Greens Telling Porkies About Fish

Here’s some news so shocking and unprecedented that you might want to sit down before reading further.

Environmental activists are lying through their teeth.

After a short pause while you pick yourselves off the floor, allow me to continue.

The particular case in point is the environmentalists’ latest demented campaign to shut down a profitable industry in Tasmania. Since the early ’80s, the island state has been repeatedly handicapped by a cohort of tilty-heads, nosey-nannas and feral unemployables, often blow-ins from the Mainland. These luddites seem to live in permanent terror that an industry besides coffee shops will start turning a private profit in the state. Even ‘eco-tourism’ isn’t safe.

The state’s aquaculture industry – salmon farming, mostly – has been a runaway success over the last decade. Naturally, the tree-huggers have it in their sights.

Just as naturally, they’re spinning a whole lot of fanciful tales in order to justify their determination to shut down anything that might make money in the state. This time, about a glorified stingray.

Claims linking salmon farms to the potential extinction of a skate that have endangered Labor’s electoral standing in Tasmania and inflamed tensions between Anthony Albanese and his cabinet rival Tanya Plibersek have been dismissed as “questionable” and “thin”, with a major report suggesting the species was “weaponised” by activists.

A paper by University of Tasmania professor emeritus of government Aynsley Kellow argues there is “no certainty” the Maugean skate was not already at risk of extinction, before salmon farms were introduced to Macquarie Harbour.

No kidding. This is the same story as the Lake Pedder galaxias, a glorified minnow that became the cause celebre of the campaign to stop a clean, green renewable hydro-electricity dam, in the 1970s. The fact that the fish had only survived to modern times in a single glacial lake – a lake inevitably doomed, at some time, to cease to exist – clearly marked it out as one of Darwin’s losers. To quote Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, they “had their shot and nature selected them for extinction”. In fact, it was only human intervention, relocating some of the fish to another lake, which allowed it to thrive.

Claims that it will be solely through human activity that the Maugean skate, an unspectacular fish which no one even knew of until 1988, will be driven to extinction are even more far fetched.

The same ancient stingray-like species became extinct in another Tasmanian waterway – Bathurst Harbour – where there were virtually no human impacts, much less fish farms.

“So it is not clear that ceasing salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour would ensure its survival there,” his report, published by the Institute of Public Affairs, concludes.

Nor is it clear that salmon farming will drive the fish to extinction, either. If anything, the fish are thriving even as salmon farming expands.

The report – ‘Skating over thin evidence: The weaponisation of endangered species laws in the Tasmanian salmon wars’ – points to recent surveys suggesting the skate has recovered to levels not seen in a decade […]

His findings cast doubt over the need for the long-running political and legal standoff over the harbour, which the industry warned placed hundreds of jobs at risk, created uncertainty and threatened to derail the Prime Minister’s fight to hold onto key Tasmanian marginal seats.

Regardless of the evidence, Plibersek is as always a sucker for a far-fetched eco-tale. After all, this is the same minister who vetoed a billion-dollar gold mine on the basis of some made-up, ooga-booga nonsense about ‘blue-banded dreaming’ that not even Aboriginal groups had ever heard of before.

Ms Plibersek in November 2023 accepted a request by green groups under the Environment Biodiversity and Conservation Act to reconsider 2012 approvals for expanded salmon farms in the harbour.

Accepting government scientific advice that salmon farm impacts on water oxygen levels were “catastrophic” for the endangered skate, the Environment Minister flagged the need to “lower” salmon loads.

Funny enough, the same people who are always shrieking about ‘the science’ have no intention of listening to a distinguished scientist who disagrees with their anti-industry Luddism.

Professor Kellow is a foundation professor of the Australian School of Environmental Studies at Griffith University and former expert reviewer for the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability working group of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He told the Australian the Macquarie Harbour case pointed to the need to apply stronger tests to claims by green groups and to broaden the scientific evidence relied upon by the minister.

Ha. When green groups want scientific evidence, they’ll make it up, thank you very much.