Controversial legislation to protect the Tasmanian salmon industry has passed parliament after the government guillotined debate to bring on a vote in the Senate on Wednesday night.
Government and Coalition senators voted in favour of the bill, which was designed to bring an end to a formal reconsideration by the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, into whether an expansion of fish farming in Macquarie harbour in 2012 was properly approved.
It followed a fiery debate on Wednesday, during which the Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, waved a dead salmon in the Senate after asking if the government had sold out its environmental credentials for “rotten, stinking extinction salmon” on the eve of an election.
Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio also weighed in, telling his 60.4 million Instagram followers that the Australian government should take urgent action to “shut down destructive industrial non-native salmon farms” and save the endangered Maugean skate, an endemic species found only in the harbour, from extinction.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had promised the government would legislate to ensure there were “appropriate environmental laws” to “continue sustainable salmon farming” in the harbour and protect local jobs.
Hanson-Young told the Senate that government has rushed through the bill in budget week with “no proper process, no proper scrutiny”.
She said there had been no time for officials to detail the potential consequences of the legislation, which lawyers have suggested could extend beyond the salmon industry and stop communities challenging other decisions, including coal and gas developments.
“This is a stitch up between the Labor government and Peter Dutton’s Liberal party… to gut Australia’s environment laws to facilitate the continuation and expansion of an industry that is polluting the Macquarie Harbour and that is pushing the Maugean skate, our wildlife, to the brink of extinction,” Hanson-Young said.
Despite supporting the bill, the opposition’s environment spokesperson, Jonno Duniam, criticised the process as an “eleventh-hour fix to get this off the political agenda”. “This government has stuffed it royally,” he said.
Labor MPs consider the legislation important in the party’s bid to win the seat of Braddon, in north-west Tasmania, at the upcoming election. Senator Anne Urquhart, who is attempting top move to the lower house by running in Braddon, told the Senate the debate was in part about “good, well-paid jobs in Tasmania, which I’ve spent my working life standing up for”.
The reconsideration of the Macquarie Harbour decision was triggered by a legal request in 2023 from three environment groups after concern about the impact of salmon farming on the skate. It prompted Plibersek to announce a review into a 2012 decision that deemed the farming was not a controlled action – meaning it did not need a full federal environmental assessment.
An environment department opinion released under freedom of information laws suggested the review could lead to salmon farming having to stop in the harbour while an environmental impact statement was prepared.
The new legislation is designed to prevent this by stopping reconsideration requests in cases in which developments had been deemed “not a controlled action” and the minister had specified that the development required state or territory oversight. It would apply when the development was already under way and had been ongoing or recurring for at least five years.
The government said the bill was “a very specific amendment” to address a flaw in national environment legislation and that “existing laws apply to everything else, including all new proposals for coal, gas, and land clearing”.
The Australia Institute’s Eloise Carr said preliminary legal advice suggested the changes could stop people from requesting reviews of other developments.
David Barnden, the principal lawyer at Sydney firm Equity Generation Lawyers, said the bill was “so poorly drafted” that it risked not even applying to the salmon industry in Macquarie Harbour. “Legal challenges are almost guaranteed,” he said.
The Maugean skate has been listed as endangered since 2004. Concern about its plight escalated last year when a government scientific committee said numbers in the wild were “extremely low” and fish farming in the harbour was the main cause of a substantial reduction in dissolved oxygen levels – the main threat to the skate’s survival. The committee said salmon farms in the harbour should be scaled back and recommended the species be considered critically endangered.
A separate report by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies last month said surveys suggested the skate population was likely to have recovered to 2014 levels after crashing last decade. It stressed the need for continued monitoring.
The government announced $3m in the budget to expand a Maugean skate captive breeding program. It said earlier this week it remained committed to improving the national law and creating a national Environment Protection Agency despite shelving those commitments and would consult on specifics in a second term.