy of salmon farming. There was a secret donor's dinner with the Tasmanian Liberal Premier at which it was set some of the Batista family were present, and it was alleged they made demands of the premier. When he was questioned about these allegations.
Of course, as all political parties do fundraiseres that's a matter for the Liberal Party organization.
He refused to answer the question.
And so tell me about the third company.
The third company, Tassa, is owned by a company called Cook Aquaculture that was so bad and some environmental records so bad that it was thrown out of Washington State. Now punk fish farming will no longer be allowed in our state today, Commissioner. According to the Public Commissioner of Lands there, Hillary Frans, there some farming practices had put the entire marine ecosystem of Washington State in peril.
Today we are truly freeing Washington States owned aquatic lands from Enclos to CAGs, so.
The other companies, I mean, it's a gallery of rogues, to say the least. At the beginning of this year, we had Anthony Alberesi fly into Tasmania for one purpose only and that was to appear at a Tassau plant with a Tassau baseball cap on embroidered with his nickname on one side and salmon Tasmania on the other.
Of Australia, Salmon comes from Tasmania and it's a major export industry. Some might argue it's Tasmania's second major export industry, only behind the export of Queen's as we've seen.
But what Anthony Alberzi was there for was to reassure the industry essentially that nothing really was going to happen about Macquarie Harbor.
My government supports jobs, we support regional economic development, and we support sustainability and this industry has a vital role to playing.
And he said jobs and the environment can coexist, and he quoted this number that there were five thousand jobs in the industry and even more indirectly, this.
Is an industry that produces some five thousand jobs, but many more jobs than that indirectly as well.
The real number, according to the Tasmanian government's own salmon report in twenty twenty one, is one seven hundred and thirty four jobs. That is as reported to the government by the industry, the industry, labor, politicians, Antony Albanezi, Peter Darton, all these people have come out and said that there are hundreds of jobs at stake with Macquarie Harbor were salmon farming to be stopped there the figures according to the Tasmanian governments owned statistics, there are less than eighty
one workers on the west coast of Tasmania. Then those jobs are important, and they are particularly important in struggling little communities. But I do not think it is beyond a nation to find other equally good work for less than eighty one people for something of this consequence, particularly when we know too that these waters are warming rapidly, that salmon can't survive in warmer waters, and that the industry will inevitably shut down and more Quarie Harbor within ten years.
So it begs the question why politicians at state level at federal level continue to support the salmon industry.
Why do you think it is.
We have to reflect on that and wonder, and we should be very concerned about that. It speaks to a mentality amongst the political class that has completely lost the sense of what its role is, and that believe its only role is to enable corporations to do their business. Think the public good is identical to corporate profit. I think the other question this begs and I thought about
this a lot. We wonder why we have all these problems with climate and it's very easy to think it's a few bad people, that it's this wicked politician, this terrible corporation. But ultimately why this is happening in Tasmania, it's because not enough people care and very few people act. You know, everyone listening to this can have an effect. Don't buy salmon, because every time you buy salm, you
are helping drive this extraordinary creature to extinction. I think so much of what's wrong in the world happens not because of the bad people, but because the good people think they can do nothing. The good people can always do things. At the end of last year, where I went with some of the groups working to try and reform the salmon industry, and they met with leading Woolworth's executives, who have a great power to tell the industry it
should clean up. And there'd been some meetings a few years before, and this meeting was completely different in tone because we realized very quickly that they had no arguments they could make that they knew the industry was rotten to the core, but we also knew that they were never going to do anything about it. Although they had titles like had to sustainability and words like ethics and so on. They could have agreed as a block to go back to their board and say it's rotten to
the core and we can act to change it. But they won't do that. They'll never do that unless everyone in their different positions takes some responsibility and all of us can do things. Change has to come from within us, and first we have to change ourselves.
Richard, thanks so much of your time today.
Thank you.
Also in the news today, a group of pro Palestinian protesters attempted to force their way to the floor of the Labor Party's Victorian State conference on Saturday, with the doors of the conference room having to be barricaded. Premier to Cinerell and accused the protesters of bringing violence, homophobia
and anti Semitism to the front door. Later on Saturday afternoon, Victorian Labors rank and file members carried six non binding motions calling for an end to the Israel Hamas War and Australian captain Zam Kerr's club Chelsea has won its fifth straight English Premiership title, with an injured Kerr joining
her teammates on the pitch to celebrate. Kerr had been set to appear in court on Monday for a preliminary hearing over charges she alleged caused racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a police officer, but the case will now take longer, with the judge of setting a child ad for February next year. Her legal team intends to argue an abusive process by Crown prosecutors. That's all from the seven Am team today. Thanks for your company. We'll see you again tomorrow.